Epilogue of empire: East Timor and the Portuguese postcolonial catharsis

The demonstrations of solidarity with East Timor that occurred in Lisbon in September 1999 were the first major political demonstrations since the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. Solidarity with East Timor demonstrated the importance to the Portuguese of emotional and cultural ties to people whom they saw as sharing their language and Catholic religion. These commonalities have a clear colonial history and are now being reconstructed around the idea of Lusophony, which is taken to be the core of a Portuguese postcolonial identity. East Timor, a Portuguese colony that was occupied by Indonesia after the Portuguese revolution of 1974, used diacritical signs such as Portuguese and Catholicism in its nationalist struggle against Indonesia. These signs are the cultural patrimony of a local creole elite and are exaggerated in Portuguese perceptions of East Timor. The colonial and postcolonial ironies of this case of mutual constitution of identity are analyzed.     

GIS without GPS: new opportunities in technology and survey research to link people and place

This paper presents innovative ways to relate survey data to GIS maps, thereby making the connection of people and place more accessible for the research community. Based on data from rural areas in the Brazilian Amazon, we describe a successful effort to sample households while linking farm-level data to property boundaries, these boundaries generated from subjects’ interpretations of satellite images on a computer screen. The sampling framework is based on legislation requiring farmers to report to a government agency in a four-week period, and the farmers’ input allows for a more efficient means of identifying property boundaries as compared to GPS. We show that the resulting sampling is statistically representative. We discuss the potential of this association of institutional design and low-cost methods of data collection to allow for more cost-effective generation of spatial data and of geospatial analysis.     

Housing Valuation,Wealth Perception,and Homeowners’ Portfolio Composition

This study explores the link between wealth perception from an appreciation of the residential property price and homeowners’ preference toward asset categories pooled by risk. Household survey data for Portugal were used to build shares of low, medium, and high risk assets representing fractions of household’s total wealth. Data showed incomplete household portfolios along with housing capturing the largest share of households’ wealth, in line with the literature on composition puzzles. The findings indicate robust empirical evidence that the rate of housing valuation is an indicator of households’ wealth perception. When the housing price appreciates with respect to its initial cost, households suffer an endowment effect and tend to increase diversity in their portfolio, expanding the holdings of safe deposits as they raise the share of high risk assets.     

How New Zealanders distribute their daily time between home indoors,home outdoors and out of home

Unlike most developed countries, until now no time-use microenvironment studies have been undertaken in New Zealand. International studies show that on average 60%–70% of each day is spent at home indoors in all countries. Time-use differences usually relate to day type, season, gender, age and job type. Although house indoor environments have fewer pollutants than other microenvironments, spending much time in this one microenvironment can easily lead to greater exposure while some indoor spaces like kitchens are proven to produce higher levels of pollutants compared to other rooms. Consequently, this study undertaken in summer has focused on time-use in three microenvironments: house indoors; house outdoors; and out of home, with a more detailed look at the time different members of selected household types spend in the various rooms of their house. Results show that New Zealanders spend on average 69.7% of each day at home indoors. Like other countries, time-use at home indoors in New Zealand is affected by gender, age, job type and day type (weekday or weekend). The average summer time-use at home outdoors is only 0.55?hours/day which is very little for a country with a temperate climate and a large proportion of houses with private gardens. In fact, New Zealand time-use microenvironment patterns seem to follow similar patterns to those of most developed countries.