The deep waters of land reform: land,water and conservation area claims in Limpopo Province,Olifants Basin,South Africa

Through investigating the reactions of commercial farmers to land and water reforms in the Trichardtsdal-Ofcolaco area, Limpopo Province, Olifants Basin, South Africa, from 1997 to 2006, it is shown that water claims are key to land redistribution processes, and that commercial farmers make strategic use of arguments for nature conservation and ecological stewardship to defend their claims to water. Given these observations, caution is warranted with respect to the implementation of land and water reforms as separate policy packages; it may be more effective to design water and conservation policies as an integral part of land reform programmes.     

Analyzing the development of individual differences in terms of Matthew effects in reading: Results from a Dutch longitudinal study.

The Matthew effect hypothesis provides a theoretical framework to describe the development of individual differences in reading ability. The model predicts an increase of individual differences in reading. Reciprocal relationships between reading and other factors seem to cause these increasing differences. This longitudinal study of 3 years was concerned with uncovering the existence and causes of increasing individual differences in reading in the early elementary grades. Data were analyzed within a structural equation modeling framework. The results clearly indicate increasing individual differences for word recognition skills. For reading comprehension, no such effects could be established for this limited time period. More important, some evidence for interactive relationships between reading and other cognitive skills, behaviors, and motivational factors, hypothesized to cause increasing differences between readers, was found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual heuristics and the dynamics of cooperation in large groups.

This article describes computer simulations in which pairs of "individuals" in large groups played a prisoners' dilemma game. The individual's choice to cooperate or not was determined by 1 of 3 simple heuristics: tit-for-tat; win-stay, lose-change; or win-cooperate, lose-defect. Wins and losses were determined through the comparison of a play's outcome with the average outcome of the individual's neighbors. The results revealed qualitative differences between small and large groups. Furthermore, the prevalence of cooperation in the population depended in predictable ways on the heuristic used, the values of the payoff matrix, and the details of the social comparison process that framed the outcomes as wins or losses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measurement quality assurance for ionising radiation dosimetry

The preface of the new ICRU report 76 on ‘MeasurementQuality Assurance for Ionising Radiation Dosimetry’ almostsounds like ‘we have published 75 reports on radiationmeasurements and now, finally, here is one on the quality ofthese measurements’. Over the past decade, meetings likethe Solid State Dosimetry conferences and the Individual Monitoringworkshops in Villigen (1993), Helsinki (2000) and Vienna (2005),whose proceedings have appeared in this journal, dedicated sessionsto the quality assurance     

Role of interdependence structure, individual value orientation, and another's strategy in social decision making: A transformational analysis.

The present research examined the influence of the objective interdependence structure of tasks, the values of decision makers, and others' strategies on social decision making and judgment. We observed that subjects' preferences among outcome alternatives that influenced both their own and another's welfare were strongly conditioned by their value orientations and by their expectations concerning the other person's choice behavior. As anticipated, there was no main effect for task structure, but structure interacted with value and with the other's strategy to influence choice behavior. Further, we observed that subjects judged others pursuing a tit-for-tat or a cooperative strategy as fairer and more honest than those pursuing a competitive strategy. They judged others pursuing a tit-for-tat strategy as more intelligent and stronger than those playing cooperatively or competitively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Persuasiveness of expert systems

Expert system advice is not always evaluated by examining its contents. Users can be persuaded by expert system advice because they have certain beliefs about advice given by a computer. The experiment in this paper shows that subjects (n = 84) thought that, given the same argumentation, expert systems are more objective and rational than human advisers. Furthermore, subjects thought a problem was easier when advice on it was said to be given by an expert system while the advice was shown in production rule style. Such beliefs can influence expert system use.