Reframing Resilience: Equitable Access to Essential Services

We urgently need to put the concept of resilience into practice if we are to prepare our communities for climate change and exacerbated natural hazards. Yet, despite the extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both remain useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider essential services or how access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, health care, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption are paramount to community resilience. We propose a new conceptualization of community resilience that is based on access to essential services. This reframing of resilience facilitates a new measure of resilience that is spatially explicit and operational. Using two illustrative examples from the impacts of Hurricanes Florence and Michael, we demonstrate how decisionmakers and planners can use this framework to visualize the effect of a hazard and quantify resilience-enhancing interventions. This “equitable access to essentials” approach to community resilience integrates with spatial planning, and will enable communities not only to “bounce back” from a disruption, but to “bound forward” and improve the resilience and quality of life for all residents.     

Resistance to metropolitan institutionality and planning in Chile

In this article, the authors review and analyse two key processes conducted by the Chilean state over the past 50 years. The first process consists of the development of specific planning instruments for the particular realities of metropolitan areas. The second process consists of the successive legislative attempts to work towards a definition of a new form of institutionality for cities with metropolitan profiles. These attempts have either failed or solely become bills of law. Both processes suggest a political and technical resistance throughout history, to substantially modify institutionality, as well as planning instruments, in order to make them more appropriate and consistent with the needs of growing metropolitan areas in Chile.     

Elementary renewal theorems for widely dependent random variables with applications to precise large deviations

Abstract

On the basis of Wang and Cheng (J. Math. Anal. Appl. 384 (2011) 597–606), this paper further investigates elementary renewal theorems for counting processes generated by random walks with widely orthant dependent increments. The obtained results improve the corresponding ones of the above-mentioned paper mainly in the sense of weakening the moment conditions on the positive parts of the increments. Meanwhile, a revised version of strong law of large numbers for random walks with widely orthant dependent increments is established, which improves Theorem 1.4 of Wang and Cheng (2011 Wang, Y., and D. Cheng. 2011. Basic renewal theorems for a random walk with widely dependent increments and their applications. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 384 (2):597–606. doi:10.1016/j.jmaa.2011.06.010.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) by enlarging the regions of dominating coefficients. Finally, by using the above results, some precise large deviation results for a nonstandard renewal risk model are established, in which the innovations are widely orthant dependent random variables with common heavy tails, and the inter-arrival times are also widely orthant dependent.     

《孟子》释读辨误(四则)

传统经典须细读，在细读的基础上领会真义。历代注家对《孟子》的注疏多有误读之处，如"攘"，本义为"取自来之物"，经"多少同盗"，演变为"攘"即"盗"；"巨室"初谓国君住的大房子，这里当喻指国君，但注家多强解为指大臣；舜在"完廪""浚井"的过程中是如何脱难的，本文没有说，注家依据其他材料做了合理化解读，未必符合本义。"坏宫室以为汙池"，如从人类社会发展史的角度来释读，实际上是要维持以渔猎为生的生存方式。致误的根源有"非黑即白"的思维方式、前后矛盾、对古代"不雅驯"的文字进行改造等。     

Attitudes of social work students towards older people

Demographic ageing is a challenge for many countries. Even though Turkey has a relatively younger demographic composition, the proportion of the older people (65+) within the population is rapidly increasing. Within this framework, older people are becoming more important clients for both social work students and social workers in Turkey. This study aims to reveal the attitudes of social work students towards older people and determine the various factors that affect their views on older persons. In the scope of the project, Kogan's Attitude Towards Old People Scale was applied to 419 social work undergraduate students at a university located in Central Anatolia. The findings showed that social work students scored a mean of 130.96 and they generally had positive attitudes towards older people. The correlation between year of study, gender and age was not statistically significant. However, having lived mostly in urban areas was positively correlated with the mean Kogan scores and this finding was found to be statistically significant. Exposure to personal contact with older people at both the personal and professional levels was influential in shaping attitudes about the older people.     

Older Adults’ Expectations about Mortality,Driving Life and Years Left without Driving

ABSTRACT

People are living and driving longer than ever before, with little preparation for transitioning to being non-drivers. We investigated driving expectations among drivers age 65 and older, including sociodemographic and driving context predictors. Cross-sectional data from 349 older drivers were explored to determine variation in how many years they expected to continue driving. General linear models examined predictors of both expectations. In this predominantly Black/African American sample, 76% of older drivers (mean age = 73 ± 5.7 years) expected a non-driving future, forecasting living an average of 5.75 ± 7.29 years after driving cessation. Regression models on years left of driving life and years left to live post-driving cessation predicted nearly half of the variance in older drivers’ expectations with five significant predictors: income, current age, age expected to live to, self-limiting driving to nearby places and difficulty, visualizing being a non-driver. Many older drivers expect to stop driving before end of life.     

试析黎锦熙先生拼音规划研究的主要理念

黎锦熙先生在研究拼音规划的过程中,灵活处理标准音和方音的关系,客观处理利用汉字和走向拼音的关系,务实处理音节传统拼写法和现代拼写法的关系,辩证处理普及和提高的关系。黎先生不避俗浅,务求实用,热心语文普及运动的学风对当今的语言文字研究很有借鉴意义。     

生产者货币计价决定因素的实证研究

利用12个发达国家和发展中国家的非平衡面板样本数据,对微观、宏观和其他因素对生产者货币计价(PCP)的影响进行实证研究,指出经济规模、市场份额、金融市场的发达程度、币值的对内稳定性和产品差异化程度是最主要的影响因素,而出口商的谈判能力、币值的对外稳定性等因素也对PCP的选择有一定影响。根据实证检验结果,对人民币作为贸易计价货币的条件进行评估,发现其优势在于我国的经济规模、出口商的市场份额及其谈判能力以及人民币汇率的相对稳定性; 劣势在于相对落后的金融市场、不可预期性较大的通货膨胀水平以及产品的差异化程度。     

Pollutant Ground Concentrations of Nonneutrally Buoyant Particles

A methodology is suggested for the estimation of the mass density and the cumulative ground deposition of a nonvolatile, nonneutrally buoyant, air pollutant (liquid or solid) released from a polluted column (following an explosion caused during routine operation in, e.g., the chemical industry or due to any kind of hostile act) and deposited on the ground via gravitational settling. In many cases, the deposited mass due to gravitational settling constitutes a significant fraction of the original inventory released from the source. Implementation of the methodology in preliminary risk assessments can serve as an efficient tool for emergency planning for both immediate and long‐term measures such as evacuation and decontamination. The methodology considers, inter alia, an estimation of the critical particle diameter, particle size, and mass distributions along the polluted column. This methodology was developed to apply in rural regions since proper application of relevant meteorological input data can be accomplished mainly for such areas.