Procedural and Substantive Fairness in Risk Decisions: Comparative Risk Assessment Procedures1

The issue of fairness often is central within environmental policy debates. The recent proliferation of state and local comparative risk projects for informing the selection of environmental policy priorities offers an appropriate setting to explore the issue of procedural fairness in risk-based decisionmaking. This paper describes and evaluates the process by which one of the initial state comparative risk projects, Washington's “Environment 2010,” attempted to include a broader range of participants in identifying, assessing, and generating preferred management strategies for a wide range of environmental hazards. The Washington case study suggests that comparative risk projects can be fairer procedurally, but that significant barriers remain. Noting that greater procedural fairness does not necessarily produce greater substantive fairness, the paper concludes that more attention needs to be directed at the process by which comparative risk projects translate their consensus upon risk priorities into subsequent actions.     

Pretransition marital fertility variation over time: was there deliberate control in England?

An important line of research concerning historical fertility patterns in currently developed countries of Europe has concluded that, prior to the fertility transition, marital fertility was essentially constant over time, and deliberate fertility control was virtually unknown. It has been argued that variations over time in overall fertility were largely the consequence of variations in nuptiality. Other researchers have challenged these views and present evidence for the existence of a significant minority of fertility controllers in pretransition populations. In this article, we find support for this second view and argue that (1) there was significant, non-random variation in marital fertility over time, prior to the transition; (2) in many cases, this variation in marital fertility was large relative to contemporaneous variations in nuptiality; and (3) in a substantial minority of the cases, the variation over time in pretransition marital fertility was so large that it is suggestive of deliberate fertility control. Thus, our findings question the view of fertility transition as an innovation in deliberate marital fertility control. While most of our evidence is based on data from England and Wales, we find corroboration of our key results in other European data.     

NEUTRON ACTIVATION ANALYSIS OF AD 1660–1930 EUROPEAN COPPER-COLOURED BLUE GLASS TRADE BEADS FROM ONTARIO,CANADA

Blue glass trade beads from well-dated late seventeenth- to early twentieth-century sites and collections have been analysed non-destructively by instrumental neutron activation analysis. The beads display enough variations in their elemental contents to allow us to characterize the different chemistries. The implication of these results is that similar chemical analyses of blue beads from undated archaeological sites may be used to help date the sites, since each bead chemistry has a specific earliest period.     

RADIOCARBON DATES FOR BEESWAX FIGURES IN THE PREHISTORIC ROCK ART OF NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon ages have been taken for a test suite of small samples of material removed from some of the ‘beeswax’art figures found in rock shelters in northern Australia. The results indicate that we can reliably date this unique form of rock art with no noticeable damage. We had not expected to find figures of any great antiquity, and so we were surprised to find that the ages obtained spanned the time period from the recent past to about 4000 BP.     

Random Time Sampling

Random Time Sampling is an innovative data collection method which has potential for adaptation and use by geographers. Individual pocket-sized programmable beepers were used in a pilot study of the uses of time by older households and older people's attitudes to different activities. Random beeps were used to prompt individuals living in eleven Melbourne suburbs to record time use data in diaries over a period of a week. The method proved extremely effective and reliable, and many participants reporting that they enjoyed the exercise.