Ability Of Communities Research Articles

A COMMUNITY‐LEVEL ASSESSMENT OF FACTORS AFFECTING LIVELIHOODS IN NAWALPARASI DISTRICT, NEPAL

AbstractThis field research investigated the livelihoods of rural communities in Nawalparasi District, Nepal. An adapted form of the Delphi technique was used to assess community perceptions regarding factors which affected their livelihoods. The six most significant factors were selected by participants and ranked in order of importance. Research findings indicated that important factors across communities included those related to water resources, education, health and roads. Climate and environmental change were found to be impacting on livelihoods, and results indicated that education and environmental awareness were two key factors affecting a community's ability to adapt to change. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Memory, justice and the court: on the dimensions of memory-justice under the Rome Statute

This article explores the possibility of locating an ‘ethics of memory’ respecting commission of mass atrocities via the link between justice, truth and memory. First, it suggests a typology for memory in relation to justice in its retributive and restorative aspects. Second, it explores how so-called ‘memory-justice’ arises in the course of international proceedings—and particularly given its significance under the Rome Statute—by considering, critically, the international community's ability to repair or restitute injury by engaging in memory in ‘the right way’. Lastly, it suggests limitations of memory-justice of which only some can be overcome. The challenges and arguments for a ‘categorical imperative’ for memory are left for a subsequent treatment, but arguments in law and practical ethics will be suggested in favour of properly approaching memory in pursuit of justice, with profound consequences for the nascent Court and sister tribunals, in their efforts to break the cycle of conflict in affected regions, and rid the world of the worst crimes known to humanity.

Conflict and death in a late prehistoric community in the American Midwest

Over the past two decades, it has been recognized that the effects of intergroup conflict in prehistoric small-scale societies were greater than previously thought. Osteological evidence provides otherwise unobtainable information on the number of people who were killed, and who was most likely to become a casualty. One such site is Norris Farms #36 in the American Midwest, dating to ca. AD 1300. Skeletal evidence of injuries (blunt force trauma and arrow wounds), body mutilation (scalping, decapitation, and dismemberment), and scavenger damage indicate that one-third of the adults died in a series of ambushes, although children were mostly spared. Both young and old adults were killed, and the age distributions of the male and female victims were similar. Individuals with disabilities that interfered with mobility were more likely to be killed than their healthier counterparts. This level of conflict-related mortality almost certainly had an effect on the community's ability to conduct its affairs and, indeed, to survive as a viable economic and social group.

Vulnerability and resilience of remote rural communities to shocks and global changes: Empirical analysis from Solomon Islands

Successful management of socio-ecological systems not only requires the development and field-testing of robust and measurable indices of vulnerability and resilience but also improved understanding of the contextual factors that influence societal capacity to adapt to change. We present the results of an analysis conducted in three coastal communities in Solomon Islands. An integrated assessment map was used to systematically scan the communities’ multiple dimensions of vulnerability and to identify factors affecting households’ perception about their capacity to cope with shocks (resilience). A multivariate probit approach was used to explore relationships amongst factors. Social processes such as community cohesion, good leadership, and individual support to collective action were critical factors influencing the perception that people had about their community's ability to build resilience and cope with change. The analysis also suggests a growing concern for a combination of local (internal) and more global (external) contingencies and shocks, such as the erosion of social values and fear of climate change.

Strengthening Communities Through an Engaged Citizenry: Opportunities for Extension Programming

Research shows the level and quality of public discourse is a key factor in a community's ability to affect change. Recently conducted Extension research shows that a large proportion of residents do not feel engaged in community decision making. Extension works with a variety of community partners on a daily basis. Targeting programmatic resources in ways that would help improve the level and quality of public discourse could leverage the impact of the many Extension programs we conduct in cooperation with our community partners.

AffRank: Affinity-driven ranking of products in online social rating networks

Large online social rating networks (e.g., Epinions, Blippr) have recently come into being containing information related to various types of products. Typically, each product in these networks is associated with a group of members who have provided ratings and comments on it. These people form a product community. A potential member can join a product community by giving a new rating to the product. We refer to this phenomenon of a product community's ability to “attract” new members as product affinity. The knowledge of a ranked list of products based on product affinity is of much importance for implementing policies, marketing research, online advertisement, and other applications. In this article, we identify and analyze an array of features that exert effect on product affinity and propose a novel model, called AffRank, that utilizes these features to predict the future rank of products according to their affinities. Evaluated on two real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness and superior prediction quality of AffRank compared with baseline methods. Our experiments show that features such as affinity rank history, affinity evolution distance, and average rating are the most important factors affecting future rank of products. At the same time, interestingly, traditional community features (e.g., community size, member connectivity, and social context) have negligible influence on product affinities. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The 2006–2007 immigration mobilizations and community capacity: The experience of Chicago

This article examines the 2006–2007 phase of the immigration movement in Chicago with a particular focus on the capacity of Latinos to advance initiatives of this magnitude. It studies the factors and forces involved and the ways in which they combined in opposition to federal immigration bill HR 4437. The experience points to a multifaceted movement initially carried out by community-based organizations but ultimately advanced by direct community action. Analysis reveals tremendous advances in the community's ability to pursue such initiatives, especially through the combination of mass action and organizational work. It also suggests that community capacity as manifested in the movement cannot be contained in fixed variables: much is acquired sobre la marcha, each moment requires different combinations and actions, and the ability to advance often depends on forces beyond the community's control.

The Geography of Pornography: Neighborhood Feminism and the Battle against "Dirty Bookstores" in Minneapolis

The Geography of PornographyNeighborhood Feminism and the Battle against "Dirty Bookstores" in Minneapolis Georgina Hickey (bio) "It just doesn't look right to have a bunch of women standing in here," declared the clerk in a South Minneapolis adult bookstore.1 The women, a half dozen or so who lived in the Central neighborhood immediately adjacent to the store, had come on this particular summer evening in 1979 in order to "browse" the clientele who browsed the store's sexually explicit magazines and quarter movies. The store's male patrons were embarrassed. The staff reacted angrily and called the store's owners. The women had intruded upon a traditionally male urban space, and they had done so intentionally and boldly, to make the point that they felt this particular business and its patrons encroached upon their territory, the neighborhood. Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing for more than a decade, the residents of three neighborhoods abutting the Lake Street commercial corridor of South Minneapolis did battle with the owners and patrons of local adult businesses. What began as sporadic protests grew into concerted and multi-year campaigns on the part of existing neighborhood associations and newly forming radical feminist organizations against public pornography. The activists who came together to oppose these bookstores and theaters organized, picketed, politicked, lobbied, testified, and allied their way toward a vision of a commercial strip that they hoped would serve the needs of the surrounding community, dissuade crime, and make the area safe. These ultimately successful efforts to close adult businesses intertwined neighborhood and municipal politics, economic revitalization, and women's rights to create a productive neighborhood feminism during the 1970s and early 1980s that has generally been overlooked in the literature of both urban renewal and grassroots feminism. While neighborhood feminism did decline in the mid-1980s, its demise ultimately fed both a national movement against pornography and grassroots economic revitalization in South Minneapolis. Where this story is better known is in the literature of women's studies, [End Page 125] for it was in Minneapolis that feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin first found a forum for their argument that pornography violates women's civil rights. Their work broke new theoretical ground in the opposition to pornography, but the stage for their work was set by local activists who also have a compelling story to tell. The history of how South Minneapolis residents sought to remove the adult businesses in their midst reveals a surprisingly strong relationship between neighborhood activism and secondwave feminism, a relationship that demonstrates the ways in which gender was constitutive of local politics. In these neighborhoods lived residents who laid the groundwork for challenging the sale of pornography. They then asked those famous feminists for assistance—not to reconceptualize the nature of pornography's harms toward women, but rather to create legal means to help residents rid their street corners of adult bookstores and theaters. The local activists sought to reclaim their neighborhood's commercial strip for "legitimate" businesses that would better serve the needs of the local community, and in radical feminism they found one tool that could be deployed in that fight. Neighborhood organizing—efforts to solve local problems and build community through grassroots organizing and local politics—flourished in the 1970s and 1980s in Minneapolis and across the nation. Not easily categorized as liberal, progressive, or leftist, argues Harry Boyte, this "citizens movement" was "cooperative group action by ordinary citizens motivated by both civic idealism and by specific grievances."2 Scholar Robert Fisher declares this type of community-based activism the "hallmark of the era," and other scholars, mostly in the fields of political science and sociology, have pointed to the important role such organizing has had on community efficacy and public policy.3 Writer and community organizer Makani Themba, for example, concludes that "efforts that engage community residents and give them a sense of their own power enhance a community's ability to solve problems and strengthen individual members' sense of community."4 The feminist movement, however, has generally been held apart from these trends, which hides the importance of local strategic alliances in feminist campaigns for systemic change. As historian Anne Enke...

Bio-medicolegal scientific research in Europe: a comprehensive bibliometric overview

In times of globalisation, the future of bio-medicolegal sciences in Europe depends on the scientific community's ability to develop new strategies for research, to introduce new and generally accepted standards, to develop new analytical methods, all in order to draw up inter-site, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary long-term research projects, eligible for European Union (EU) funding. To analyse the scientific output and to identify the topics of greatest interest and appeal in these sciences, an innovative method has been developed to select and analyse publications. This method has been applied to analyse a total of 21,176 records from PubMed out of which 5,826 papers were suitable for further analysis because they were published in national and international journals in the time between January 1, 2005 and June 1, 2010 by European authors in the field of interest. In 69% of all manuscripts, authors presented results of systematic research (original articles); 84% of the papers were written in English language. The cumulative impact factor increased from 1,670 points in 2005 to 1,878 in 2009, and extrapolated 2,812 points in 2010. The most frequent topics were the description of new analytical methods in forensic toxicology (5.7% of all papers), the analysis of short tandem repeat systems (STR, 5.6%) as well as the analysis of injury mechanisms in forensic pathology and clinical forensic medicine (4.9%). If the impact factor related potential of different topics is calculated (ratio of frequency of papers and frequency of impact points achieved), SIDS research reaches 1.64 points, followed by studies on mtDNA (1.59) and the development of new analytical methods in forensic toxicology (1.49). The findings made in the present bibliometric analysis reveal a clear and interesting overall picture of the European scientific production and productivity and could be used to identify the most innovative research lines.

The Political Economy of Andrew Carnegie's Library Philanthropy, with a Reflection on its Relevance to the Philanthropic Work of Bill Gates

When it was announced in 1997, Bill Gates' library philanthropy programme attracted a tremendous amount of media attention. A central feature of that coverage was a renewed interest in Andrew Carnegie's library building programme. While identifying the historical similarities between Carnegie and Gates is an interesting exercise, failure to ground these comparisons in a critical policy analysis frame that attends to the political economy of largescale private philanthropy seriously limits, if not jeopardizes, the public library community's ability to respond to the broader cultural implications of Gates' library programme. Here, the radical philanthropic approach is used to frame a historical analysis of Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy as a response to the contemporary class warfare of the period, within which he was deeply implicated. Unpacking Carnegie's library philanthropy for its ideological importance in the struggle over the ownership and control of the means of industrial production provides a powerful analytic lens through which to view capital's updated hegemonic project, as reflected in Gates' philanthropy, which is designed to bring software and internet connectivity to America's public libraries.

Democratizing Information Creation From Health Care Data for Quality Improvement, Research, and Education—The Montefiore Medical Center Experience

The National Research Council recently reviewed the capabilities of health care software implemented in the United States and described a health care information technology chasm that is threatening the medical community's ability to meet the health care quality goals enumerated in Institute of Medicine reports. Among the critical gaps is the inability of health care software systems to allow users to convert data into meaningful information supporting quality improvement, analysis, and research. In this article, the authors describe the Montefiore Medical Center's decade-long experience developing software for the purpose of converting data into useful information and integrating software use into the clinical culture. The program at Montefiore could serve as a potential national model.

The differential impact of mortality of American troops in the Iraq War: The non-metropolitan dimension

Abstract This study investigates the disproportionate impact of mortality among United States troops in Iraq on rural communities. We advance scholarly research and popular accounts that suggest a non-metropolitan disadvantage by disaggregating the risk of mortality according to the metropolitan status of their home county and by examining potential sources of variation, including enlistment, rank and race or ethnicity. Results show that troops from non-metropolitan areas have higher mortality after accounting for the disproportionate enlistment of non-metropolitan youth, and the non-metropolitan disadvantage generally persists across military branch and rank. Moreover, most of the differential is due to higher risks of mortality for non-metropolitan African American and Hispanic military personnel, compared to metropolitan enlistees of the same race or ethnicity. 1. Introduction Considerable attention has been given to mortality among United States troops in the Iraq War (2003 to present), especially the differential impact made by death among troops. A recent study estimated the risk of death for US troops in Iraq, according to several individual characteristics including military branch, rank, sex, age, and race or ethnicity (Buzzell and Preston 2007) and found that the greatest risk of death was experienced by the Marines, the enlisted, males, the young, and Hispanics. Some of the differences in risk of death correspond with trends in the larger society (e.g., sex) while others are specific to the military (e.g., branch and rank). Other researchers and journalists have focused on the potential differential impacts of deaths in the Iraq conflict for specific sub-populations of American society, including rural populations and lower-income groups (e.g., Mark 2007; O'Hare and Bishop 2006; see also Zeitlin, Lutterman, and Russell 1973 for an explicit focus on class and poverty). In their 2006 report on rural soldiers, O'Hare and Bishop (2006) connect these two sub-populations by linking military involvement to the poor economic opportunities that characterize many rural areas. The current study is concerned with the potential disproportionate impact of mortality in Iraq for the rural population, and extends previous research by empirically estimating the extent of the differential impact, and taking initial steps to investigate the sources of variation. The disproportionate impacts of deaths in Iraq are important to consider for at least two reasons. First, rural communities in the United States have a long and active history of military involvement, yet they have fewer resources to deal with the consequences of war. Research has shown that rural communities lack the necessary support services for families suffering loss (Helseth 2007a). Indeed, service providers in rural areas are not able to directly serve their communities because, in part, they have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan (Helseth 2007b). Second, disproportionate military deaths may also perpetuate the conditions in rural communities that encourage rural youth to serve in the military and put themselves at risk of death. Military deaths among the rural population diminish the available labor force-which makes an impact on a community's ability to attract industry and reduces household earning potential, which puts families at greater risk of living in poverty. Limited labor force opportunity and economic instability are oft-cited reasons for military enlistment (Bachman et al. 2000; Dale and Gilroy 1984; O'Hare and Bishop 2006; Teachman, Call and Segal 1993; for a contrasting view, see Kane 2005, 2006). In the current analysis, we address the question of whether rural communities are more greatly affected by mortality in the Iraq War compared to urban communities, by disaggregating mortality data by the non-metropolitan status of the reported home counties of the deceased, and estimating whether troops from rural communities have a greater risk of death than troops from urban communities. …

Community engagement in research: frameworks for education and peer review.

Community engagement in research may enhance a community's ability to address its own health needs and health disparities issues while ensuring that researchers understand community priorities. However, there are researchers with limited understanding of and experience with effective methods of engaging communities. Furthermore, limited guidance is available for peer-review panels on evaluating proposals for research that engages communities. The National Institutes of Health Director's Council of Public Representatives developed a community engagement framework that includes values, strategies to operationalize each value, and potential outcomes of their use, as well as a peer-review framework for evaluating research that engages communities. Use of these frameworks for educating researchers to create and sustain authentic community-academic partnerships will increase accountability and equality between the partners.

Using network analysis to assess the evolution of organizational collaboration in response to a major environmental health threat

Effective inter-organizational collaboration is essential to a community's ability to leverage social and material resources for community problem solving, particularly in the face of complex public health problems. This study used network analysis to document the evolution of collaboration among 21 organizations in the Tar Creek Superfund site in northeastern Oklahoma from 1997 to 2005. The Tar Creek Superfund site was part of a major lead and zinc mining operation and suffers from widespread heavy metal contamination. An organizational network of 21 organizations and a subset of eight tribes were assessed through interviews at three points in time for density and centrality. In addition to collaboration on any topic, we examined information exchange and joint planning related to lead. Density scores were consistently higher in 2005 than in 1997 for both the full and tribal networks. Centralization indices for information exchange showed a marked reduction in the hierarchical structure of information exchange over time. Of particular note is that tribal linkages with local, state and federal agencies increased over time, as did inter-tribal linkages to address the lead issue.

Bridging Science and Society

The theme of this year's Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) seems especially timely: Bridging Science and Society. Virtually every major issue now confronting society has a science and technology component, and this means that “the need for general scientific understanding by the public has never been larger, and the penalty for scientific illiteracy never harsher.” * Today, science and technology are receiving unprecedented financial and policy support worldwide, as more countries invest in science and science education with the belief that these investments will enhance economic strength and improve the lives of their citizens. In the United States, the current national leadership frequently focuses on science, science education, and science-based policy-making. As well, the U.S. National Science Board just reported in Science Indicators 2010 that the general citizenry continues to hold scientists in high regard, second only to firefighters in prestige. But this confidence and prestige depend on a belief in the integrity and credibility of science, as well as in the scientific community's ability to help solve global problems. A spate of recent incidents has threatened the public's trust and argues that greater attention is essential to maintaining a strong bridge between science and the rest of society.

A review of coastal community vulnerabilities toward resilience benefits from disaster reduction measures

The coast has always been an area of significant hazards. In situations of community self-sufficiency, consequences of coastal hazards might be isolated to regions directly affected by the hazard. But, in the current global economy, fewer and fewer communities are isolated; damage to one location frequently has consequences around the globe and coastal community resilience can have broad-reaching benefits. Hazard responses for the built coastal environment have typically been resistance: constructing stronger buildings, enhancing natural barriers or creating artificial barriers. These approaches to hazard reduction through coastal engineering and shoreline defence efforts have been crucial to sustained coastal development. However, as coastal forces continue or magnify and resources become scarcer, resistance alone may be less effective or even unsustainable, and interest in resilience has grown. Resilience is a community's ability either to absorb destructive forces without loss of service or function, or to recover quickly from disasters. Community resilience encompasses multiple elements, ranging from governance to structural design, risk knowledge, prevention, warning systems and recovery. This paper focuses on hazards of coastal communities, and provides a review of some recent engineering efforts to improve the resilience elements of risk knowledge and disaster warnings for coastal disaster reduction.

Analysis of rolling group therapy data using conditionally autoregressive priors

Group therapy is a central treatment modality for behavioral health disorders such as alcohol and other drug use (AOD) and depression. Group therapy is often delivered under a rolling (or open) admissions policy, where new clients are continuously enrolled into a group as space permits. Rolling admissions policies result in a complex correlation structure among client outcomes. Despite the ubiquity of rolling admissions in practice, little guidance on the analysis of such data is available. We discuss the limitations of previously proposed approaches in the context of a study that delivered group cognitive behavioral therapy for depression to clients in residential substance abuse treatment. We improve upon previous rolling group analytic approaches by fully modeling the interrelatedness of client depressive symptom scores using a hierarchical Bayesian model that assumes a conditionally autoregressive prior for session-level random effects. We demonstrate improved performance using our method for estimating the variance of model parameters and the enhanced ability to learn about the complex correlation structure among participants in rolling therapy groups. Our approach broadly applies to any group therapy setting where groups have changing client composition. It will lead to more efficient analyses of client-level data and improve the group therapy research community's ability to understand how the dynamics of rolling groups lead to client outcomes.

Review: No Easy Fix

NO EASY FIX Global Responses to Internal Wars and Crimes against Humanity Patricia Marchak Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. 376pp, $34.95 cloth ISBN 978-0773533684Dealing with sovereign regimes that have perpetrated crimes against the human rights of their own citizens is a perennial problem for the international community, that nebulous and faceless force. Related to this issue, and perhaps the real crux ofthe problem, is the fact that countries remain at odds over the interrelated questions of state sovereignty and the legitimacy of foreign intervention. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 - which the White House initially justified on the grounds of international security and, subsequently, by appealing to humanitarian considerations - raised exactly these concerns and demonstrated how elusive a global consensus on these issues remains. The ongoing conflict in Darfur poses similar problems. In western countries, public pressure for intervention to stop what many consider to be a genocide highlights the tension between state sovereignty and humanitarian principles. The Sudanese governmenf s refusal to recognize the authority ofthe International Criminal Court - which has attempted to bring to trial various members ofthe regime - casts doubt on the ability of international organizations to discharge their stated responsibilities.Patricia Marchak's book attempts to make sense of these issues. It is the valiant effort of a gifted and erudite scholar. If her conclusion is sobering, the blame hardly lies with her. The weight of her subject hangs heavily over every page. As Marchak herself admits, she is skeptical about the international community's ability to uphold an effective system of global justice. Humanitarian intervention, she notes, may be an idea whose time has arrived, but it has arrived in the context of a failing state system, and the one organization that has the moral authority to address the problems lacks the military capacity and the political will to do so (38). Concepts such as the responsibility to protect, a subject that forms the basis for one ofthe book's most convincing chapters, are, Marchak notes, often strong in sentiment but weak in execution. A further issue contributing to the author's doubts is the ability of international law - a western-centric and western-oriented concept - to develop into a legitimate and universally-accepted legal regime.But despite this skepticism, No Easy Fix avoids crass pessimism. Marchak has spent the last decade developing a solid reputation as a specialist in political ethics and its relation to state governance, and she is clearly aware of the implications of her subject. Her 2003 book Reigns of Terror examined various theoretical and historical approaches to cases involving state crimes against citizens, and argued for a theoretical connection between state systems and humanitarian crimes. The goal was to explain why states choose or are able to commit violent crimes against their own citizens.In many ways, Reigns of Terror is a prequel to No Easy Fix. While the former examined the mechanisms that allow state-sponsored violence to develop, the latter focuses on the repercussions of such violence, including the international community's attempts to bring justice to divided societies, the ability of these societies to come to terms with their legacies of violence, and the flaws inherent in the very concept of global justice. …

Investigating the Attributes in Serious Games that Contribute to Learning

Though serious games have been the topic of much discussion within the scientific community, the theoretical underpinnings of this technology remains largely nascent. Although much of the knowledge base of the simulation and digital learning community applies to serious games, the play-based nature of these tools necessitates additional examination. Games have defining component attributes, and variation of these attributes may affect learning resulting from game play. Thus, understanding of the attributes involved in games and how they map to various learning outcomes will improve the community's ability to effectively design and employ these tools. This article describes research designed to address this need through experimental manipulations of the privately developed InnerCell game. This effort is conducted in the context of game attributes and learning outcomes, and recommendations for attribute-outcome pairs are offered based on preliminary findings of this research.

Future roles of the UK intelligence system

AbstractThe UK intelligence system is engaged in three distinct roles – producing strategic assessments in the traditional way; acting as a ‘global policeman’ by monitoring terrorist and criminal networks; and raising the capability of other countries to defeat terrorist and insurgency groups. Counter-intuitively, it is perhaps the first role that is most questionable. The use of single source intelligence reporting, drawn from individuals selected principally for their willingness to share secrets, may not be the best way to analyse emerging issues such as climate change, energy security and financial stability. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) may be drawing on too narrow a range of reporting to compete with increasingly sophisticated assessments from the private sector, academia and NGOs. In any event, the JIC has less impact on policy than is often imagined. The second task of ‘global networker’ is better-suited to the intelligence community's ability to combine human intelligence with communications intelligence and bulk data gathering, and is producing results. The third task of helping other countries to enforce the law and resist insurgency is proceeding on an ad hoc basis with occasional successes, but requires co-ordination across Whitehall so that improvements in the capabilities of other countries' intelligence services are accompanied by improved police and justice systems and enhanced oversight. Joint Intelligence Committee perhaps ought to be a Joint Action Committee.