Reducing Toxic Chemical Releases and Transfers: Explaining Outcomes for a Voluntary Program

Relatively little is known about the possibilities and limitations of voluntary public programs. The so-called 33/50 Program for reducing releases of certain toxic chemicals into the environment provides a useful instance for examination. In an investigation of toxics-reduction outcomes, with states as units of analysis, economic and policy variables help to explain the results. In particular, channels and approaches used In communicating policy intentions are related to outcomes. Voluntary programs can make a difference, but the details of execution, including the extent and nature of field efforts, influence outcomes.     

Spatial variation in cervical cancer screening participation and outcomes among Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Australians in Queensland

Indigenous women continue to experience a disproportionately higher burden of cervical cancer than non‐Indigenous women in Australia. The National Indigenous Cervical Screening Project used probabilistic record linkage to combine population‐based administrative databases and identify Indigenous women on Pap Smear Registers. This study aimed to quantify the spatial variation by local government areas (LGAs) for Indigenous and non‐Indigenous women in Queensland in cervical screening participation rates and related outcomes. Empirical Bayes local geostatistical smoothing was performed to reduce the likelihood of spurious variation between small areas. The cohort included 1,091,260 women (2 per cent Indigenous) aged 20 to 69 with 2,393,708 Pap smears between 2006 and 2011. Indigenous women had smoothed LGA‐specific 5‐year participation rates (interquartile range (IQR) 38.9–53.3 per 100 eligible women) consistently lower than non‐Indigenous women (IQR 80.7–85.3). The non‐overlapping confidence intervals of these rates suggest that the Indigenous differential was significant. Compared with Indigenous women, non‐Indigenous women had consistently lower and more stable prevalence rates of histologically confirmed high grade abnormalities (IQR 8.0–10.1 versus 15.0–21.3 per 1,000 screened women). Although the LGA‐specific rates also suggest that a higher proportion of non‐Indigenous women were followed‐up within two months of an abnormal screening result, the wide confidence intervals for these estimates limit our ability to draw definitive conclusions about spatial patterns for this outcome. These findings highlight the importance of continued monitoring and ongoing efforts to identify drivers of these patterns and develop effective strategies to improve participation and potentially reduce the cervical cancer burden among Indigenous women.     

Modernity and Matrifocality: The Feminization of Kinship?

The extensive analytical focus on how gender relations in working lives, employment, education, political engagement and public life change under modernity needs extension into a consideration of the ways in which kinship and relatedness have also been changing. This article argues that relatedness under modernity tends towards matrifocality. This is explored through looking at broad patterns of social change in kinship practices across a range of societies experiencing transitions towards modernities over the past fifty years, and at how state and NGO development and social protection programmes contribute to this matrifocal turn.     

Effects of Different Record Selection Methods on the Transverse Seismic Response of a Bridge in South Western British Columbia

The seismic response of a continuous 4-span bridge designed according to the current Canadian seismic provisions is investigated using Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA). Different earthquake types, including shallow crustal events, interface Cascadia subduction, and deep inslab subduction are considered. The median collapse capacities calculated using different record selection methods including Conditional Mean Spectrum (CMS)-based, Uniform Hazard Spectrum (UHS)-based, and epsilon-based methods are compared. The use of the epsilon-based method generally resulted in the highest collapse capacity predictions, but the CMS-based method was less sensitive to the number of records considered in the IDA.