Not so private lives

Not So Private Lives is the first national study to examine same-sex attracted Australians’ preferences for various forms of relationship recognition since the introduction of de facto status for same-sex couples at a federal level. It is also the first major study to investigate preferences for relationship recognition while taking into account the current legal status (in Australia or overseas) of an individual’s same-sex relationship. Findings from the relationship recognition measures of this survey demonstrate that same-sex attracted individuals, like other Australians, differ in the way they prefer their relationships to be formally recognised. However, the results show that the majority of same-sex attracted participants in this survey selected marriage as their personal choice. A federally recognised relationship documented at a registry other than marriage was the second most popular option, and de facto status was the third. The preference for a relationship without any legal status was selected by only 3% of the overall sample. Interestingly, marriage was still the majority choice irrespective of the current legal status of participants’ same-sex relationships (including no legal status). For example, of those currently in a de facto relationship, 55.4% stated they preferred marriage for themselves, 25.6% stated that they preferred a federally recognised relationship other than marriage, 17.7% selected de facto and 1.3% chose no legal status. Participants were also given the opportunity to select which forms of legal relationship recognition they would like to see remain and/or become available in this country for same-sex couples in general. Responses to this measure (which allowed for multiple selections) show that 77.4% would like to see marriage become available as an option, 59.9% would like to see a federally recognised relationship other than marriage be made available and 48% would like to see de facto recognition remain. These numbers indicate that many participants selected multiple options, suggesting that simply having a choice was an important factor. Although the data from this survey indicate that marriage is not for everyone, the majority of same- sex attracted participants in this national survey selected this type of relationship recognition as their personal choice and as a choice to be made available for their fellow same-sex attracted Australians

State Policy, Livelihood Protection and Gender on Canada's East Coast

This paper looks at the interactions between environmental and industrial restructuring within the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery and regime shifts in three main policy areas related to fisheries. Our focus is the gendered consequences of interactive restructuring across policy areas for the ability of women and men in fisheries households in Newfoundland and Labrador to make a living. The three main policy areas include fisheries management policy, Employment Insurance policy and policy related to the regulation of occupational health and workers compensation. We document important similarities in the overall pattern and outcomes of regime shift within these three policy areas and point to ways these changes have interacted with resource degradation and industrial restructuring to influence the lives and livelihoods of fishery dependent people.Cette étude porte sur l’interaction entre la restructuration environnementale et industrielle dans le secteur des pêches de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador, et les changements de régime survenus dans trois secteurs de dépenses importants des pêches. L’étude concerne les répercussions pour les sexes de la restructuration interactive dans les secteurs de dépenses sur la capacité des femmes et des hommes des ménages de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador qui vivent de la pêche de gagner leur vie. Les trois principaux secteurs de dépenses comprennent la politique sur la gestion des pêches, la politique sur l’assurance-emploi et la politique sur la réglementation de la santé au travail et la rémunération des travailleurs. L’étude fait état des ressemblances importantes dans la structure générale et les résultats des changements de régime dans ces trois secteurs de dépenses et indique des façons dont ces changements ont interagi avec le dépérissement des ressources et la restructuration industrielle pour influer sur la vie et le gagne-pain des personnes tributaires de la pêche

Against stativizing negation, expletive negation and NPI-until

We present a novel account of phenomena that have been discussed under the labels stativizing negation, expletive negation and the licensing of NPI-(eventive-)until. We argue that these concepts are theoretically undesirable as well as descriptively inadequate because (a) negation does not affect event structure, (b) “eventive” until outscopes negation and can also occur without negation, so it cannot be treated as an NPI, and (c) the properties ascribed to negation and/or until are observed in a wide variety of contexts and should therefore receive a more general, non-lexical analysis. Our account derives the facts from the idea that until- and for-duratives are referential items that scope in the topic field and can receive a contrastive interpretation on analogy with regular topics. This gives us a handle on the socalled “actualization” observed with negated eventives in the scope of a durative, previously handled by lexical duplication of until and by stipulation of idiosyncratic lexical properties

Vernacular museum: communal bonding and ritual memory transfer among displaced communities

Eclectically curated and largely ignored by the mainstream museum sector, vernacular museums sit at the interstices between the nostalgic and the future-oriented, the private and the public, the personal and the communal. Eluding the danger of becoming trivialised or commercialised, they serve as powerful conduits of memory, which strengthen communal bonds in the face of the ‘flattening’ effects of globalisation. The museum this paper deals with, a vernacular museum in Vanjärvi in southern Finland, differs from the dominant type of the house museum, which celebrates masculinity and social elites. Rather, it aligns itself with the small amateur museums of everyday life called by Angela Jannelli Wild Museums (2012), by analogy with Lévi-Strauss’ concept of ‘pensée sauvage’. The paper argues that, despite the present-day flurry of technologies of remembering and lavishly funded memory institutions, there is no doubt that the seemingly ‘ephemeral’ institutions such as the vernacular museum, dependent so much on performance, oral storytelling, living bodies and intimate interaction, nevertheless play an important role in maintaining and invigorating memory communities

Predictors of anemia in preschool children: Biomarkers Reflecting Inflammation and Nutritional Determinants of Anemia (BRINDA) project.

Background: A lack of information on the etiology of anemia has hampered the design and monitoring of anemia-control efforts.Objective: We aimed to evaluate predictors of anemia in preschool children (PSC) (age range: 6-59 mo) by country and infection-burden category.Design: Cross-sectional data from 16 surveys (n = 29,293) from the Biomarkers Reflecting Inflammation and Nutritional Determinants of Anemia (BRINDA) project were analyzed separately and pooled by category of infection burden. We assessed relations between anemia (hemoglobin concentration <110 g/L) and severe anemia (hemoglobin concentration <70 g/L) and individual-level (age, anthropometric measures, micronutrient deficiencies, malaria, and inflammation) and household-level predictors; we also examined the proportion of anemia with concomitant iron deficiency (defined as an inflammation-adjusted ferritin concentration <12 μg/L). Countries were grouped into 4 categories on the basis of risk and burden of infectious disease, and a pooled multivariable logistic regression analysis was conducted for each group.Results: Iron deficiency, malaria, breastfeeding, stunting, underweight, inflammation, low socioeconomic status, and poor sanitation were each associated with anemia in >50% of surveys. Associations between breastfeeding and anemia were attenuated by controlling for child age, which was negatively associated with anemia. The most consistent predictors of severe anemia were malaria, poor sanitation, and underweight. In multivariable pooled models, child age, iron deficiency, and stunting independently predicted anemia and severe anemia. Inflammation was generally associated with anemia in the high- and very high-infection groups but not in the low- and medium-infection groups. In PSC with anemia, 50%, 30%, 55%, and 58% of children had concomitant iron deficiency in low-, medium-, high-, and very high-infection categories, respectively.Conclusions: Although causal inference is limited by cross-sectional survey data, results suggest anemia-control programs should address both iron deficiency and infections. The relative importance of factors that are associated with anemia varies by setting, and thus, country-specific data are needed to guide programs

The re-birth of the "beat": A hyperlocal online newsgathering model

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 754 - 765, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2012.667279.Scholars have long lamented the death of the 'beat' in news journalism. Today's journalists generate more copy than they used to, a deluge of PR releases often keeping them in the office, and away from their communities. Consolidation in industry has dislodged some journalists from their local sources. Yet hyperlocal online activity is thriving if journalists have the time and inclination to engage with it. This paper proposes an exploratory, normative schema intended to help local journalists systematically map and monitor their own hyperlocal online communities and contacts, with the aim of re-establishing local news beats online as networks. This model is, in part, technologically-independent. It encompasses proactive and reactive news-gathering and forward planning approaches. A schema is proposed, developed upon suggested news-gathering frameworks from the literature. These experiences were distilled into an iterative, replicable schema for local journalism. This model was then used to map out two real-world 'beats' for local news-gathering. Journalists working within these local beats were invited to trial the models created. It is hoped that this research will empower journalists by improving their information auditing, and could help re-define journalists' relationship with their online audiences

Dominant predators mediate the impact of habitat size on trophic structure in bromeliad invertebrate communities

Local habitat size has been shown to influence colonization and extinction processes of species in patchy environments. However, species differ in body size, mobility, and trophic level, and may not respond in the same way to habitat size. Thus far, we have a limited understanding of how habitat size influences the structure of multitrophic communities and to what extent the effects may be generalizable over a broad geographic range. Here, we used water-filled bromeliads of different sizes as a natural model system to examine the effects of habitat size on the trophic structure of their inhabiting invertebrate communities. We collected composition and biomass data from 651 bromeliad communities from eight sites across Central and South America differing in environmental conditions, species pools, and the presence of large-bodied odonate predators. We found that trophic structure in the communities changed dramatically with changes in habitat (bromeliad) size. Detritivore : resource ratios showed a consistent negative relationship with habitat size across sites. In contrast, changes in predator : detritivore (prey) ratios depended on the presence of odonates as dominant predators in the regional pool. At sites without odonates, predator : detritivore biomass ratios decreased with increasing habitat size. At sites with odonates, we found odonates to be more frequently present in large than in small bromeliads, and predator : detritivore biomass ratios increased with increasing habitat size to the point where some trophic pyramids became inverted. Our results show that the distribution of biomass amongst food-web levels depends strongly on habitat size, largely irrespective of geographic differences in environmental conditions or detritivore species compositions. However, the presence of large-bodied predators in the regional species pool may fundamentally alter this relationship between habitat size and trophic structure. We conclude that taking into account the response and multitrophic effects of dominant, mobile species may be critical when predicting changes in community structure along a habitat-size gradient.Fil: Petermann, Jana S.. Freie Universitat Berlin. Institute of Biology; AlemaniaFil: Farjalla, Vinicius F.. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; BrasilFil: Jocque, Merlijn. State University Of New Jersey; Estados UnidosFil: Kratina, Pavel. Queen Mary University Of London. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences; Reino UnidoFil: Macdonald, Andrew. University Of British Columbia; CanadáFil: Marino, Nicholas. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; BrasilFil: de Omena, Paula. Universidade Estadual de Campinas; BrasilFil: Piccoli, Gustavo. Universidade de Sao Paulo; BrasilFil: Richardson, Michael. Universidad de Puerto Rico; Puerto RicoFil: Richardson, Barbara. Universidad de Puerto Rico; Puerto RicoFil: Romero, Gustavo. Universidade Estadual de Campinas; BrasilFil: Videla, Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Córdoba. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal (p); Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Centro de Investigaciones Entomológicas de Córdoba; ArgentinaFil: Srivastava, Diane. University Of British Columbia; Canad

A Szintaktikai Lokalitás Minimalista Megközelítése: A szintaktikai lokalitási feltételekért felelős nyelvi alrendszerek munkamegosztásának vizsgálata = A Minimalist Approach to Syntactic Locality: A study of the division of labour of linguistic subsystems underlying syntactic locality effects

A projekt a szintaxis és az azzal érintkező grammatikai komponensek munkamegosztását vizsgálta a mozgatási és polaritás engedélyezési függőségekben jelentkező szintaktikai lokalitási hatások területén. A projektnek a generatív grammatika mai, Minimalista kutatási programjába illeszkedő radikális tézise szerint a természetes nyelvi szintaxis egyáltalán nem is tartalmaz külön lokalitási megszorítás(oka)t. Kimutattuk, hogy az általunk vizsgált, a szintaxisban jelentkező lokalitási hatások (i) a szintaktikai komputációs rendszer általános tulajdonságaiból, különösen a komputációs komplexitása minimalizálásának igényéből, valamint (ii) a szintaxis és a vele érintkező grammatikai alrendszerek munkamegosztásából fakadnak. A projekt olyan területeken vizsgálta a lokalitási hatások természetét, mint a főnévi kifejezések által képviselt szigetek, a szintaktikai fejmozgatás, a kvantorhatókör-értelmezés, a fókuszálás, a határozói módosítás, a mondatbeágyazás, a preszuppozíciós, a tagadó és a kérdő típusú gyenge szigetek, és egyes, a polaritásengedélyezésben szerepet játszó intervenciós hatások. A több nemzetközi együttműködést is kezdeményező kutatócsoport munkájának sikerességét a számos jelentős publikáció, köztük egy sor nemzetközi folyóiratcikk és nagy presztízsű nemzetközi kiadónál megjelenő könyvfejezet is jelzi. A kutatás keretében egy megvédett DSc értekezés és egy leadott PhD disszertáció is született, és egy további doktori disszertáció készül el még ebben az évben. | This project studied the division of labour between syntax and its interface subsystems in giving rise to some of the central syntactic locality properties of dependencies like movement and polarity licensing. Implementing the current Minimalist research program of transformational generative grammar, it explored the radical proposal that natural language syntax itself includes no special syntactic locality conditions per se. Instead, the locality effects under scrutiny are reduced to (i) the elementary properties of the syntactic computational system, including its quest to keep computational complexity to a minimum, which in turn subsumes its cyclic mapping to the interpretive systems of sound and meaning; and (ii) the division of labour between syntax and the interface subsystems, in particular, semantics and information structure. The topics investigated include the locality effects involved in noun phrase islands, syntactic head movement, quantifier scope interpretation, focusing, adverbial modification, clausal embedding, weak islands like presuppositional, negative, and wh-islands, and some apparent intervention effects in polarity licensing. The project established fruitful international co-operations, and its results have appeared in the form of a number of international journal and book chapter publications. The project has also yielded a completed PhD dissertation, a PhD thesis to be submitted later this year, and a DSc dissertation