Innovations to reduce residential energy use and carbon emissions: an integrated approach

Research in energy sustainability is gaining renewed priority because of the growing importance of climate‐change issues and the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by many countries. Increased energy efficiency and substitution of less carbon‐intensive fuels are proposed as the principal means to reduce greenhouse‐gas (GHG) emissions and associated climate change. The residential sector is an important area for improvement, as it accounts for 22 percent of global energy consumption. This paper illustrates the integration of four dimensions of energy issues within a single community study in Waterloo Region, Canada. First, it overcomes the limitations of single‐discipline approaches to energy studies by recognizing the importance of social context in measuring the potential to reduce energy consumption. The ‘sociotechnical’ potential to reduce residential consumption by 25 percent is lower in our analysis than traditional measures of the technical potential, but is considered more achievable. Second, the paper examines how community‐based implementation can enhance the effectiveness of a national energy efficiency program (EnerGuide for Houses, or EGH). Controlled marketing experiments demonstrated higher response rates for materials highlighting local partners. Third, the paper outlines how the local capacity developed by diverse stakeholders (city councils, regional government, federal government agencies, local utilities, local businesses, environmental nongovernmental organizations and the local university) was an important means of overcoming many of the barriers to taking action. Fourth, the paper details the examination of issues of energy efficiency and fuel substitution through a survey of residents’ attitudes and comparison to behaviour. For example, stated ‘willingness to pay’ was compared to the actual sign‐up rate for the first introduction of ‘green’ electricity in the Ontario residential market. The integration of these four dimensions in a single study offers a framework that can be reviewed and adapted to meet the needs of other projects.     

Hispanic Pregnancy Outcomes: Differentials Over Time and Current Risk Factor Effects

In light of major changes over the past decade or two in the structure of infant mortality in the United States, the primary objectives of this article are to document recent variation in pregnancy outcomes in specific Hispanic populations compared with non-Hispanic Whites and to estimate the contemporaneous association of ethnicity with risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, and infant mortality. The primary data employed are the 1995–1997 NCHS Linked Birth/Infant Death Files. Changes over time are examined through comparisons with the 1989–1991 counterpart files. Logistic regression models provide estimates of ethnic disparities in birth weight, gestational age, and infant mortality. Every ethnic population followed the national pattern of increasing rates of adverse birth outcomes coupled with declining rates of infant mortality. Net of the effects of a wide range of risk factors, every Hispanic group was at greater risk of short gestation and low-weight births, but at lower risk of infant death. The findings are consistent with the view that Hispanics, as well as the White, non-Hispanic majority, have benefited from advances in neonatal health services and technology at the time of delivery and postpartum. The epidemiologic paradox appears to be applicable to some, but not all, Hispanic groups.     

Australian political studies and the production of disciplinary innocence

ABSTRACT

While Australian political studies often appears to have neglected engagements with Indigenous peoples and politics, we argue this is not a simple question of omission. In fact, the discipline is deeply implicated in imperial knowledge production and the authorisation of racialised colonial governance. As non-Indigenous scholars working within Australian political studies, in this paper we reflect on our own discipline in light of several decades of critical scholarship, identifying the production of disciplinary innocence through a theoretical and institutional analysis of Australian political studies knowledge practices. We explore this production via canonical knowledges, institutional processes that contain Indigenous people and knowledge to subjects of policy, and the operation of disciplinary divisions which neutralise scholarship on policy and political institutions.     

Public open space exposure measures in Australian health research: a critical review of the literature

Numerous studies have shown associations between public open space and a variety of health outcomes. Yet the extent to which firm conclusions and planning policy recommendations can be drawn from this body of work depends on how public open space availability has been measured and reported. Other researchers have highlighted potential issues with the way that public open space has been measured but have not systematically assessed the extent of this problem. This paper provides a comprehensive critical review of studies of public open space and health conducted in Australia to identify and compare public open space measurement and data treatment. Our analysis showed wide variation in how public open space was measured, as well as a lack of consistency in reporting public open space exposure measures and under‐reporting of measurement methods. We find that such tendencies limit how much these studies can be compared and contrasted with each other. The corollary of that finding is that without more detailed reporting of exposure measures, it will be difficult to establish an evidence base that informs planning for healthy, liveable environments. In response, we develop and present a checklist for reporting public open space exposure to address this challenge.     

Unsettling Time: Persistence and Memory in Spanish Colonial Peru

In this paper, I explore the politics of memory during the Toledan reforms—a series of ambitious administrative changes legislated in colonial Peru between 1569 and 1581, by viceroy Francisco de Toledo. At the center of Toledo’s project was an initiative to resettle the entire native population of the audiencias of Lima and Charcas into a series of planned towns called reducciones. This movement—reducción—sought to transform Andean indigenous peoples into subjects of the Catholic Church and the Spanish crown through a series of explicitly spatial operations, including regional population nucleation and settlement planning. But the terms of these changes were also temporal: as reducción shaped landscapes and built environments, it also sought to transform indigenous historicity, bringing native peoples into the Era of Christ and carefully regulating the social institutions and practices by which they accounted for their pasts. The Toledan reforms therefore present a clear example of one empire’s attempts to subjugate conquered peoples through mnemonic practices. Yet archaeological research in one corner of the viceroyalty—Peru’s Zaña valley—suggests that the story of how indigenous memories were actually shaped during the course of resettlement and its aftermath was far from straightforward. To understand these transformations, I argue that we must explore not only the short-term dialectic of Spanish designs and their indigenous responses, but also the “afterlives” of reduccion in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the longer term, reducción achieved staying power through a series of unanticipated pathways, in which landscape change, demography, and indigenous agency all played essential roles. I argue that these developments ultimately resulted in much more complex forms of remembering than those implicit in reducción legislation and that they underscore the importance for archaeological studies of memory of attending both to the materiality of imperial landscapes and long-term processes of subject formation.     

Responses of South African Agate and Chalcedony When Heated Experimentally,and the Broader Implications for Heated Archaeological Minerals

Here we present a database of responses by South African agate and chalcedony to heat treatment. This will assist analyses of heated stone tools not only in South African archaeological sites, but wherever heated agate and chalcedony pieces were knapped. The minerals are abundant worldwide. To replicate potential heating methods during the Stone Age we placed some minerals in a wood fire, some under coals, and others were buried in sediments beneath fires. Thermal responses include lustrous flaked surfaces, pot lid fractures, semi-circular internal fractures, rough internal surfaces, and crazing. Aerobic heating is implied by pot lid fractures. To explain the thermal responses we analyzed the minerals using X-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, and carbon and sulfur analyses. Our chalcedony contains more water and impurities than agate, making it more vulnerable to thermal damage. Our method of combining field experiments with chemical analyses has global applications even though we expect that mineral components of agate and chalcedony will vary slightly in different parts of the world.