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This paper is a contribution to the ongoing development debate. It focuses on some of the general problems underlying the development problematic, and makes use of a broad range of historical experiences. Emphasis is laid upon the development problems emerging from competence differentials in the world economy, particularly on the threat of peripheralization of less developed countries. This threat has been ever present. Whether it can be overcome depends on background conditions like the underlying social structure, in particular the agrarian structure, and the innovation and transformation capacity of individual societies, respectively. Very much depends on the sophistication of concrete development policies, particularly on the skilful opening of individual societies to the world economy and a selective delinking from it at the same time. This development issue, as most, is highly political in character. The paper substantiates this assumption by looking once again at the European development experience. The latter can only be understood by reference to its underlying process of democratization resulting from a multiplicity of political conflicts among a broad range of social forces. This experience was quite different from the history of 'world empires" outside Western Europe. Although present developing societies, whether capitalist or socialist, resemble to some degree the highly bureaucratized and centralized empires of the past, they cannot escape the development and modernization pressure characteristic of the present international system. Their success or failure depends mostly on their own efforts, but also on the circumspection of the presently developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews research studies on the information needs and information-seeking behaviour of rural dwellers in developed and developing countries. The analysis suggests that the information needs of rural communities from all countries are very similar, although rural communities they do vary from region to region and from country to country depending on socio-economic conditions. These needs are mostly related to the daily life of rural dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The theoretical section of this paper describes three mechanisms through which science in non-Western countries is institutionalized to follow the forms that are prevalent in the major industrial nations. The empirical section, which is based on a sample of 73 less developed countries (LDCs) and underdeveloped countries (UDCs) demonstrates that the findings are inconsistent with predictions made by theories of economic development and modernization. These theories predict a positive relationship between the degree of institutionalization and economic performance, but, for LDCs we find no such relationship; for the UDCs, it is even negative. Thus we conclude that institutional isomorphism and conformity to external rational myths are loosely coupled with internal economic efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teenagers do better at reading when they are motivated to read. The Programme for International Student Assessment assesses reading literacy for 15-year-olds in over 70 countries worldwide, and also includes questions that explore the relationships between motivation and reading. Country-level results indicate that developing countries have lower reading scores than developed countries. However, they also indicate that students in many developing countries are more motivated to read and spend more time reading than students in developed countries. These results suggest that the ideal role for libraries is to ensure students’ motivation to read through the provision of a variety of materials, a supportive environment for literacy and reading conversations, and encouraging student autonomy in making their reading choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes and analyses a database on the dynamics of sociopolitical instability in the United States between 1780 and 2010. The database was constructed by digitizing data collected by previous researchers, supplemented by systematic searches of electronic media archives. It includes 1,590 political violence events such as riots, lynchings, and terrorism. Incidence of political violence fluctuated dramatically over the 230 years covered by the database, following a complex dynamical pattern. Spectral analysis detected two main oscillatory modes. The first is a very long-term – secular – cycle, taking the form of an instability wave during the second half of the 19th century, bracketed by two peaceful periods (the first quarter of the 19th century and the middle decades of the 20th century, respectively). The second is a 50-year oscillation superimposed on the secular cycle, with peaks around 1870, 1920, and 1970. The pattern of two periodicities superimposed on each other is characteristic of the dynamics of political instability in many historical societies, such as ancient Rome and medieval and early-modern England, France, and Russia. A possible explanation of this pattern, discussed in the article, is offered by the structural-demographic theory, which postulates that labor oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does warfare affect the environment? This question has received some theoretical and empirical attention, but none of the extant studies has employed large-N statistical models. This article theorizes the possible effects of warfare on the environment and estimates large-N statistical models of these effects on CO2 emissions per capita, NOX emissions per capita, the rate of change in forested area, and a composite indicator of environmental stress reduction. The results indicate that warfare significantly affects the environment, but the signs and sizes of these effects depend on the environmental attribute (whether the fighting is at home or abroad) and development (whether the fighting country is developed or less developed). Warfare reduces CO2 emissions, but the effect is weaker in less developed countries (LDCs) than in developed countries (DCs). Warfare increases deforestation when fought at home and promotes forest growth when fought abroad, particularly in the LDCs. Warfare at home reduces NOX emissions for the LDCs and increases them for the DCs; warfare abroad increases NOX emissions for both the DCs and LDCs. Finally, warfare increases aggregated environmental stress, particularly for the LDCs when fought at home and for the DCs when fought abroad. The sizes of these effects are on par with or larger than the mandated or recommended policy goals stated by the US government for changes in CO 2 and NOX emissions, and by the World Bank (and by implication the DCs driving its policy) for the rate of deforestation, during the coming decade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a cross-country comparison of the intensity of revolutionary terrorism in the developed world after the wave of mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some countries were hit much more severely than others by this type of violence. The article tries to account for this variation with a new dataset of fatalities in 23 countries, for the period 1970-2000, based on local sources in six different languages. This dataset corrects in part the problems of underreporting that Jan Oskar Engene's TWEED dataset suffers from. The dependent variable is a novel index of the intensity of terrorism that combines the number of fatalities and the number of years in which the terrorist organization has killed people. The unit of analysis is the country in the whole period. Six broad hypotheses about the influence of economic development, social change, mobilization, welfare provision, population and political factors are tested in the article. The statistical results show that three variables are almost sufficient to explain variance: past dictatorship, high population and strong communist parties. Given that past dictatorship is the most important variable, three different mechanisms by which to understand its effect are suggested: the role of repression in countries with past political instability; dictatorship as a proxy for polarization; and past breakdowns as an indicator of the chances of overthrowing the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current road safety initiatives are approaching the limit of their effectiveness in developed countries. A paradigm shift is needed to address the preventable deaths of thousands on our roads. Previous systems have focused on one or two aspects of driving: environmental sensing, vehicle dynamics or driver monitoring. Our approach is to consider the driver and the vehicle as part of a combined system, operating within the road environment. A driver assistance system is implemented that is not only responsive to the road environment and the driver's actions but also designed to correlate the driver's eye gaze with road events to determine the driver's observations. Driver observation monitoring enables an immediate in-vehicle system able to detect and act on driver inattentiveness, providing the precious seconds for an inattentive human driver to react. We present a prototype system capable of estimating the driver's observations and detecting driver inattentiveness. Due to the "look but not see" case it is not possible to prove that a road event has been observed by the driver. We show, however, that it is possible to detect missed road events and warn the driver appropriately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Selye discovered Stress in 1935 as a syndrome occurring in laboratory rats. In the modern world, Stress has become a universal explanation for human behaviour in industrial society. Selye's discovery arose out of widespread interest in the stability of bodily systems in 1930s' physiology; however, his findings were rejected by physiologists until the 1970s. This analysis is framed in terms of Latour's actor-network theories, and traces the translation of Stress from the animal laboratory into the narratives of modern life experience. This mapping reveals that translation was brought about by Selye's recruitment of a broadly based constituency outside of academic physiology, whose members each saw in Stress a validation of their pre-existing ideas of the relationship of the human mind and body in industrial civilization. While Selye was successful in realizing Stress as a scientific fact, he was unable to make his institute the obligatory passage point for Stress research. Selye's notion of a universal non-specific reaction has become accepted in almost all forms of human discourse about life and health, and physiologists in the 1990s use Stress as a unifying concept to understand the interaction of organic life with the environment. However, this modern use of Stress contains none of the physiological postulates of Selye's original findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between national scientific effort, national economic size, and national affluence is investigated. It is found that the relationship between these variables differs substantially for developed countries (DCs) and underdeveloped countries (LDCs). While affluence and economic size jointly correlate highly with levels of scientific effort in DCs, economic size alone correlates strongly with levels of scientific effort in LDCs. It is concluded that so long as LDCs remain underdeveloped economically, the prospects for their establishing strong scientific capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on some findings resulting from an explanatory analysis of the corporate tapes of the "Science Citation Index" (SCI). The analysis focuses on the international production of scientific literature, with a view of making a broad survey of national research activities. Publication counts based on the SCI were made for the scientific production of 117 countries. It was found that OECD and Eastern European countries produce 93.99 percent of the mainstream scientific literature, while third world countries produce only 4.57 per cent of this literature. The publication ranking of the world's top publication producers corresponds well with the ranking of the world's top national recipients of the Nobel prize in scientific areas. A principal components analysis of the publication data for the world's science producers for eight scientific fields suggest that there are five basic patterns for the production of national science.