Social accountability and community forest management: the failure of collaborative governance in the Wombat Forest

This article presents a critical analysis of what caused the failure of Australia's first Community Forest Management (CFM) trial. We explore how ‘community’ was conceptualised and represented through the dynamic CFM process, leading to contradictions and conflicts that could not be resolved. We examine the governance structures and institutions that were created to try to enable community participation in forest management. Ambiguity and uncertainty in the power and purpose of the CFM organisation, as well as power relationships within the organisation, all contributed to conflicts that eventually tore the CFM process apart.     

Narratives of collapse and generation: Komatsu Sakyō's disaster novels and the Metabolist movement

Abstract

In the summer following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 2011, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo opened the exhibition ‘Metabolism: The City of the Future’, a major retrospective of the works of architects, designers and critics associated with the Metabolist movement. As suggested by its subtitle ‘Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan’, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to examine the legacy of postwar Japanese avant-garde architecture and city planning, in the context of the serious questioning of Japan's future direction regarding the built and natural environments, life styles, and social structures following the triple disaster.

This article examines the writings and designs of the Metabolists, as well as the works of science fiction and disaster novel author Komatsu Sakyō, who collaborated with a number of Metabolist architects in the preparations for the 1970 Osaka Expo. Like the writings of the Metabolists, Komatsu's works, such as the seismic disaster novel Nihon Chinbotsu (Japan sinks, 1973), expose new links between the built environment and the geological and biological environments, pointing to both the vulnerability of the human domain as well as its generative and adaptive capabilities. In the process, Komatsu's works both critique and reproduce elements of the Japanese postwar reconstruction ethos, while offering avenues for re-imagining the future through dramatic inversions of center and periphery. I will argue that Metabolist works and Komatsu's novels challenge us not only to expand our imagination of both construction and catastrophe on a grand scale, but also to see isomorphic patterns and triggering events on the molecular level – a multi-scaled vision that could be generative in imagining the future beyond the disasters of March 2011.     

Toward a world population program

Problems facing the less developed countries in the field of family planning are inadequate funds, weak administration, insufficient personnel, and sometimes lack of governmental will. To close the "family planning gap," the gap between the number of married women who now have access to modern birth control techniques and the number who would use them if given the opportunity, in the less-developed world as a whole would cost an estimated $3 billion ($2 billion if the People's Republic of China is excluded). The author develops 8 national and international guidelines for the tackling of the population problem. Among other points the guidelines state that assistance to a country in family planning should be solely at the request of that country and that national assistance should be related maximally to the work of international organizations. The history of United States and international efforts to deal with the world population crisis are detailed. During 1962-1967 the United States and the United Nations created decisive policies granting family-planning assistance to less-developed countries. The author urges a world population program, directed by the U.N. and financed by a special fund of voluntary contributions, to increase U.N. and regional economic commission staffs concerned with family planning, develop training centers for family planning personnel, and develop pilot or demonstration projects to get national or regional programs under way.     

Decision making in a schizophrenic population

Over the past decade, competence to make decisions has become a prominent topic in forensic psychology. We employed a gambling paradigm to measure ability to weigh risks, benefits, and probabilities in an internally consistent manner. Decision-making behavior of chronic, involuntarily committed schizophrenic inpatients was compared to outpatient schizophrenics and first-degree relatives of the patients. We found significant differences between inpatients and non-mentally-ill relatives, and between inpatient and outpatient schizophrenics. When WAIS-R Vocabulary subtest score was statistically controlled,no significant differences between any of the groups remained. Vocabulary x group interactions revealed that Vocabulary subtest predicted decision-making behavior for outpatients and controls, but not inpatients. Severity of psychiatric symptoms and number of prior hospitalizations predicted decision-making behavior for inpatient schizophrenics. Results suggest that competence assessments that rely primarily on verbal abilities may be inadequate to assess competence in acutely ill psychiatric patients.     

Optimization and initial evaluation of 1,2-indandione as a reagent for fingerprint detection

1,2-Indandione has been used to develop fluorescent fingerprints on porous materials such as paper. The compound reacts with amino acid residues to produce highly fluorescent fingerprint ridges. An optimized formulation and treatment protocol for using the reagent is presented here. The reagent is applied as a solution in HFE7100 containing acetic acid and ethyl acetate. Treated articles are heated at 100 degrees C for 10 min at ambient humidity and stored in the dark before recording the fingerprints using fluorescence photography or digital imaging. Photodecomposition of the fluorescent fingerprints has been observed. Storage in the dark reduces degradation, extending the lifetime of the fingerprints. Other chemical methods to stabilize the fingerprints proved unsuccessful. Comparisons of the performance of 1,2-indandione with DFO in CFC113 performed on a limited range of substrates indicated that the reagent might be an effective method for the development of latent fingerprints despite the new reagent producing less intense fluorescence.