Conscious Planning Research Articles

Industrial training methods adopted in undergraduate programmes in Sri Lanka

Industrial training methods adopted in Sri Lankan universities can be classified as structured, problem-oriented and informal. They have evolved not through conscious planning but because of increasing difficulties in finding training positions in industry. Of the three categories, structured training appears to be the most effective, while problem-oriented training places much reliance on the commitment of the trainee. The least effective is the informal type, which can only be successful by chance.

Seasonality in Vital Processes in a Traditional Chinese Population

This is an exploratory analysis of seasonal variations in fertility mortality and marriage in Taiwan from 1906 to 1943 based on data from Japanese colonial records primarily household registers. Comparisons are made with Japan and China. The results indicate that the seasonality of vital events is a curious mix of custom conscious planning and natural cycles. (EXCERPT)

Retail Services and the Role of the State: Convenience Stores and the Planning Appeals Board in Melbourne

Studies of urban and regional phenomena are increasingly coming to recognize the role of the state in many planning processes and outcomes. In this paper we examine the planning process in Melbourne with respect to a recent retailing innovation in Australia, that of drive-in convenience stores. Resistance to the establishment of such stores, particularly their location in residential areas, has come both from residents and from local authorities charged with the administration of the Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme. The conflicts have been adjudicated through a planning appeals body, the Victorian Planning Appeals Board. The nature of constraints placed on the interpretation of the planning scheme by the Appeals Board through Supreme Court decisions, and through the manner of operation of the Appeals Board itself, has meant that decisions have predominantly favoured the developers. Thus structure at the lower levels of the retail hierarchy is altering quite markedly, not as a result of conscious planning decisions, but as a result of the mechanisms to resolve conflict.

The Kahan Commission Report on the Beirut Massacre

If politics is the art of the possible, then the impact of the Kahan Commission Report has to be understood as "beyond politics." Israel's final victory in the Lebanon War is not the ex pulsion of the PLO or even the extension of its sovereign reach to challenge Lebanese territory and political independence but its vindication, despite all, as a moral force in the region as, in fact, a superior state, especially as compared to its Arab rivals. The Washington Post starts off its lead edito rial on the day the Report was issued: "The whole process of the Israeli reaction to the Beirut massacre is a tribute to the vitality of democracy in Israel and to the country's moral character" [1]. The New York Times also de voted a lead editorial to the Report, praising its results: "How rare the nation that seeks salva tion by revealing such shame" [2]. Gaston De ferre, the French Minister of the Interior, is quoted on the cover of the commercial edition: "This report is the honor of Israel. It gives the world a new lesson in democracy." What is re markable about this phenomenon, which, as might have been expected, has been efficiently exploited by Israel's vast public relations ap paratus, was that it was not in any sense a pro duct of conscious planning. Quite the contrary, the appointment of a commission of inquiry was genuinely resisted at every stage by the Begin government, and its existence is a tribute to the force of public opinion within Israel and outside.

In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55

In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447-55

Deindividuation, self-awareness, and disinhibition.

Assessed whether lack of self-awareness and conscious planning, group unity, and disinhibited behavior occurred together in deindividuating settings as predicted by E. Diener's (1979) theory of deindividuation. The characteristics and effects of group-induced deindividuation with non-socially-induce

THE SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS TO THE REDUCTION OF FERTILITY

Summary This paper rests on the premise that in modern societies population growth is controlled mainly through means of family planning. Community attitudes towards men, women and children, as well as assumptions about the role and worth of the father, the mother and the child in a family, determine to a large extent whether the reproductive aspect of family life will be subjected to conscious deliberation and planning. On the other hand, the ‘availability’ and ‘accessibility’ of family planning services is a relative concept, depending on the subjective evaluation of potential users of the service. Not only economic and physical-practical factors, but also psycho-social and cultural considerations enter into consumers' perception of how relevant, appropriate, acceptable, and within-reach such services are.

The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation

BOOTH: I've been wondering about the repeated patterns in The Works of Love that I traced yesterday. I'd be curious to know if you had them in mind before you wrote or if they came out of the pen as you were writing? MORRIS: Let's first locate one or two of these motif-returns that you think of as patterns, so that we're sure we're talking about the same thing. BOOTH: One main pattern that I argued for was the sequence in Brady's experience: a person born in emptiness, seeming to have no chance whatever of becoming a visionary, who yet became a person of deeply educated imagination. I can't believe that that wasn't part of your conscious planning. You began with a simple guy in an empty world who has very little chance of becoming anything, and you ended up with a man who, though he has not had a fulfilled life at all, has turned out to be fantastically imaginative in works of love-able to create them in his imagination though never able to realize them with actual people. MORRIS: Would you believe that this was not part of my awareness when I started the work on Brady? BOOTH: I just want to make sure that we distinguish between what you thought about when you began writing, what you thought about by the time you finished, and what you have discovered since. MORRIS: I begin with the ultimate clich6-a man's life. With this difference. A life in which little of consequence appears to have happened. My style of writing is organic. I go from one page to the next page, and I read on the page how well or how poorly I am doing. I take my clues, in the main, from what I have done. Now I'm taking the craft details of writing for granted-the organic motivates and informs

Styles of planning health services: the United states, Sweden, and England.

Conscious planning of health services is being regarded as a necessity in western countries in order to contain costs, provide rational delivery systems, and assure equal access. Brief case studies of styles of planning for health services in the United States, Sweden, and Great Britain are presented in this paper. It is contended that since there are very few scientifically verified criteria regarding adequacy of personnel and facilities, proper volume of use of services, and how much health services should cost, conscious planning becomes at best arbitrary. Types of personnel and facilities are quite uniform in all countries determined by technologic imperatives. There are, however, differences in health services organization and systems, sources and amounts of funding, ratio of personnel and facilities to population, and use of services. It is, therefore, suggested that varying organizations, structures, and use result from differing social and political contexts, both historical and current. The health services of each country are a reflection of their problem-solving styles. The open-ended nature of health services precludes a standardized health services system from country to country, analogous to airports.

My First Experience with Computer Drawings

My background of study in art was of the traditional kind. I have made drawings, paintings, prints and some sculptures. My paintings have evolved into a type that are more formed by the dictates of intuition than by preconceived ideas or conscious planning. The paintings in oils have taken the form of flat geometrical shapes. In my recent paintings the number of shapes has been reduced to very few, and they are closely related to the rectangle of a canvas. I came to realize that intuition feeds upon a certain fund of knowledge and experience with a medium. The intuitive or creative act seems to follow this sequence: spade work, planting, waiting and harvest. The image-making process is to me a way of expressing a felt fact. The rightness and the order

Multivariate models of urban development

The use of multivariate models as models of urban residential development is reviewed, and the results obtained by such models are compared. A multivariate model of the residential development in Greater Copenhagen is set up; and it is shown, how public interferences have had increasing influence on the development process, especially after 1963. This increasing influence on the development process probably is just as much due to the industrialization of the dwelling construction, as it is a result of a conscious planning. The multivariate analysis also shows, that the accessibility to the suburban centers after 1963 has been a more important development factor than the accessibility to the Copenhagen city, indicating that the multicenter structure now is becoming a reality in the greater Copenhagen area. The change in the development process, because of public interference, seems in the greater Copenhagen area to lead to a situation, where the multivariate model cannot describe the development process.

After Thoughts on Human Ecology

SINCE I first addressed you on Folklore and Human Ecology' it seems to me that the word Ecology is used with increasing frequency by the popular Press as well as in the serious periodicals. Not always applied in the strict scientific sense its employment at least bears witness to a growing awareness of the significance of interrelationships. There has long been a recognition of the part environment plays in the behaviour of human beings whether the environment be the effect of conscious planning or natural growth. Our folklore which is part of our environment includes the surviving traditions of country life and custom. Too often these traditions or fragments of them are presented as exposing just a quaint idea or an absurd superstition or an unusual object. By themselves such recorded scraps do no more than faintly illumine part of our environment. Folklore can do much more than that if it aims at the study of a whole environment or total ecological system where human beings are viewed not as isolated entities but as partners with each other with their habitat and with the multiple organism which constitutes a community. In ecology this total picture calls for a wide-eyed comprehension and even so is difficult to interpret at first sight. The whole picture is the subject of folk-life study and I have drawn attention to the limitations of the information provided by the separate sciencedisciplines and to the vital need for overlapping observations and cross-references to give a truly scientific exposure. Regarded from the ecological standpoint any organic group attracts attention to its margins of give and take between the component parts. Study 1 Folklore, Vol. 76 (1965), Summer. F 81

Science as a Factor in International Relations

IT is obvious that the power of a country, the place which it can occupy in the world, depends chiefly on its state of technical advance in administration, in industry, and in military affairs. The rates of advance of different countries have been very variable: periods of technical activity have been followed by periods of technical stagnation. Spain and Italy provide examples. A large measure of Britain's unparalleled world position in the nineteenth century was due to the remarkable skill of her inventors in the previous centuries, which put her ahead of all other nations in the production of power and the mechanization of industrial processes. The reasons for these bursts of technical activity have been much discussed. I do not want to go into that question here, nor am I competent to do so. But one thing is clear: they just happened. There was no conscious planning about them: at best, an alert nation profited by them to the maximum when they occurred. My purpose is to suggest that a new factor has now crept into the affairs of nations, some of the results of which we still scarcely appreciate. This factor, as I hope to show, enables a country consciously to examine its national resources and plan, if it so wishes, to occupy the position in the world which these resources, properly exploited, would allow. The new factor is science. The term 'science' really means two things. First, it indicates a mode of establishing facts. This consists of a combination of experiment and rigidly logical deduction: the study of known facts and their integration into a hypothesis; the devising and carrying out of experiments to test this hypothesis, leading to its acceptance or rejection; then, if it proves acceptable, its extension in the light of new facts. Neither experiment nor logical deduction are new ways of acquiring knowledge. The Greeks in particular were masters of logical deduction, a process of which the works of Euclid to this day remain a shining example. Man has been making experiments of one sort or another throughout his history; moreover, astronomers have for several thousand years been deducing laws governing the motion of heavenly bodies, making predictions and verifying them. What is new in the history of civilization is the systematic application of the combination of these methods to the study of the nature of the physical world-a process which has produced in a comparatively short space of time an astonishing corpus of knowledge, extending from cosmology, which thinks

The Present Status of the Spanish-Americans ofNew Mexico

.The most important question raised by analysis of an urban pattern determined in part by conscious planning and in part by pressure of custom, rather than by exigencies of land market, is whether much of anarchic and unstable character attributed by many authorities to urban life in general, is not merely a particular aspect of urban history of United States and Western Europe since Renaissance. The attitude of urban sociologist has often implied wickedness of city, the painted woman under street lights luring farm boys, and wholesome superiority of ruralism, without regard to historical circumstances. There can be no question that impact of city upon a rural culture tends to disorganize traditional web of understandings and that this disorganization is facilitated by each improvement of communication. Nor can there be any doubt that acculturation of rural migrant is essentially a disorganizing experience and implies a period of cultural marginality. What should be questioned is assumption that individual and institutional disorganization are progressive functions of urbanism per se. Even in United States, there is an accumulating body of evidence to suggest that residential mobility and cultural marginality tend to decrease as urban society matures. Granted greater heterogeneity of an urban population, multiplication of stimuli in urban milieu, and disastrous pressure which urban conditions can exert upon individual psyche, it has yet to be demonstrated that urban societies are intrinsically incapable of satisfying human needs. In any event, Middle American data strongly suggest that we have barely begun to describe and classify possible varieties of urban organization and are therefore still unable to predict complete range of alternatives open to increasingly urban societies like our own.

Trade Union Policy under Full Employment

I do not propose to discuss here the problems of the transition from war to peace, or how unions can help to get full employment in the first place. I am concerned with the more fundamental problem of the place of unions in a society which has achieved full employment in peace-time, without sacrificing any of the essential freedoms, and which wants to keep both full employment and freedom. I am assuming that full employment involves planning. I am assuming also that unions are not just nuisances but, in one form or another, permanent and desirable social institutions. Can we plan production without planning wages, hours, and conditions of work? If full employment involves planning these also, where do the unions come in ? Must they sacrifice their traditional freedom to bargain collectively on behalf of their members, and suffer a sea-change into something, if not rich and strange, at least very different from what they have ever been before? Or can the community do this part of its planning through collective bargaining? Can we continue to have purely sectional bargaining, plant by plant, industry by industry, or must the various unions act as a unit according to a general wage policy laid down by some central organization? Must trade unionism change its functions, or its structure, or both?These questions have been widely discussed in Britain, and to some extent also in the United States; in Canada, as far as I know, hardly at all. If we mean business when we talk of full employment, especially full employment in a free society, it is high time they were. For they are not by any means minor questions. Mrs. Wootton goes so far as to say that “Of all the possible points of conflict between conscious planning of priorities and traditional freedoms, the regulation of wages is likely to prove the most stormy”; and of course in this context “wages” include hours and conditions of work—not only what is paid, but what it is paid for. In Canada, freedom to bargain collectively can scarcely be called one of the “traditional” freedoms; for most Canadian workers it is still a recent, hard won, and imperfect conquest. But it is none the less prized for that, and it will not be easily surrendered, even as the price of full employment. For of all the freedoms, this is perhaps the one that comes closest home to the ordinary worker.