Disability Policy and the Media: A Stealth Civil Rights Movement Bypasses the Press and Defies Conventional Wisdom

The Americans with Disabilities Act was pushed through Congress with far less attention from the media than has accompanied other major civil rights bills. This was part of a deliberate and unconventional strategy by disability rights lobbyists who believed that media portrayals of disability were so cliched that journalists would impede, not further, the public's understanding of disability rights issues. Despite the success of the strategy, there is a price to pay for having been a 'stealth' civil rights movement: Now that the law is in place, disabled people face a backlash from Americans who neither understand the ADA nor the need for civil rights protection for disabled people.     

Learning to teach geography for primary education: results of an experimental programme

Students training to become primary school teachers appear to have little awareness of the core concepts of geography (teaching). To ensure that future primary school teachers are able to develop their pupils’ geographical awareness, a six weeks programme was developed. The characteristics of this programme – named Consciously Teaching Geography (CTG) – are: principles of good geography teaching, conjunction and a recurrent structure during training, modelling and reflection. In a quasi-experimental research design the question is answered what the effects are of CTG on the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for the subject of geography of first year primary student teachers. The results indicated that the programme has a positive effect on the domain-specific PCK development in the short term.     

Producer Services, Economic Geography, and Services Tradability

We investigate how the incorporation of producer services linkages affects the outcome of an economic geography model. We specify the production of manufactures such that a variety of producer services is needed to transform tradable unfinished goods into final consumption goods. We find that service linkages promote the concentration of economic activity in a single region, but whether full concentration is achieved depends on the costs and mode of services trade. Applying the model to a multiregion world shows that incorporating producer services may also give rise to regions that specialize in different economic activities.     

Urban Growth in the 1990s: Is City Living Back?

The 1990s were an unusually good decade for the largest American cities and, in particular, for the cities of the Midwest. However, fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during prior post–war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three main trends: (1) cities with strong human capital bases grew faster than cities without skills, (2) people moved to warmer, drier places, and (3) cities built around the automobile replaced cities that rely on public transportation. Although the negative impact of population density diminished slightly in the 1990s, there is no real evidence for a return to large, dense cities.     

X-ray powder diffraction analysis of Late Holocene reservoir sediments

X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) analysis of clays from anthropogenic Late Holocene reservoir sediments can provide a paleoclimatic proxy. Illite and smectite are climate sensitive clay minerals and their relative amounts correlate with climatic episodes. Relative percent composition of clays in Late Holocene reservoir sediment is diagnostic of different mineral source areas and their hydraulic transport processes, which are climate controlled. Climosequences of clay minerals from Late Holocene reservoir sediments are correlative with magnetic susceptibility records and provide a relatively simple and cost-effective tool for gaining insight into paleoclimate.