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Summary While animals navigating the real world face a barrage of complex sensory input, their brains have evolved to perceptually compress multidimensional information by selectively extracting the features relevant for survival. For instance, communication signals supporting social interactions in several mammalian species consist of acoustically complex sequences of vocalizations, however little is known about what information listeners extract from such time-varying sensory streams. Here, we utilize female mice’s natural behavioural response to male courtship songs to evaluate the relevant acoustic dimensions used in their social decisions. We found that females were highly sensitive to disruptions of song temporal regularity, and preferentially approached playbacks of intact male songs over rhythmically irregular versions of the songs. In contrast, female behaviour was invariant to manipulations affecting the songs’ sequential organization, or the spectrotemporal structure of individual syllables. The results reveal temporal regularity as a key acoustic cue extracted by mammalian listeners from complex vocal sequences during goal-directed social behaviour. Highlights - Natural behaviour is used to probe how mouse listeners encode vocal sequences - Listeners are highly sensitive to disruptions of the songs’ rhythmic regularity - Female behaviour is invariant to changes in song sequence - Approach behaviour is robust to the removal of syllable spectrotemporal dynamics

The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. Voter competence is unlikely to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference to our politics. By contrast, the competence of officials can and does vary substantially over short periods of time. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens. We elaborate on this argument, emphasizing the “incompetence multiplier”: the way that the properties of hierarchies can amplify the incompetence of those in powerful positions. We illustrate our argument with an extended discussion of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Climate change forecasts predict impacts that will increasingly expose coastal residents to existential risks, necessitating aggressive adaptation. While the polarization of climate change attitudes in American politics represents a barrier to climate adaptation efforts, it is not well-understood how political ideology mediates how individuals connect the abstract concept of “climate change” to concrete experiences with environmental risks. Understanding this link in the context of adaptation decision-making is important, as the effects of many, household-level adaptation efforts compound over space and time, affecting community flood risk and vulnerability. This paper asks, how do political ideologies interact with threat perception to affect coastal climate adaptation decisions? We frame this analysis using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Protection Motivation Theory (PMT). Using responses from a survey of residents (n = 164) in North Carolina’s (USA) Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, we examine how measures of residents’ subjective norms, threat-appraisals, and self-efficacy influence their intent to retreat or topographically adapt. We find that, despite political polarization around climate change, generally, when given concrete examples of risk, respondents’ political beliefs appear unrelated to their plans to protect their property and livelihoods.

Mission is shaped by the life and experience of the church, both past and present, and this in turn is the function of both the work of the Spirit of God and the interaction of the people of God with their contexts. In line with this position, we examine the impact of Covid-19, highlighting some elements of the global context of mission, trends in world Christianity and mission. We then explore how global mission is in a process of realignment that has the potential to be enhanced through embracing the conditions Covid-19 has imposed on us. Finally, we consider the need for deep reflection on our identity if we are to take the opportunity to bear faithful witness in this moment.

The article argues that over the years a series of gradual developments has taken place in the judicial review policies of Israel’s Supreme Court, whereby the Court expanded its ad hoc discretion in determining the constitutional limits that apply to primary legislation. Israeli constitutionalism has become judiciary-centered. The article suggests that judicial discretion that the Israeli Supreme Court tends to exercise in constitutional matters is of two types: substantive judicial discretion, which concerns the interpretation or application of the law; and adjudicative discretion, which includes both the discretion to deny in limine petitions in which the Court does not deem it necessary to grant relief according to considerations such as standing or delay; and the Court’s discretion in the manner of the hearing. The article suggests three illuminations of Israeli judiciary-centered constitutionalism: expenditure of the justices’ awareness of their discretion; the decline of the rules structuring judicial discretion; and a re-rise of the justices’ recognition of legitimacy of adjudicative discretion due to the expansion of substantive judicial discretion.

The growing cost of climate-driven coastal impacts requires an improved understanding of how coastal populations engage with adaptation decisions. While many studies explore factors driving coastal adaptation, generally, few evaluate how residents consider relationships between in situ, protective adaption vs. retreat from at-risk areas. What is the relationship between residents’ exposure, perceptions of climate trends, and concerns about the future? How do these factors influence openness to different adaption strategies? Are these strategies considered to be progressive—where protection is indexed to minor threats and retreat occurs when protection measures fail—or are these dichotomous choices? We apply structural equation modeling to evaluate these decision pathways using a 2017 household survey in North Carolina’s (USA) Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula (n = 147). Our results reveal that residents commonly view protection and retreat as mutually exclusive, rather than progressive, methods for reducing risk, and that their preferences are correlated with different understandings of climate threats.

Immigration from one cultural milieu to another has been associated with a greater risk for incident cardio-metabolic morbidity among adults. In this nationwide, population-based, cross-sectional study of data recorded from 1992 to 2016, we assessed the association between body mass index and blood pressure levels among adolescent immigrants, aged 16 to 19 years, of Ethiopian origin, and their secular trend of overweight and obesity. Adolescents of Ethiopian origin were classified as Israeli-born (n=16 153) or immigrants (N=23 487), with stratification by age at immigration. Adolescents whose fathers were at least 3 generations in Israel (n=277 789) served as a comparative group. Hypertensive-range blood pressure values adjusted for age, sex, and height served as outcome. Among adolescents of Ethiopian origin, overweight and obesity (body mass index ≥85th percentile), increased by 2.5 and 4-fold in males and females, respectively, during the study period, compared with a 1.5-fold increase among native Israeli-born males and females. The odds for hypertensive-range measurements increased with the length of residence in Israel: 7.3%, 10.6%, and 14.4% among males who immigrated at ages 12 to 19, 6 to 11.9, and 0 to 5.9 years, respectively; and 11.5%, 16.7%, and 19.3%, respectively, among females. Israeli-born Ethiopians had a significantly higher risk for hypertensive-range measurements at any body mass index level compared with native Israeli-born examinees, after adjusting for sociodemographic factors and health status. In conclusion, among Ethiopian Israeli adolescents, abnormal blood pressure correlates directly with the time-lapse since immigration. Immigrant populations require targeted surveillance and appropriate intervention.

In this paper, we construct a framework for modeling teams of agents who apply techniques or procedures (tools) to solve problems. In our framework, tools differ in their likelihood of solving the problem at hand; agents, who may be of different types, vary in their skill at using tools. We establish baseline hiring rules when a manager can dictate tool choice and then derive results for strategic tool choice by team members. We highlight three main findings: First, that cognitively diverse teams are more likely to solve problems in both settings. Second, that teams consisting of types that master diverse tools have an indirect strategic advantage because tool diversity facilitates coordination. Third, that strategic tool choice creates counterintuitive optimal hiring practices. For example, optimal teams may exclude the highest ability types and can include dominated types. In addition, optimal groups need not increase setwise. Our framework extends to cover teamwork on decomposable problems, to cases where individuals apply multiple tools, and to teams facing a flow or set of problems.

Expanding demand for low-density development has restructured the urban-rural frontier throughout North America, shifting the burden of ecosystem provisioning to increasingly fragmented green infrastructure remnants. Planners have responded with approaches to control low-density development (‘sprawl’) that dominates North American exurbia. However, the ability of sprawl alternatives to preserve ecosystem services have not been systematically evaluated. Using a novel integration of land change simulation and ecosystem services modeling, we used proxies to estimate changes in water quality, climate regulation and biodiversity, and returns to landowners associated with sprawl alternatives and business-as-usual trends for the rapidly urbanizing Charlotte (NC) region by 2030. We found no single growth scenario simultaneously reduced pollution, stored additional carbon, and retained sensitive habitat, underscoring trade-offs likely encountered when balancing development and environmental outcomes. Watersheds at the extremes of the urban-rural gradient exhibited significantly different and often opposing responses to policies aimed at reducing environmental impacts. Scenarios of increased land use density yielded stronger financial returns to landowners as concentrated economic activity drove up land rents while minimizing broader pollution costs. Our simulated landscape approach overcame limitations associated with scale and data, and projected regional environmental outcomes emerging from local development events.

One of the main disputes in regard to how courts should interpret the federal Constitution pertains to the legitimacy of relying on international law in constitutional interpretation. This Article examines the interpretative status of international law, in general, and the controversy over the use of international law in constitutional interpretation, in particular. The Article offers an innovative approach to the controversy based on the significant difference between customary international law and treaty law; namely, that constitutional interpretation with reference to international law should be limited to customary international law, as opposed to treaty law.

Although Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied problem-solving by experts as well as nonexperts, political scientists generally understand “bounded rationality” to refer primarily to cognitive constraints: how we fall short of completely rational decision-making. This incomplete understanding deprives us of an enormously useful intellectual legacy, built not only by Newell and Simon but also by a wide array of cognitive scientists who have explored how humans have collectively solved very difficult problems such as eliminating smallpox or designing nuclear submarines. This chapter surveys this richer understanding of bounded rationality. Cognitive capacities receive as much attention as cognitive constraints. The chapter reports work on how cultural storehouses of knowledge and certain organizational arrangements amplify our cognitive capacities in both the short and the long run. Finally, it extracts from the literature a set of thematically related propositions that are building blocks for constructing macro-theories of politics out of cognitively realistic micro-premises.

Objective: To analyze the contribution of the teaching of entrepreneurship, in the development of the entrepreneurial potential of Business Administration majors on a higher level education institution. Method: The study was divided in two stages: in the first stage, a descriptive and documentary research was carried out, with a qualitative approach. Subsequently, a quantitative study was carried out by means of a survey. The data collection instrument used was proposed by Carland, Carland and Hoy (1992), called Carland Entrepreneurship Index (CEI). Originality/Relevance: The research deepens a discussion about the entrepreneurial potential and teaching of entrepreneurship in higher education, evidencing decisive empirical factors for the formation of new managers-entrepreneurs. Results: The methodological mechanisms demonstrated the existence of congruent knowledge between the tested model and the contents disseminated in the classroom. Thus, the contribution to the entrepreneurial training of students in the decreasing requirements of identification of entrepreneurial potential, micro-entrepreneurs and macro-entrepreneurs. Theoretical / methodological contributions: The study contributes to the literature by pointing out, through the empirical propositions, that the content in the student training process exerts a guiding function in the construction of behaviors aimed at entrepreneurial education. Social/management contributions: The findings in the field were salutary to direct the pedagogical management and the teaching staff regarding the interdisciplinarity of contents of entrepreneurial training in the nuclei of basic training, complementary, Contents of Quantitative Studies and their Technologies and Complementary Training Contents, as established by the National Curricular Guidelines of the Graduate Program in Administration., Objetivo: analisar a contribuição do ensino de empreendedorismo para o desenvolvimento do potencial empreendedor dos estudantes de Administração de uma Instituição de Ensino Superior. Método: o estudo foi dividido em duas etapas: (1) uma pesquisa descritiva e documental, com abordagem qualitativa; e (2) um estudo quantitativo, por meio de uma survey. O instrumento de coleta de dados utilizado foi proposto por Carland, Carland e Hoy (1992), denominado de Carland Entrepreneurship Index (CEI).Originalidade/Relevância: a pesquisa aprofunda a discussão acerca do potencial empreendedor e do ensino de empreendedorismo, no âmbito da Educação Superior, evidenciando fatores empíricos decisivos para a formação de novos gestores empreendedores.Resultados: os mecanismos metodológicos mostraram a existência de conhecimentos congruentes entre o modelo testado e os conteúdos disseminados em sala de aula, evidenciando, com isso, a contribuição para a formação empreendedora dos estudantes, nos quesitos decrescentes de identificação de potencial empreendedor, tanto para micro quanto para macroempreendedores.Contribuições teóricas/metodológicas: o estudo contribui com a literatura, ao sinalizar, por meio das proposições empíricas, que a integralização de conteúdos, no processo da formação do estudante, exerce uma função balizadora na construção de comportamentos voltados à educação empreendedora.Contribuições sociais/para a gestão: os achados em campo foram salutares ao direcionamento da gestão pedagógica e da equipe docente, no que diz respeito à interdisciplinaridade de conteúdos de formação empreendedora, nos núcleos de formação básica, complementar e no conteúdo dos estudos quantitativos e de suas tecnologias, conforme as Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais do curso de Graduação em Administração.

We develop a model of adaptive learning with social comparisons. Actors are more likely to choose actions that recently yielded satisfactory payoffs; satisfaction is evaluated relative to an aspiration level that reflects previous payoffs and possibly other players’ payoffs. This captures the phenomenon of social comparison viareference groups. We show that if agents compare themselves to those who are receiving higher payoffs then in stable outcomes all payoffs must be equal. If, however, agents’ aspirations are driven by less ambitious social comparisons then very unequal distributions can be stable. We apply our general results to collective action problems in socio-political hierarchies and derive conditions for stable exploitation. Finally, we develop a computational model, which shows that increases in payoff inequality make outcomes less stable.

Proportionality is a set of rules determining the conditions for a limitation of constitutionally protected rights. It is the mainstay of the protection of constitutional human rights in many Western democracies and worldwide. Aharon Barak’s Proportionality is probably the most important and comprehensive book written on the subject to date. The essay presents several key arguments concerning the weaknesses of proportionality in the model proposed and developed by Barak, and shows how Barak’s rejection of various arguments against proportionality is not fully convincing. The essay suggests that the benefits of Barak’s structuring of proportionality are more modest than Barak maintains; points out the weaknesses of Barak’s approach in regard to the interpretation of constitutional rights, which entails a trivialization of the rights and has problematic consequences for the interpretation and application of proportionality as well as undesirable symbolic connotations; and asserts that Barak’s approach increases the problem of incommensurability, which is inherent in the doctrine of proportionality. The essay claims that despite the importance of the book it does not provide a satisfactory answer to many difficult and complex problems regarding proportionality.

Ecosystem service markets are increasingly used as a policy solution to environmental problems ranging from endangered species to climate change. Such markets trade in ecosystem credits created at restoration sites where conservation projects are designed and built to compensate for regulated environmental impacts. “Credit stacking” occurs when multiple, spatially overlapping credits representing different ecosystem services are sold separately to compensate for different impacts. Discussion of stacking has grown rapidly over the past three years, and it will generate increasing interest given the growing multibillion-dollar international market in carbon, habitat, and water-quality credits. Because ecosystem functions at compensation sites are interdependent and integrated, stacking may result in net environmental losses. Unless stacked compensation sites and impact sites are treated symmetrically in the accounting of environmental gains and losses, stacking may also cause environmental gains at compensa...

Although non-point source (NPS) pathogen pollution is a leading cause of stream impairment in the United States, the sources of NPS pollution are often difficult to ascertain. While previous studies have employed land use regression methods to develop a greater understanding of the sources and dynamics of microbial NPS pollution, little work has explicitly considered the effects of local, state, and federal stormwater management policies on water quality across multiple watersheds or at larger spatial scales. How do land use and stormwater management efforts collectively influence fecal coliform (FC) levels at a regional or multiple-watershed scale? We construct a unique spatial regression model of stream FC pollution (n=327 monitoring stations) throughout the state of North Carolina (USA), incorporating both land cover and urban development variables. We then use a subset of our data (nbmp=80 monitoring stations) to incorporate local stormwater control measures and stormwater management policies. Results demonstrate that the inclusion of policy and management variables improves the explanatory capacity for FC levels (R2=0.4412 versus R2=0.5323). Locally, this model can be used to better target stream restoration and water quality mitigation actions and investments, as well as help to predict FC levels at unmonitored locations throughout North Carolina's stream network. More generally, the novel structure of this model can also help examine the large-scale effects of stormwater regulations on surface water pathogen levels, helping researchers and planners better predict water quality in the absence of extensive monitoring station data.

Social media are considered ideal means to promote inclusive political participation by “reaching citizens where they are” in scalable and cost-effective ways. However, with all the excitement about the new virtual public sphere, little attention is given to the technical mediation itself – the affordances of e-deliberation platforms and the kind of interactions they support. In response, this paper aims to thicken the account of the interrelated political and technological contexts of e-deliberation. Using recent Facebook deliberations on sustainable transportation in Vancouver as our example, we argue that different rationales for public participation in policymaking animate different approaches to discourse, which, in turn, inform and are affected by different design and use strategies for e-deliberation platforms. Our argument suggests that the design affordances of e-deliberation represent opportunities to promote or curtail certain visions of a political culture of sustainability.

In 2008, federal regulators issued formal regulations governing wetland and stream mitigation in an effort to improve ecological quality and reduce uncertainty during the mitigation process. In this article, we explore how the federal regulations (“the Rule”) reduce compliance risks assumed by regulators when issuing permits that require wetland and stream mitigation under the U.S. Clean Water Act. Regulatory risk involves the timeliness and adequacy of mitigation provided for permitted impacts. The Rule attempts to accomplish this by requiring more consistent implementation of compensatory mitigation projects in general, largely through a series of provisions that create equivalent ecological and mitigation standards for all sources of mitigation (mitigation banks, permittees and in-lieu fee programs). Between April–May 2009, we administered a national, web-based survey of mitigation bankers and other mitigation professionals (N = 156 responses; 47.7% response rate). Our results reveal banker perceptions that several Corps districts have incompletely implemented equivalent standards, and therefore a variety of barriers to abating regulatory risk continue to exist 1 year after the regulations took effect. Qualitative analysis of respondent comments revealed the reasoning behind these perceptions, including perceptions that regulatory conflicts of interest involving close relationships with in-lieu fee (ILF) programs, as well as regulatory preference for NGO and government sponsored mitigation. Based on our results, it appears that Rule clarification may be necessary to further reduce regulatory uncertainty and promote high quality compensation.

Military expansion can profoundly affect surrounding communities, which are often rural and have low capacities for accommodating rapid growth and associated impacts. Urban growth models that can assist community planning are often complex and costly. We describe a case study in a rural, coastal region of the American state of North Carolina that has been affected by rapid military expansion. The study used informant interviews and analysis of land-use plans to contextualize a review of urban growth models that fit local needs and capacities. Our findings suggest a method for selecting modeling tools that match community-specific capacities and needs that can be applied in other regions experiencing rapid, military-induced growth.

This article explores the ways in which Waltz with Bashir (2008), Ari Folman’s animated war memoir, combines a commentary on memory with a moral stance on war. The authors argue that the film exemplifies the capacity of animated documentaries not only to show what is otherwise difficult or impossible to represent in non-animated documentaries, but to serve as a vehicle for fostering new relationships between the viewer and the documentary text. In this vein, the authors argue that Waltz with Bashir synthetically produces a rich, consistent, and thus trustworthy sense of reality for its viewers not despite but because of its unique aesthetic choices – its innovative animation techniques and mixing of reality with fantasy. Accordingly, the authors weave together analyses of the film’s content and form with accounts of their reception, discuss how the film evokes certain somatic responses with individuals, and consider the political significance these responses may engender.

Internationally, ecosystem service markets are emerging as a way to reduce the negative effects of agriculture, industry and urbanization. In the USA, the compensatory mitigation industry, particularly entrepreneurial mitigation banking, accounts ∼$2.9 billion in stream and wetland restoration annually. The mitigation banking industry has historically disagreed with regulators over several ecological, legal, and economic issues. In April 2008, federal regulators issued formal regulations governing compensatory mitigation in an effort to improve ecological quality and reduce uncertainty during the mitigation process. In this article, we explore how the 2008 federal regulations reduce the financial risk experienced by mitigation bankers, who speculatively restore large tracts of wetlands or stream to offset future aquatic impacts permitted under the U.S. Clean Water Act. Restoration incurs substantial up-front investments, and revenue is determined by regional and macro-economic factors, as well as regulatory decisions. Between April and May 2009, we administered a national, web-based survey of mitigation bankers and other mitigation professionals (N = 156 responses; 47.7% response rate). Our results suggest a variety of perceived barriers to mitigation banking continue one year after the 2008 regulations took effect. In-depth qualitative analysis revealed extensive distrust of regulatory practices, as well as perceptions that regulator decisions were opaque and tainted by conflicts of interest. These barriers create an environmental paradox: in attempting to ensure high ecological quality of compensatory mitigation, regulators may also create market entry and participation barriers that dissuade the establishment of mitigation banks, the very vehicles of large-scale ecological restoration that the 2008 regulations encouraged. We discuss the implications of this problem and suggest solutions, including a more centralized system for aquatic mitigation policymaking.

This article applies comparative law tools to portray eight significant aspects of the constitutional right to human dignity in Germany and Israel. The elements considered are: the constitutional status of human dignity; the nature of the right; its effect on other constitutional rights; its scope and definition; waiver of human dignity; human dignity after death; negative and positive aspects of the right; and the right to asylum. The textual foundations of the respective constitutional guarantees are as different as human dignity's core meaning. In Germany, such guarantees are held to be absolute, immune to restriction, and therefore quite narrow in scope. In Israel, the scope of the right is much broader, but it is subject to limitations when placed against the public interest. Still, based on the findings of our comprehensive comparison, similar dynamics can be identified in Germany and Israel The constitutional coverage of both absolute and relative principles is broad, as are the constitutional lacunas, which are those dimensions of constitutional law neglected by the written constitution.

Since the seminal work of Key (1966), Kramer (1971), and Nordhaus (1975), retrospective voting has been a major component of voting theory. However, although these views are alive empirically (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000; Franzese, 2002; Hibbs, 2006), most theorizing assumes rational citizens. We suspect that Key had a less heroic view of voter cognition, and we formalize his verbal theory accordingly. Our model is based on two axioms: if an incumbent performed well (above voter A’s aspiration) then A becomes more likely to vote for the incumbent; A is less likely to do so if the incumbent performed poorly (below A’s aspiration). We then prove that such citizens, though lacking ideologies, endogenously develop partisan voting tendencies. This result is robust against perceptual errors (citizens evaluating an incumbent’s performance incorrectly). We also show that the best-informed voters, who perceive performance most accurately, are the most partisan.

This article explains a computer simulation analysis of financial incentives to promote the sale and use of cleaner vehicles. The analysis focuses first on feebates, a combination of fees and rebates to promote the sale of cleaner new vehicles. The analysis assumes that buyers of new cars may chose between vehicles fueled by gasoline, alcohol, electricity and compressed natural gas. The market shares for new car sales are based on a discrete-choice model estimated from a stated preference survey in California. The analysis is conducted for a hypothetical air shed to illustrate the feasibility of the simulation method. The simulation analysis shows that feebates can lead to important reductions in hydrocarbon emissions, but the reductions will appear gradually as the newer vehicles displace the older vehicles in the air shed. The analysis then focuses on the emissions reduction that could be achieved by scrappage payments to induce early retirement of older cars. The analysis shows that scrappage payments can lead to large, immediate reduction in emissions. The article concludes with a simulation analysis of a combination of scrappage payments and feebates to achieve both immediate and sustained reductions in vehicle emissions. The simulations demonstrate that the emissions reductions could be achieved with rebates and scrappage payments drawn from a single fund financed by the fees imposed on the sale of new cars with high emissions.

Pitch perception plays a critical role in identifying and segregating auditory objects 1 , especially in the context of music and speech. The perception of pitch is not unique to humans and has been experimentally demonstrated in several animal species 2,3 . Pitch is the subjective attribute of a sound’s fundamental frequency (f0), that is determined by both the temporal regularity and average repetition rate of its acoustic waveform. Spectrally dissimilar sounds can have the same pitch if they share a common f0. Even when the acoustic energy at f0 is removed (“missing fundamental”) the same pitch is still perceived 1 . Despite its importance for hearing, how pitch is represented in the cerebral cortex remains unknown. Here we show the existence of neurons in the auditory cortex of marmoset monkeys that respond to both pure tones and missing fundamental harmonic complex sounds (MFs) with the same f0, providing a neural correlate for pitch constancy 1 . These pitchselective neurons are located in a restricted low-frequency cortical region near the anterolateral border of primary auditory cortex (AI), consistent with the location of a pitch-selective area identified in recent human imaging studies 4,5 .

▪ Abstract We survey modern models of delegation that assume a boss and a subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will prefer to retain authority; how a boss can induce a subordinate to truthfully reveal information; when rational principals will use the ally principle (i.e. delegate to agents with similar goals); delegation in repeated interactions; and how delegation can overcome commitment problems. These themes are relevant to a wide variety of institutions, affecting intralegislative organization, executive-legislative relations, and central banks.

Contemporary social work practice, with its focus on empowerment and diversity, hassparked renewed interest in practice that moves away from a deficit or pathological approach to one that emphasizes strengths, resilience and resources. This paper explores die influence of strengths based practice models on social work education. It considers the potential dissonance in the MSW curriculum between strengths perspectives and practice theories influenced by notions of pathology and deficiency. Three aspects of dissonance are considered: historical roots; internal sources of dissonance and external influences on thecurriculum.

Pitch, our perception of how high or low a sound is on a musical scale, is a fundamental perceptual attribute of sounds and is important for both music and speech. After more than a century of research, the exact mechanisms used by the auditory system to extract pitch are still being debated. Theoretically, pitch can be computed using either spectral or temporal acoustic features of a sound. We have investigated how cues derived from the temporal envelope and spectrum of an acoustic signal are used for pitch extraction in the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus), a vocal primate species, by measuring pitch discrimination behaviorally and examining pitch-selective neuronal responses in auditory cortex. We find that pitch is extracted by marmosets using temporal envelope cues for lower pitch sounds composed of higher-order harmonics, whereas spectral cues are used for higher pitch sounds with lower-order harmonics. Our data support dual-pitch processing mechanisms, originally proposed by psychophysicists based on human studies, whereby pitch is extracted using a combination of temporal envelope and spectral cues.

American law long held that the Constitution does not limit state power over municipalities, a doctrine exemplified by Hunter v. Pittsburgh. While the Supreme Court has made some moves to update this doctrine in light of the Reconstruction Amendments and the constitutional rights revolution, those moves have been minimal enough to obtain uneven recognition from the Courts of Appeal, and a recent Supreme Court decision suggests a possible return to the ancien regime. I argue that the problem is that Hunter’s reach today is determined by its dicta, not its purpose, which courts have forgotten. Hunter’s purpose should be to preserve state policy flexibility, which means that state grants of municipal powers are not constitutionally enshrined as property or contract. This leaves room for municipal residents and municipalities themselves to invoke the Constitution against their creating states when individual rights or federal regulatory regimes are at stake. It even leaves for municipalities themselves to claim constitutional rights. One such candidate is free speech rights. I also discuss suits between municipalities.

The obvious security difficulties in Israel also carry problematic political, economic and social consequences. The unique Israeli condition — as a young democratic state, whose mere existence is still not self-evident to all — also has legal implications. In Israel, the law and the courts of law are often involved in resolving political issues, including issues pertaining to foreign and security policy. This involvement is more intensive in Israel than in many other democracies.1 That is why one might be interested in comprehending some legal aspects, especially those of constitutional law, that are present in the background of Israeli reality.

The threat of a chemical war has profound impacts on all layers of society. Hospitalized mental patients, as we have observed them, react in more extreme ways than staff members. They may react overanxiously, totally apathetically, or in context-related flights to partial sanity. Denial and projection were heavily used defense mechanisms together with a tendency of the more acute patients to plunge into their bizarre idiosyncratic world, lending strange meanings to what was happening in the world. Many patients were found to have strong narcissistic traits and to invest most of their libidinal energies in their private world. In times of stress this results in even greater social isolation. Different types of patients in different phases of their illness react differently to such overpowering stress, and the way they react illustrates their cognitive, behavioral, and social deficiencies. WWII literature on the reactions of mentally ill patients to "fly-bombing" seem not to take into consideration the different possible reactions of patients. This may be due to a change in emphasis in the care of mentally disturbed individuals in the last two decades. We propose to use even such an extremely stressful situation as a challenge to the mental health profession to further the well-being of their patients.

Pitch, our perception of how high or low a sound is on a musical scale, crucially depends on a sound's periodicity. If an acoustic signal is temporally jittered so that it becomes aperiodic, the pitch will no longer be perceivable even though other acoustical features that normally covary with pitch are unchanged. Previous electrophysiological studies investigating pitch have typically used only periodic acoustic stimuli, and as such these studies cannot distinguish between a neural representation of pitch and an acoustical feature that only correlates with pitch. In this report, we examine in the auditory cortex of awake marmoset monkeys ( Callithrix jacchus) the neural coding of a periodicity's repetition rate, an acoustic feature that covaries with pitch. We first examine if individual neurons show similar repetition rate tuning for different periodic acoustic signals. We next measure how sensitive these neural representations are to the temporal regularity of the acoustic signal. We find that neurons throughout auditory cortex covary their firing rate with the repetition rate of an acoustic signal. However, similar repetition rate tuning across acoustic stimuli and sensitivity to temporal regularity were generally only observed in a small group of neurons found near the anterolateral border of primary auditory cortex, the location of a previously identified putative pitch processing center. These results suggest that although the encoding of repetition rate is a general component of auditory cortical processing, the neural correlate of periodicity is confined to a special class of pitch-selective neurons within the putative pitch processing center of auditory cortex.

The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial reformulation.

This paper reports the clinical findings of a sibling group program used in an exploratory study designed to provide information about the unmet psychosocial needs of siblings of pediatric cancer patients. Two multisession groups, one for elementary school age children and one for adolescents, were held at a metropolitan teaching hospital to enable siblings to identify, express and master their feelings of anxiety and isolation in a supportive atmosphere. Eight major sources of anxiety and isolation were identified. Recommendations are made for integrating preventive intervention with siblings into standard hospital social work practice.

Many elections specialists take seriously V.O.Key’s hypothesis (1966) that much voting is retrospective: citizens reward good performance by becoming more likely to vote for the incumbent and punish bad performance by becoming less likely. Earlier (Bendor, Siegel, and Kumar 2005) we formalized Key’s verbal theory. Our model shows that people endogenously develop partisan voting tendencies, even if they lack explicit ideologies. However, that paper depicts parties as passive payo-generating mecha

We present a model for the diffusion of management fads and other technologies which lack clear objective evidence about their merits. The choices made by non-Bayesian adopters reflect both their own evaluations and the social influence of their peers. We show, both analytically and computationally, that the dynamics lead to outcomes that appear to be deterministic in spite of being governed by a stochastic process. In other words, when the objective evidence about a technology is weak, the evolution of this process quickly settles down to a fraction of adopters that is not predetermined. When the objective evidence is strong, the proportion of adopters is determined by the quality of the evidence and the adopters' competence.

Risk is not a simple phenomenon; contrary to the arguments of frustrated scientists who claim evidentiary support for the development and release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), opponents of these organisms claim that the risks associated with their release are unacceptable. Obviously, the evaluation of risk is often contentious and ambiguous, and yet the phenomenon of how people actually evaluate risk is not widely known among scientists. Hence, we present a review of the literature on risk that underscores its complexity. Scholars argue the merits of different types of risk assessment, but most agree that the process is far more complex than simple cost/benefit analyses. Indeed, the literature presents a plethora of theories, ranging from economic and actuarial assessment to psychological and social assessments. We agree with the social constructionist view, and argue that opponents of GMOs have amplified the socially derived feelings of risk that the various stakeholders and publics harbour towards GMOs. We likewise conclude that GMO opponents are amplifying the factors of control and unknown risk. Keywords: social; political; synthesis

The so-called “paradox of voting” is a major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational, then in large electrorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone being pivotal would be too small to make the act worthwhile. Yet many people do vote, even in large national elections. To address this puzzle we construct a model of adaptive rationality: Citizens learn by simple trial and error, repeating satisfactory actions and avoiding unsatisfactory ones. (Their aspiration levels, which code current payoffs as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, are also endogenous, themselves adjusting to experience.) Our main result is that agents who adapt in this manner turn out in substantial numbers even in large electorates and even if voting is costly for everyone.Standard conceptions of rational behavior do not explain why anyone bothers to vote in a mass election…. [Turnout is] the paradox that ate rational choice theory.Fiorina (1990, 334)We would like to thank Stephen Ansolabehere, Sorin Antohi, Glenn Ellison, Dedre Gentner, Sunil Kumar, David Laitin, Tze Lai, Arthur Lupia, Elijah Millgram, Lincoln Moses, Scott Page, Tom Palfrey, John Patty, Paul Pfleiderer, Adam Simon, Joel Sobel, Carole Uhlaner, three anonymous referees, and the participants in the Political Economics seminar at the GSB, the Stanford–CalTech workshop, the UNC American Politics Research Group, the UCLA conference on Cognition, Emotion, and Rational Choice, panels at the Annual Meetings of the MPSA and the APSA, the Agent 2000 Workshop, the Seventh Annual Wallis Conference, the CMU–Pitt Colloquium Series, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences seminar series for their helpful comments. This paper was written while Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks UNC's Department of Political Science for its support. It was revised while Bendor was a Fellow at the CASBS, and he is grateful for the Center's financial and intellectual support.

The power of women to negotiate, trade and barter their consent to sex could be perceived as an empowering capacity. The heart of the problem has always been the gender based double standard toward practicing sex prevailing in society. It is precisely the recognition and legitimacy of sex commensurability that might serve as a key toward neutralizing the women humiliation dimension of heterosexual intercourse.

You did it last night, and you will do it again tonight. And you're not alone, because every living organism with a brain needs to do it: sleep. And, for something so critical to our well-being, it's remarkable that we don't understand why we need to sleep. We may feel our conscious mind shutting off for much of the night and think that our brain is resting, but our brain actually remains very active. And what our brain is doing when we sleep provides a hint about what many neuroscientists believe to be a fundamental role of sleep.

What's in a name? Sometimes a good deal. Tom Hammond organized the panels on "Public Administration" for the 1988 meetings of APSA. As he later told me, he decided that this section name had a narrower connotation than he wanted. He told prospective panelists that he wanted the section to encompass phenomena outside public agencies that affected the agencies, phenomena inside the agencies themselves, and the interaction between outside and inside phenomena. Not much omitted, one would think. But the title he chose for the section-"Bureaucracy"-elicited an intense reaction from several professors of public administration. One said in rather vigorous terms that Tom was trying to read public administration out of the APSA. This reaction puzzled and frustrated him; he had tried to be inclusive.

In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dynamic process. Fourth, participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing. Fifth, participants are only minimally informed.The result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior, very much in the spirit of Simon's (1947) behavioral tradition, that offers a new perspective on political control, bureaucratic power, and the “intelligence of democracy.”

Empirical studies suggest that mission-oriented bureaucrats bias their design of program alternatives to increase the odds that a superior will choose the kind of program the officials want. However, political executives may anticipate this manipulation and try to reassert control. These struggles are examined in three models. In Model 1 a senior bureaucrat is interested only in missions; the bureaucrat's political superior controls him or her by rejecting inferior proposals and entertaining new options from other policy specialists. Model 2 is a principal-agent analysis. Here the official is interested only in budgets; the official's superior reduces search bias by creating an ex ante incentive scheme. In Model 3 the bureaucrat cares about both budgets and programs; the superior uses both his or her final review authority and ex ante incentives to reduce agenda manipulation. The models' contrasting implications for the political control of bureaucracy are examined.

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

Literacy is a concept that can be very briefly defined. Webster uses just the five words “ability to read and write,” and few would challenge this as an acceptable dictionary entry. Many scholars, however, have felt compelled to develop much longer definitions, some of paragraph length, as they have examined literacy from a particular perspective, and there is no counting the number of words which have been used, as definition moves on to description and research.

The empirical literature on the control of bureaus notes that politicians have difficulty observing bureaucratic output, but this insight is rarely represented informal models. To analyze how bureaus use this uncertainty strategically, we develop a model of expertise-based agenda control, building on the Niskanen (1971) and Miller and Moe (1983) tradition. We show that under some plausible conditions, bureaus will underestimate the benefits, and overestimate the costs, of their programs. In the model, politicians are neither passive nor omniscient: they anticipate the bureau's strategic behavior and establish a monitoring system to counteract it. This possibility of detection changes the bureau's behavior: even imperfect monitoring reduces the bureau's deception of the legislature, whether or not the legislature's demand for the bureau's services is concealed. Moreover, uncertainty by itself matters: if the legislature makes it harder for a risk-averse bureau chief to predict demand or penalty, the bureau will restrain its deception.

Formal analysis is fairly new in public administration, and there is some scepticism in the field about the intellectual advantages of mathematical methods. This is appropriate. Using these methods is now faddish, and fads can cause goal displacement. A formal model of bureaucracy should be only a tool for deepening our knowledge about public organizations. If the underlying ideas are silly, translating them into mathematics will do little good. If they are promising, however, deductive reasoning can help us explore their potential: if one believesAis a general property of bureaucracies, to fail to work outA's logical implications would be throwing away information. Analysis can also increase the falsifiability of our ideas: ifAimpliesBbut empirically we find not-B, the truth status ofAis brought into question. Or it may turn out, as Arrow discovered about democratic principles, that our informal ideas are logically inconsistent: we thought propertiesCandDdescribe existing or possible institutions, but recasting the ideas into mathematical form reveals that such an institution is impossible. Finally, some problems are just too hard to tackle without formal tools. It is unlikely, for example, that Robert Axelrod would have discovered the robustness of the simple strategy of tit-for-tat in the two person prisoners' dilemma without the help of a computer (to pit tit-for-tat against many opponents in thousands of rounds of play) and of mathematics (to prove some generic properties of tit-for-tat).