The Impact of Federalism on the Organization of Canadian Foreign Policy

The international activities of Canadian provinces—mainlyAlbert, British Columbia, Ontario, and Québec—challengeconventional concepts of sovereignty and the federal view ofa national monopoly in foreign policy. These provincial activitieshave become more important since the early 1970s and have yieldedoutcomes in the field of foreign policy that would not haveoccurred otherwise. Provinces engage in international activitiesfor a number of reasons. They have the capacity, jurisdictionalobligation, and political desire to do so. Economic necessity,especially the international economic environment, is importantmotivation. Both conflict and cooperation with Ottawa also encourageprovincial involvements in international activities. Occasionally,foreign governments invite such activity as well. Present trendscoupled with the constitutional division of responsibilitiesin Canada suggest that territorial transgovernmentalism willhave greater consequences for Canadian foreign policy, therebygiving to Canada's international presence a character similarto the complexities and contradictions of the country's domesticmosaic.     

Variation of the electorate: Veto and purge

In the paradigm social choice problem, there is a fixed set of alternatives and a fixed set of voters. This essay considers variations of the electorate when some subset of voters has a special voice on some subset of alternatives. We formalized such a situation by means of the veto function. We focus on stable veto functions, exhibit a stable liberal social choice function and promotion mechanism, and investigate a notion of stability for groups whose membership itself is the social state.     

Adolescents’ Experiences of Victimization: The Role of Attribution Style and Generalized Trust

Positive attribution style, negative attribution style, and generalized peer trust beliefs were examined as mediators in the relationship between adolescents’ peer victimization experiences and psychosocial and school adjustment. A total of 280 (150 female and 130 males, M_age = 13 years 4 months, SD_age = 1 year 1 month) adolescents completed measures of peer victimization, global self-worth, depressive symptoms, social confidence, school liking, loneliness, attribution styles, and generalized trust beliefs. Multigroup path analysis revealed that: (a) negative attribution style mediated the relationship between cyber victimization and school liking and depressive symptoms for males and females; (b) positive attribution style mediated the relationship between cyber victimization, school liking, global self-worth, and depressive symptoms for females; and (c) generalized peer trust beliefs mediated the relationship between social victimization, depressive symptoms, social confidence, and loneliness for females. Consequently, attribution style and generalized trust beliefs differentially influence the relationship between peer victimization and adjustment.     

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.     

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.     

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.