Ecosystem services deficits in cross-boundary landscapes: spatial mismatches between green and grey systems

Urban Ecosystems - Quantitative analyses of the influence of boundary lines on ecosystem services distributions remain rare. Approaches towards integrative assessments of green and grey landscape...     

A Comparative Study of Segregation Patterns in Belgium,Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden: Neighbourhood Concentration and Representation of Non-European Migrants

In this paper, we use geo-coded, individual-level register data on four European countries to compute comparative measures of segregation that are independent of existing geographical sub-divisions. The focus is on non-European migrants, for whom aggregates of egocentric neighbourhoods (with different population counts) are used to assess small-scale, medium-scale, and large-scale segregation patterns. At the smallest scale level, corresponding to neighbourhoods with 200 persons, patterns of over- and under-representation are strikingly similar. At larger-scale levels, Belgium stands out as having relatively strong over- and under-representation. More than 55% of the Belgian population lives in large-scale neighbourhoods with moderate under- or over-representation of non-European migrants. In the other countries, the corresponding figures are between 30 and 40%. Possible explanations for the variation across countries are differences in housing policies and refugee placement policies. Sweden has the largest and Denmark the smallest non-European migrant population, in relative terms. Thus, in both migrant-dense and native-born-dense areas, Swedish neighbourhoods have a higher concentration and Denmark a lower concentration of non-European migrants than the other countries. For large-scale, migrant-dense neighbourhoods, however, levels of concentration are similar in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Thus, to the extent that such concentrations contribute to spatial inequalities, these countries are facing similar policy challenges.     

Winter habitat selection of Corvids in an urban ecosystem

Urban Ecosystems - Urban areas attract birds during the winter when cities provide a predictable source of food and relatively stable weather conditions. However, many other factors determine the...     

The effects of data input errors on subsequent statistical inference

Data input errors can potentially affect statistical inferences, but little research has been published to date on this topic. In the present paper, we report the effect of data input errors on the statistical inferences drawn about population parameters in an empirical study involving 280 students from two Polish universities, namely the Warsaw University of Life Sciences – SGGW and the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow. We found that 28% of the students committed at least one data error. While some of these errors were small and did not have any real effect, a few of them had substantial effects on the statistical inferences drawn about the population parameters.     

Typology of Slovenian Drama in the Period Between the Two World Wars

From the 1970s, the term metafiction has been mostly confined to studies of American and Western European literatures; I propose using metafiction as a means of approaching Sergei Dovlatov’s Zona [The Zone], a novel which blurs the line between fiction and memoir. In one sense a prison text, in that it concerns the lives of guards and prisoners in a camp, it is, however, divorced from survivor narratives in that the camp does not contain political prisoners, so the “heroes” are the thieves and criminals so universally reviled in other memoirs of the Soviet gulag. It is also a record of its author’s developing need to write as it tracks the transformation of the guard Boris Alikhanov, Dovlatov’s alter-ego. Dovlatov’s authorial persona serves not to elucidate the text, but to construct a hybrid prison memoir which supports his views on the prison experience; views which are in opposition to the pre-existing tradition, and this leads me to describe The Zone as a metatextual camp narrative, containing many of the attributes of the metafictional novel, though originating from the memoiristic impulse and still straddling the line between fiction and nonfiction in a way that true metafictions do not.     

Measuring the Cultural Dimension of Migrant Integration and Integration Policy in the European Context: Dilemmas and Discussions1

Migrant integration is usually studied in four dimensions: economic, political, social and cultural. The cultural sphere seems to be the most ambiguous, but also the one that induces various interpretations as it touches upon core norms and values held both by migrants and by the receiving society. This paper aims to reconstruct research approaches to cultural integration and integration policy. Beside the receiving country’s language, that is the obvious differentiating factor of cultural integration, other aspects have been defined: migrants’ religion, knowledge of the receiving country’s symbolic culture, maintenance and transmission of cultural patterns, cultural identity. Furthermore, indicators which appear to adequately measure the effectiveness of integration activities have been assigned to the predefined aspects of cultural integration. They have been confronted with indicators used within integration policies of selected EU states and with expert statements (collected within the Delphi method‐based survey) on given aspects of policies aimed at cultural integration.     

A Rational Theory of Mutual Funds' Attention Allocation

The question of whether and how mutual fund managers provide valuable services for their clients motivates one of the largest literatures in finance. One candidate explanation is that funds process information about future asset values and use that information to invest in high‐valued assets. But formal theories are scarce because information choice models with many assets are difficult to solve as well as difficult to test. This paper tackles both problems by developing a new attention allocation model that uses the state of the business cycle to predict information choices, which in turn, predict observable patterns of portfolio investments and returns. The predictions about fund portfolios' covariance with payoff shocks, cross‐fund portfolio and return dispersion, and their excess returns are all supported by the data. These findings offer new evidence that some investment managers have skill and that attention is allocated rationally.     

Effects of human-related disturbance on breeding success of urban and non-urban blue tits (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cyanistes caeruleus</Emphasis>)

There is a need to study the effects of urbanization on wildlife in order to understand the ecological implications of increasing urbanization and find out how to reduce its threats to biodiversity. The blue tit evolved as a forest species and prefers deciduous and mixed forests, whereas its nesting in urban habitats is a more recent phenomenon. Our long-term study of blue tit populations has been conducted in two habitats: an urban parkland (frequently visited by people) and a deciduous forest outside of the city. Using linear mixed modeling, we revealed that a relationship of blue tit breeding success (and the number of fledglings) with thermal conditions in May differed between the urban parkland and the forest. While the relationship was positive in the forest, it was negative in the parkland. In addition, breeding success in the parkland increased with increasing number of rainy days in May. We argue that the main possible reason for such patterns is human activity in the parkland, which interferes with tit parental care, especially the regular feeding of nestlings, whereas it is evidently associated with weather conditions. Human disturbance in the forest is likely to be negligible.