1,721,004 research outputs found
On human carrying capacity: A review essay on Joel Cohen's: How Many People Can the Earth Support?
No full textJoel Cohen's eagerly awaited and broadly disseminated book is erudite, suffused with the ethical dimension of population policy, and comprehen- sive-touching on everything from paleodemography to AIDS, the theory of fertility decline, international population policy, and more. On these grounds, if a scientifically literate friend asked you for one book to read about population, this would be a good suggestion. The book is, as its au- thor promises us in the Introduction, "neither an alarmist tract nor a cornucopian lullaby" (p. 12), and that is precisely the sort of responsible balance we expect from a leading researcher in the field. The style of the book is breezy and irrepressible; some will like it, others will not. I found myself wishing that the editor had excised the chattiness, but readers with stronger nerves may thrive on it.
Having been assured that the volume is basically sound, readers of this journal will wish to know whether it makes a scientific contribution or sheds new light on policy questions. Here, How Many People Can the Earth Support? is a study in contrasts...
Priorities in Global Assistance for Health, AIDS, and Population
No full textThis article makes three points regarding international assistance in health, AIDS, and population. First, despite growing attention in the development policy dialogue, the share of health (broadly considered) in total assistance is actually declining, not increasing, if assistance for the HIV/AIDS crisis is taken out of the picture. Second, interventions financed by international health assistance do not closely correspond to the burden of disease as conventionally calculated. HIV/AIDS receives a share of assistance in excess of its contribution to the global burden of disease, and reasons for this are adduced. Third, despite the emphasis on aligning international assistance to country priorities, a comparison of how health is treated in poverty-reduction strategies and the nature of health assistance reveals no clear relationship between the two. This suggests that there may be room for improvement in the process of preparing such strategies, the allocation of health assistance, or both
Review of the book "Population, Economic Development, and the Environment" (K. Lindahl-Kiessling, H. Landberg, eds)
No full textIn the 1970s and 1980s, many social scientists in the areas of population, economy, and environment occupied themselves with qualifying the rigid Limits to Growth model in which the world goes crashing, to use the metaphor of environmental economist Anthony Fisher, blindly into the wall of resource depletion. Thus, for example, the 1986 US National Academy of Sciences study found no reason to believe that population pressure would improve or worsen the allocation of depletable resources over time, but warned, with prescience, that population posed possibly serious problems in the allocation of renewable natural resources, which basically includes the environment as sink. In the 1990s, it would appear, many social scientists are occupied with qualifying the optimism of the equally rigid "exemptionalist" wing of neoclassical economics...
Pandemic influenza: A review
No full textThis essay, written ten years after the first human death from avian influenza, reviews scientific, social, and policy aspects of pandemic influenza, and asks whether the near-crisis level of concern is justified. That there will be another influenza pandemic is certain, and a number of factors suggest it will occur sooner rather than later. It is impossible, however, to predict two of the pandemics crucial characteristics -its pathogenicity and the age-attack curve. The scientific arsenal has never been stronger, yet gaps in the availability of antiviral drugs and vaccines are inevitable, and the world is poorly prepared to cope with the politics of drug shortage. Some studies suggest emergent pandemics can be "ring-fenced", but these studies are not broadly accepted. Assuming that they cannot, raid and global deployment of a range of responses, including social distancing, travel limitations, and prophylactic/curative application of antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu, can limit impacts. However, the impacts are bound to be significant if not severe. Overall health-sector strengthening, rural development (particularly in the area of veterinary health), and addressing the local, national, and international governance issues that cut across all aspects of infectious disease are more likely to bear fruit, especially in the developing world, than the pandemic preparedness planning now in vogue
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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