Behavioral responses of rural and urban greater white-toothed shrews (Crocidura russula) to sound disturbance

Urban Ecosystems - The development of urban areas imposes challenges that wildlife must adapt to in order to persist in these new habitats. One of the greatest changes brought by urbanization has...     

What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action,temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

Theory and Society - The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior...     

Philippine NGOs and Multistakeholder Partnerships: Three Case Studies

This paper discusses an emerging role for Philippine NGOs—building and maintaining intersectoral cooperation among various sectors of society to tackle key issues like agricultural development, HIV/AIDS, and agrarian reform. The three case studies elaborated in the paper show that Philippine NGOs play important intermediary and bridging functions crucial for the success of multistakeholder partnerships. NGOs are well equipped for this because of their middle-class and professional nature and because of various characteristics like autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to mobilize resources.     

A class of symmetric bivariate uniform distributions

A class of symmetric bivariate uniform distributions is proposed for use in statistical modeling. The distributions may be constructed to be absolutely continuous with correlations as close to±1 as desired. Expressions for the correlations, regressions and copulas are found. An extension to three dimensions is proposed.     

Career Self‐Efficacy and Perceptions of Parent Support in Adolescent Career Development

The authors examined the relative contributions of both proximal and distal supports to the career interests and vocational self‐efficacy in a multiethnic sample (N = 139) of middle school adolescents. Consistent with Social Cognitive Career Theory, it was found that (a) vocational self‐efficacy and career planning/exploration efficacy consistently predicted young adolescents' career interests across Holland (J. L. Holland, D. R. Whitney, N. S. Cole, & J. M. Richards, 1969) themes; (b) gender and career gender‐typing predicted interests in Realistic, Investigative, and Social careers; and (c) perceived parent support accounted for 29% to 43% of the total unique variance in vocational self‐efficacy for all Holland theme careers.     

Quantifying uncertainty in the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales

Summary.  A crucial issue in the current global warming debate is the effect of vegetation and soils on carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in the atmosphere. Vegetation can extract CO₂ through photosynthesis, but respiration, decay of soil organic matter and disturbance effects such as fire return it to the atmosphere. The balance of these processes is the net carbon flux. To estimate the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales, we address the statistical problem of inference for the sum of multiple outputs from a complex deterministic computer code whose input parameters are uncertain. The code is a process model which simulates the carbon dynamics of vegetation and soils, including the amount of carbon that is stored as a result of photosynthesis and the amount that is returned to the atmosphere through respiration. The aggregation of outputs corresponding to multiple sites and types of vegetation in a region gives an estimate of the total carbon flux for that region over a period of time. Expert prior opinions are elicited for marginal uncertainty about the relevant input parameters and for correlations of inputs between sites. A Gaussian process model is used to build emulators of the multiple code outputs and Bayesian uncertainty analysis is then used to propagate uncertainty in the input parameters through to uncertainty on the aggregated output. Numerical results are presented for England and Wales in the year 2000. It is estimated that vegetation and soils in England and Wales constituted a net sink of 7.55 Mt C (1 Mt C = 10¹² g of carbon) in 2000, with standard deviation 0.56 Mt C resulting from the sources of uncertainty that are considered.     

Expectations, Capital Gains, and Income

A theoretical framework for the measurement of income under uncertainty is developed that addresses some long-standing controversies about the treatment of capital gains. The consequences for economic analysis and policy making are potentially serious, because the treatment of capital gains can significantly affect some major macroeconomic aggregates, including national income and savings, balance of payments deficits, government deficits, and depreciation. (JEL O47 , P44 , Q32 )     

Campus attitudes toward alcohol and drugs in a deep southern university.

In our zeal to deal with alcohol and drug abuse, we may have a distorted picture of what the majority of college students actually think about alcohol and drug use. Students in this study done at a public university located in the Deep South report being generally intolerant of substance abuse.