Washington's Response to the AIDS Epidemic: The Ryan White CARE Act

Passage of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act of 1990 followed a form familiar to students of policymaking in the American intergovernmental system: the provision of significant federal financing for policy initiatives located primarily at the state and local levels. The successes and failures of the Act, including its 1996 reauthorization, suggest both the strengths and the limitations of that design. This paper examines the structure of the Act as a vehicle for the federal government to fund AIDS service delivery at the state and local levels and the intergovernmental consequences of allocation policies associated with the Act. It concludes that perennial problems of equity and access cannot be resolved by the delegation of responsibility for significant policy or funding decisions to localities; rather, questions about the role of the federal government in overcoming intralocal and interlocal disparities remain to be addressed.     

Huang,Shih-shan Susan,Picturing the True Form. Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China

Susan Huang＇s Picturing the True Form： Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China is an important addition to the current bibliography of Daoist studies. The book is a scholarly investigation into the formulation of the rich visual vocabulary and diverse formats used to express the complex and manifold corpus of Daoist beliefs and practices. Prominent among these is the challenge of finding the means to pictorially convey the ever-changing true form, or zhenxing,     

Work hard, play hard: selling Kelowna, BC, as year-round playground

A keen interest in place making and place selling is widespread in contemporary society. While the bulk of academic research has focused on studying the restructuring of large urban conglomerates, places beyond the exploding metropolis, by comparison, have received little attention, especially when it concerns Canadian landscapes. In an attempt to study the particularities of place making in contemporary smaller, more isolated communities—hinterlands—this work analyses the city of Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada. We argue that historically Kelowna, a small rural community specialising in ranching, forestry and fruit production, since the early 1980s, has been re-imagined and re-designed, on the one hand as an all-year playground and as an innovative frontier for high-tech industries; on the other hand, this post-Fordist reinvention contains a discourse of 'whiteness', one that entices by packaging 'place' in terms of 'sameness' and 'familiarity'. In contrast to large cosmopolitan post-industrial cities, hinterland-type cities are invented, sought and lived as geographies cleared from the 'elements' that make cities 'unsafe'.     

HUMAN MOBILITY AT THE EARLY NEOLITHIC SETTLEMENT OF VAIHINGEN,GERMANY: EVIDENCE FROM STRONTIUM ISOTOPE ANALYSIS*

As evidence concerning human mobility during the transition to agriculture in central Europe, we present the results of strontium isotope analysis of human skeletons from the Neolithic village of Vaihingen, Germany. We find significantly more ‘non‐local’⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values from humans buried in a Neolithic ditch surrounding Vaihingen than from those buried within the settlement. These results fit with previous studies showing a correlation between burial circumstances and strontium isotope signatures from LBK cemeteries of southwestern Germany ( Price et al. 2001 ; Bentley et al. 2002 ). A pilot study of Neolithic animal teeth from Vaihingen suggests that either ‘local’⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr signatures were more variable than the analysed human bones suggest, or that these domestic animals themselves were mobile, perhaps ranged by mobile pastoralists.     

TESTING FOR CAUSALITY BETWEEN PRODUCTIVITY AND AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES

ABSTRACT The productivity effects of agglomeration economies are often treated as endogenous in empirical work due to the potential for reverse causality. The extent to which these relationships are actually simultaneously determined, however, remains largely unobserved. This paper estimates panel data vector autoregressions for different sectors of the economy to test for bidirectional causality between productivity and both localization and urbanization economies. The aim is to address some key questions that will help to identify the extent of the endogeneity problem. Can we actually observe bidirectionality in the data? Does it feature more for some industries than for others? Is it more prevalent for localization or urbanization economies? The results show that agglomeration economies are not strictly unidirectional and that higher levels of productivity can induce growth in the scale of local urban and industrial environments. The paper discusses the difficulties that these issues pose for the estimation of agglomeration economies.     

The Right Tool for the Job: The Canalization of Presidential Policy Attention by Policy Instrument

This article investigates how presidential policy attention is allocated across policy tools and whether there is a channeling of tool use by policy area. I also examine whether there is evidence of disproportionate information processing within presidential policy attention allocation and whether it is common across presidential policy tools. Presidential messages, hearings on administrations' legislative proposals, amicus briefs, and executive orders are employed to capture presidential policy tools. The allocation of attention via these four instruments is examined from 1957–2007 in the policy areas of defense and foreign affairs, macroeconomics, banking and commerce, civil rights, law and crime, and labor and immigration. I find that there is a canalization of presidential policy attention by instrument, and that the opportunity structure of policy tools shapes attention allocation. Additionally, I find evidence for punctuated equilibrium theory in the allocation of presidential policy attention via these four tools. When presidents do shift their attention to an issue area, they often attack the issue with some coordination of their policy instruments.     

Where East Meets West: The Formative in Mexico’s Central Highlands

Mexico’s Central Highlands form one of Mesoamerica’s fundamental cultural seams, a point of overlap between two traditions, one to the east and the other to the west. Although this area is usually included in the west, it can be more productively viewed as an interface, the physical space where people, goods, and ideas passed from one side to the other, and thus it holds many keys for our understanding of emerging social complexity in Mesoamerica. In reviewing the last two decades of Formative period (1500 BC–AD 100) research in this crucial territory, we focus on themes that reveal the variation and dynamism of interregional interaction, including the formation of regional traditions, exchange systems, and foreign “influence,” and others that help contextualize the events and processes of that time, like household studies and environmental degradation. We stress that this part of Mexico is undergoing relentless development so time is of the essence if we are to broaden our perspectives on social evolution in the Central Highlands. This issue cannot be resolved by rescue and salvage work because it requires long-term, interdisciplinary projects to unravel multifaceted problems.