Public Apathy Research Articles

Managing Urban Rivers and Water Quality in Malaysia for Sustainable Water Resources

Rivers are rich ecosystems and sources of life, providing many functions for the survival of natural and human systems. In Malaysia, due to poor management and public apathy, they are severely degraded. Rapid development and urbanization have also overstressed and polluted them, and governance practices are mostly focused on managing water shortages, floods, and pollution. Limitations include low priority in the political agenda, inadequate economic, managerial, and human resources, poor enforcement of laws and regulations, poor public involvement, and inadequate use of non-structural measures. Recent government, private sector, and NGO partnerships, however, have shown great potential for improved management of rivers.

The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks

Public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension and to limits on technical reasoning. However, evidence suggests that individuals with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity are not the most concerned about climate change and are the most culturally polarized.

A contemporary study of the decision to incarcerate white‐collar and street property offenders

Conventional wisdom holds that white‐collar offenders operate with relative impunity because of widespread public and governmental apathy. The present study, however, examines whether public tolerance and governmental leniency toward white‐collar offenders have endured the series of national white‐collar crime scandals emerging in 2001–2002. This study analyzes sentencing guidelines data from Florida for the period 1994 to 2004, modeling legal and extra-legal factors related to the decision to incarcerate white‐collar and street property offenders. In/out incarceration sentences imposed upon white‐collar offenders are compared with those imposed upon burglars and thieves to determine whether 21st‐century white‐collar offenders are treated more leniently than street‐level property offenders. Additional analyses consider the roles of social status and of recent corporate scandals in influencing sentencing disparities. Findings indicate that, despite operating under sentencing guidelines designed to reduce disparities, white‐collar offenders are afforded greater leniency, though this relationship varies by the type of white‐collar crime considered, the offender's social status, and whether the sentencing occurred before or after the Enron scandal. Conclusions emphasize the salience of the definition of white‐collar crime when discussing punitiveness disparities and the relationship between white‐collar crime scandals and punishment.

Problems Mitigating Housing Finance Through Primary Mortgage Institutions In Lagos

In developing countries among important factors influencing housing provision, finance is one of the most critical. This is the case with Nigeria and in particular in large urban centres of which Lagos is one. The study is therefore an investigation on the structure and challenges confronting housing finance efforts of Primary Mortgage Institutions in Lagos. The research objectives include the examination of housing delivery policies and finance in Nigeria and Lagos. The study also examines the structure of Primary Mortgage Institutions (PMIs) in the study area, housing funding products and strategies by the PMIs and investigated the problems and challenges confronting the operations of the PMIs in Lagos. The methodology employed by the research includes the collection of primary and secondary data. Field survey showed that 65 PMIs operate and are active as at the time of field work and 16 representing 25% were picked for sampling through oral discussion and questionnaire administration to the bank officials and customers, with 160 questionnaires for the latter. Data obtained were analyzed through simple frequency distribution tables and bar charts. Among major findings of the research include the following: that the PMIs nature of business transactions include commercial banking, LPO financing, merchandising, property agency and sales and transport. Existing departments in the PMIs are corporate/administration, human resources operations, legal, marketing and mortgage. Services and products of the PMIs are National Housing Fund (NHF) loan, estate development loan, pension-linked loan, LPO financing and overdraft facilities for their customers. Major challenges confronting the operations of the PMIs are NHF policy, structure of PMIs, the national economic climate, high cost of building materials and public apathy, difficulty of access to land and land documentation constraints, poor collateral, high interest rates and competitive finance market. The study suggests that the NHF policy should be reviewed and that government should provide incentives such as tax rebate for building materials manufacture, encourage the re-training of labour to improve their skills and speed. The Nigerian land law should be reviewed to make access to land less cumbersome while cheap funding sources should be provided specifically for housing finance. Key words: Housing; Institution; Finance; Mortgage; Bank; Policy

America's plague of incarceration

America's plague of incarceration

Urbanization and Solid Waste Management in India: Present Practices and Future Challenges

Urbanization is now becoming a global phenomenon, but its ramifications are more pronounced in developing countries. High rate of population growth, declining opportunities in rural areas and shift from stagnant and low paying agriculture sector to more paying urban occupations, largely contribute to urbanization. The unexpected immigration has also caused the burgeoning of slums and the growth of squatters and informal housing all around the rapidly expanding cities of the developing world. In many cites the rapid population growth has overwhelmed the capacity of municipal authorities to provide even basic services. Urbanization directly contributes to waste generation, and unscientific waste handling causes health hazards and urban environment degradation. Solid Waste Management which is already a mammoth task in India is going to be more complicated with the increase in urbanization, changing lifestyles and increase in consumerism. Financial constraints, institutional weaknesses, improper choice of technology and public apathy towards Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) have made this situation worse. The current practices of the uncontrolled dumping of waste on the outskirts of towns/cities have created a serious environmental and public health problem. The focus of the present paper is to see the upcoming trends of urbanization in India and accordingly generation of waste. The present paper evaluates the current practices prevalent in India to deal with this solid waste and problems associated with it. It also provides the measures to deal this waste in healthy and environment friendly manner so that it may prove a resource instead of waste.

Commentary: N.H. Choksy and serum therapy

Nasserwanji Hormusji Choksy (1861–1939) was the Chief Medical Officer of the Arthur Road Infectious Diseases Hospital in Bombay, which had been set up exclusively for treating infectious diseases, in 1892, and is still functioning today. He served here, till 1922, his name becoming synonymous with this institution. During the plague epidemic of 1896–97, Choksy worked, in the face of public apathy and suspicion. Most victims were sent there, under compulsion, and Choksy had not only to contend with their ignorance and prejudice, but they were more often brought in when they were beyond all help. The hospital was short staffed and the few, who were induced to join, ran away within hours or days, not even coming back to claim their wages. They had never seen so many people die of plague, for the largest number of people died at the hospital, not only because of numerous admissions but also because many cases were admitted in a moribund condition. There were apprehensions that the authorities took people to hospitals to make a speedy end of them, and the means used to resuscitate and support the strength of patients, through subcutaneous injections, were misconstrued. It was openly stated that the patients were deliberately killed and their hearts taken out to be sent to the Queen in England, to appease her wrath, on account of the disfigurement of her statue, which had occurred at the beginning of the epidemic. Choksy’s experience of treating plague patients with Lustig’s serum, during this epidemic, caused him to comment on the critique of a paper by Dr Alfons Mayr, of the Bombay Municipal Laboratory, by a special correspondent of the Lancet (2 June 1900). Choksy clarified that Mayr, who had based his observations on the monthly reports submitted by Choksy to the municipality, had mixed up his arguments and presented them so confusedly as to prejudice those not conversant with this line of treatment of plague. Choksy pointed out that he had personally conducted all the clinical observations and was solely responsible for the results. Alessandro Lustig (1857–1937), with his pupil, G. Galeotti, had extracted from Bacterium pestis, a substance having the chemical characteristics of nucleoproteins and demonstrated its immunizing properties. These investigations stand in the history of bacteriology and immunology as one of the first attempts at the chemical identification of a bacterial antigen and at using chemically defined antigens to induce active immunity. These substances were used by Lustig and his colleagues as chemical vaccines to immunize animals and obtain immune sera that were employed for serum therapy in plague cases. Lustig, Galeotti and another pupil, G. Polverini were invited to India to apply the results of their research. When they arrived in Bombay, in June 1897, the epidemic had run its course and they treated a few sporadic cases with a serum that had been prepared in the Laboratory of General Pathology, Florence. The results proved satisfactory and they then went upcountry, since no material for further observation was available in Bombay city, where they successfully treated 30 cases. After his return to Florence, when Lustig heard of another outbreak in Bombay, he offered to prepare and send another batch of serum to test its efficacy, on a larger scale. This offer was accepted by the municipality, and Galeotti and Polverini arrived with a sufficient quantity of serum and, as the epidemic was at its height, arrangements were made to start the serum treatment immediately. Observations were conducted over two periods (March–November 1898 and February–May 1899) with moribund cases, who were beyond reach of all human help, and with convalescent and semi-convalescent cases being excluded. It was found that the rate of recovery could be doubled in acute and fit cases with the use of serum therapy. In his letter to the Lancet, Choksy contended that there had been no reason for dissatisfaction with Lustig’s serum, in the 2 years of its application by him. He held that although the mode of preparation and application at the bedside had to be determined with further research, experiment and clinical observation, serum treatment was the only treatment that could appreciably reduce the high mortality of plague. Choksy maintained that he abided by his experience and called upon critics to withhold their objections and allow those conversant Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association

‘Olympic Games Doomed’

The immediate post-war years revealed that all was clearly not well within the British Olympic movement. Battling against the tide of widespread public and governmental apathy and opposition, the BOA persevered in its attempts to raise a British team for the forthcoming 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Backed by a coterie of prominent patricians and Conservative politicians, the BOA endeavoured to raise the funds needed to help reclaim Britain's lost sporting prowess. In spite of the BOA's renewed efforts, the chauvinistic scenes that marred the 1924 Paris games both reaffirmed British suspicions that the Olympics were a politico-sporting contest between nation-states and sparked renewed calls for a full-scale British Olympic withdrawal.

Bundestag Election 2009: Solidifying the Five Party System

Although characterized by widespread public apathy and record low voter turnout, the 2009 Bundestag election solidified a stable, but fluid five-party system that will likely be a defining feature of German political life for the next generation. The three minor parties each achieved historical bests at the polls with steep losses for the two traditional Volksparteien. Drawing on data from the German Longitudinal Electoral Study (GLES), this article examines the nature of this new five-party system with a closer look at each party's voters in the 2009 election. The analysis shows the breadth and stability of the five-party system—each party draws significant support across all sixteen Länder; and, despite a growing number of swing voters, each party has a core group of committed voters that alone exceeds the 5 percent national electoral threshold. We also find evidence that the increased volatility and fluidity of the party system is structured along the left-right ideological spectrum with the parties divided into two major camps and vote-switching much more likely within the respective camps rather than between them.

The politics of motherhood: maternity and women's rights in twentieth-century Chile

With the 2006 election of Michelle Bachelet as the first female president and women claiming fifty percent of her cabinet seats, the political influence of Chilean women has taken a major step forward. Despite a seemingly liberal political climate, Chile has a murky history on women's rights, and progress has been slow, tenuous, and in many cases, non-existent. Chronicling an era of unprecedented modernization and political transformation, Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney examines the negotiations over women's rights and the politics of gender in Chile throughout the twentieth century. Centering her study on motherhood, Pieper Mooney explores dramatic changes in health policy, population paradigms, and understandings of human rights, and reveals that motherhood is hardly a private matter defined only by individual women or couples. Instead, it is intimately tied to public policies and political competitions on nation-state and international levels. The increased legitimacy of women's demands for rights, both locally and globally, has led to some improvements in gender equity. Yet feminists in contemporary Chile continue to face strong opposition from neoconservatism in the Catholic Church and a mixture of public apathy and legal wrangling over reproductive rights and health.

James Harris's 'Much Ado': Text and Historical Context of a Sarah Fielding Misattribution in the Gentleman's Magazine

IN January 1752 an unidentified correspondent wrote an indignant letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine (hereafter GM), complaining of what he considered an unseemly and callous disregard by readers of news reports of a recent destructive hurricane in Jamaica, reports marginalized in the public’s attention amid a welter of competing news tidbits of inconsequential and trivial matters. The correspondent, signing his name only as ‘X.’, enclosed in his letter to ‘Sylvanus Urban’ (the sobriquet of Edward Cave, the GM’s editor) a near verbatim1 copy of a pertinent ‘dialogue called Much Ado in the second volume of Miss Fielding’s letters’, urging the GM to reprint it as a useful admonition against public apathy. The correspondent’s haste and righteous anger got the better of his accuracy, for he provided the wrong date for the hurricane and miscited the GM’s news report of it. In addition, he was unaware that ‘Much Ado’, a trenchant social commentary upon the public reaction to the sinking of H.M.S. Victory in 1744, was the composition of James Harris (1709–80), friend of Henry and Sarah Fielding and author of Three Treatises: The first concerning art. The second concerning music, painting, and poetry. The third concerning happiness. By J.H. (London, 1744). Instead, he incorrectly assumed (along with Cave) that Sarah Fielding had written ‘Much Ado’, since it was published in her Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple.2

Brazil and tobacco use: a hard nut to crack

Taxes on tobacco products generated income of around US$ 2.2 billion for the Brazilian government in 2008, but that doesn't mean the Brazilian government is going easy on the tobacco industry. For the past two decades, Brazil has been at the forefront of global tobacco control initiatives. Vera da Costa e Silva, public health specialist who advises the government on tobacco control, is proud to note that Brazil was the first country to ban the use of misleading adjectives such as light and mild from cigarette packages back in 2001. That move was in line with law passed year earlier requiring cigarette manufacturers to include pictorial health warnings covering at least 100% of one of the two main sides of pack. These warnings often depict people in advanced stages of tobacco-related illness. As result of such initiatives, smoking prevalence has come down in the past two decades from 34% of the adult population in 1989 to 15% last year, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Health. But the declining trend has tailed off over the past few years as tobacco companies target new consumers, notably women. Meanwhile, 200 000 Brazilians die every year from tobacco-related diseases, according to the National Cancer Institute (INCA). One area in which Brazilian tobacco control has faltered is in the enforcement of other key tobacco control measures, such as smoking bans in enclosed public places. Although Brazil ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2005, requiring the country to pass laws to restrict tobacco, it has not done this. For that reason, many states and municipalities have taken matters into their own hands by passing their own laws banning smoking from public places with no separate places designated for smokers. However, these by-laws have been challenged as unconstitutional by the hospitality industry and could be overturned by the supreme court. So far four states and eight municipalities have introduced smoking bans in process that Costa e Silva characterizes as a effect. August, big domino went down when the state of Sao Paulo passed its own law banning smoking in enclosed public places. Previous attempts to ban smoking in Sao Paulo have failed as result of weak enforcement and public apathy, but this time things may be different. Sao Paulo state health secretary, Luiz Roberto Barradas Barata, says that 99.5% of the state's pubs, restaurants and hotels are committed to upholding the law. In the last month, we monitored 37 000 places and applied only 198 fines, he says. Establishments in breach of the ban are fined up to US$ 750 for first offence, with the fine doubling for repeat offence. A third breach entails closure of the business for 48 hours and fourth shuts it down for 30 days. Not everyone is happy about the bans. Alexandre Sampaio, president of the Pubs, Restaurants and Hotels Syndicate in the state of Rio de Janeiro claims that such initiatives are unconstitutional. He says that Riffs hospitality industry has suffered 20% decline in visits to restaurants and bars as result of the ban, which the state legislature passed into law but that has yet to come into force. He also argues that the government should be committing resources to informing the public, teenagers in particular, about the dangers of smoking, rather than restricting the spaces in which people can smoke. In few years we would have fewer smokers, he says. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Of course, while banning smoking in public places protects the health of non-smokers, many smokers need more than bans to help them quit. On the cessation front, Brazil is throwing its weight behind nicotine replacement therapies--a move strongly endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which in May of this year put nicotine replacement therapy on the Essential Medicines List (EML). This is public health victory, according to Costa e Silva, who believes that this recent decision by WHO will encourage Brazil and other countries to see nicotine replacement therapy as equally important as any other drug used for prevention purposes and promote cheaper commercial forms of nicotine replacement therapies. …

The cultural barriers to renewable energy and energy efficiency in the United States

In an effort to make the social dimensions of energy conversion and use more visible, this article investigates the cultural barriers to energy efficiency technologies and devices and renewable power generators in the United States. To discover the cultural impediments to these technologies, the author conducted 181 formal, semi-structured interviews at more than 82 institutions (including electric utilities, regulatory agencies, interest groups, energy systems manufacturers, nonprofit organizations, consulting firms, universities, national laboratories, and state institutions) from 2005 to 2008. These interviews were supplemented with an extensive literature review. The study finds that the apparent disconnect between how electricity is made and how it is socially perceived perpetuates public apathy and misinformation about it; also that deeply held values related to consumption, abundance, trust, control, and freedom shape American attitudes toward energy. As a result, wind farms and solar panels (along with other renewable power systems) are often opposed not because they are a poor alternative to fossil fuels, but because people simply do not comprehend why such technologies may be needed.

Dealing With Denial

![Figure][1] CREDIT: LINDA A. CICERO/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE Paul Ehrlich is still out to save the world. A generation after sounding the alarm about overpopulation, the Stanford University biologist and colleagues have launched an effort called MAHB (pronounced “mob”)—the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. Its aim is to penetrate public apathy and denial and prod social scientists to look into the behavioral aspects of Earth's problems. “I'm trying to … get a global discussion going,” says Ehrlich. Science has laid out the problems—climate change, food and water crises, loss of biodiversity, and toxins in the environment—in great detail, the group argues on a new Web site, [mahb.stanford.edu][2], “yet society stubbornly refuses to take comprehensive steps to deal with them and their drivers,” the first of which is population growth. When Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, died last week, “the blogs were full of ‘This is the person who proved Ehrlich wrong’” in his dire prophecies, says Ehrlich. “What we need is a total change in the way we think about these problems. … We need to start talking very frankly about what people want and what they can have.” Ehrlich, 77, says that at present MAHB's core group, including atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider and Donald Kennedy, former editor-in-chief of Science , is focusing on getting the word out. A “world megaconference” is planned for 2011. [1]: pending:yes [2]: http://mahb.stanford.edu

Discourse, War and Terrorism – Edited by Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep

Discourse, War and Terrorism – Edited by Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep

Constraints in the Implementation of Performance Management Systems in Developing Countries

Performance management has become a key element in modern public sector governance. As a result, many developing countries have introduced it as a means to measure organizational and individual efficiency in order to ensure that public sector organizations meet the needs of the public. However, the implementation of performance management systems in many of these countries has been affected by a number of institutional and capacity constraints such as culture, institutional fragmentation, public apathy, and leadership support, thus making it difficult for many of them to realize the `benefits' of such a system. This article examines these constraints with a focus on Ghana. Utilizing information obtained from interviews of senior bureaucrats and chief executive officers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), it is argued that without a critical analysis of these constraints, performance management no matter how attractive it may be will not achieve the desired results in developing countries.

The Practical Importance of Inherency Analysis for Public Advocates: Rhetorical Leadership in Framing a Supportive Social Climate for Education Reforms

This essay argues that teaching rhetorical leadership, particularly the skill of inherency analysis, is crucial to preparing effective citizen leaders. Using the example of education reforms for children with disabilities, it illustrates the practical value for those interested in public concerns of understanding and using analysis of the structural, attitudinal, and philosophical inherent barriers to change. The argument focuses on the implications of and refutation options to the inherent barriers to reform of viewing education as primarily an individual rather than a social good and on Americans’ public apathy toward social goods. It concludes that reforms might be more readily conceived and more effectively made salient by citizen advocates who develop their inherency analysis skills and discusses the concomitant responsibilities for communication scholars.

Russia's Political Youths

Abstract: Although most Russian youths are politically apathetic, a small cross section is engaged in political activity--mostly consisting of protest actions--in preparation for the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. Youth-based political and civic organizations can be defined generally by their support for, or opposition to, President Vladimir Putin and the party of power. Ideological differences between opposition youth organizations have prevented the formation of an effective civic movement. Putin's administration has employed a number of tactics, including the creation of the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi (Ours) to counteract anti-Kremlin youth groups such as Youth Yabloko, The National Bolshevik Party, and Oborona. Western nongovernmental organizations, along with youth alumni of the revolutions, have been helping Russian opposition youth to overcome these difficulties, much to the dismay of the Putin administration. Keywords: democracy assistance, elections, Orange Revolution, politics, youths ********** Russia's youths are preparing for battle. With the State Duma and presidential elections approaching, youth-based civic and political organizations, aided by Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and alumni of the so-called colored revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Serbia have been gearing up for a contest against the firmly entrenched United Russia Party (YeR) and the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been pumping millions of rubles into its own youth groups with the hope of thwarting a Ukrainian-style revolution. Enhanced focus on youths in Russia has come mainly in response to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Youth-based organizations have played an important role in the colored revolutions that have swept across the postcommunist space in the last five years. The knowledge of organizational techniques and movement management developed in Serbia by Otpor and a host of Western-based NGOs has infiltrated into Georgia and Ukraine, helping to fuel the rise of democratic culture if only in response to flagrant infringements on democratic principles. In Ukraine, organizations such as Pora and Znayu not only provided the passion and sense of purpose that contributed to the spirit of the Orange Revolution, they also played a major role in mobilizing the Ukrainian people to challenge the authorities. Following their success, activist youths from Ukraine have joined their colleagues from Georgia and Serbia, along with a number of Western-based NGOs, in exporting organizational knowledge and democratic participation to other countries in the former Soviet Union. Many of these organizations have focused on Russia as a small number of youth-ased political and civic organizations prepare for parliamentary elections in 2007 and presidential elections in 2008. Activists from Pora and Znayu have held seminars on organizational techniques and movement development with their counterparts in Russia. NGOs from the United States and Europe have provided funding for these activities in addition to running their own programs for Russia's youths. These efforts have drawn the ire of the Putin administration, which has launched its own campaign targeting Russia's youths in an attempt to counteract a potential Orange Revolution in Russia. I have conducted an investigation into the activities of Russian youth-based political and civic organizations and their support network of Western NGOs and colored revolution alumni to assess their political effectiveness in confronting the political monopoly of the Putin administration and YeR in 2007 and 2008. Although an opposition youth movement in Russia has been developing some of the elements that made groups such as Otpor in Serbia and Pora in Ukraine successful civic mobilizers, internal divisions, public apathy, resource deficiencies, and countermeasures by the authorities have all undermined its ability to wage a successful civic campaign. …

TEACHING JOURNALISTS TO SAVE THE PROFESSION

Concerns about the media industries prioritizing profits over public service has historically given rise to proposals for a more professional model of journalism education (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947; Pulitzer, 1904; Royal Commission on Newspapers, 1981). In the context of neoliberal restructuring and a “professional crisis” in journalism, there have again been proposals for journalism education to help uplift professional journalistic values (Adam, 2001; Bollinger, 2003; Carnegie Corporation, 2005a; Sauvageau, 2004). This paper offers a critique of these recent journalism education reform proposals. While the proponents of professionalizing journalism schools acknowledge the structural and economic changes that are the culprits of the professional crisis in journalism, they place the onus of the solution on journalists, and they propose a model of journalism education that encourages students to refrain from critically analysing the media industries. The advocates of professional journalism schools also hark back to traditional journalistic ideals and notions of objectivity which some critics argue contributes to public apathy and damages prospects for participatory democracy. This paper will conclude by exploring recent proposals for a critical journalism pedagogy, which overcomes some of the problems of the professional reform model (Atton, 2003; Skinner et al., 2001).

DID KATRINA RECALIBRATE ATTITUDES TOWARD POVERTY AND INEQUALITY?: A Test of the “Dirty Little Secret” Hypothesis

We test the popular claim that poverty and inequality were “dirty little secrets” until the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina exposed them to a wider public. If this account were on the mark, it would suggest that the absence of major antipoverty initiatives in the United States is partly attributable to public ignorance and apathy coupled with the narrowly rational decision on the part of policymakers to attend to other issues about which the public evidently cares more. Using the 2004 Maxwell Poll, we find strikingly high levels of awareness and activism on poverty and inequality issues even prior to Katrina, clearly belying the “dirty little secret” account. The follow-up Maxwell Poll, which was administered in 2005 immediately after Katrina, revealed only a slight increase in public awareness of poverty and inequality. The Katrina effect was evidently dampened because (1) the large number of preexisting poverty activists reduced the size of the residual population “at risk” for conversion to antipoverty activism, and (2) the remaining non-activists were ardently opposed to poverty activism and hence unlikely to be receptive to the liberal message coming out of Katrina.