Exposing the glosses in Seligman and Fowler's (2011) straw-man arguments.

The author was disappointed to see an entire special issue of the American Psychologist (January 2011) devoted to military psychology, but he was especially concerned about the one-sided moral justifications presented by Seligman and Fowler (2011) in the final article of the issue. The author feels they misrepresented potential objections to their program and dismissed the inherent dangers of cooperation between organized psychology and the military. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sustaining the Commons: The Coercive to Cooperative,Resilient, and Adaptive Nature of State Comprehensive Water Planning Legislation

Problem, research strategy, and findings: States need guidance to adopt comprehensive water planning legislation that can affect urban planning and built form. Current state legislation, however, may not yet incorporate emerging water resource paradigms that promote sustainable water management at the state and substate levels. Planners can improve existing state legislation, but need guidance on incorporating the latest thinking on resilience, adaptive capacity, and sustainable commons management. I identify the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation, and analyze that legislation using a new assessment tool that builds on the coercive versus cooperative metric (CvCA). I determine where each state's water planning legislation falls on a coercive versus cooperative spectrum, and the extent to which each state's legislation incorporates sustainable commons management (SCM) and social–ecological resilience (SER) mechanisms and attributes. Most of the 26 states with comprehensive water planning legislation balance coercive and cooperative approaches to achieve state and substate water plans, although research suggests that planning is most effective when legislation is more cooperative. Moreover, most have not codified SCM and SER mechanisms into state water planning legislation, suggesting that the plans that follow may lack the adaptive capacity to increase the resilience of the water system. Research limitations include the single data source and potential interpretive coding bias.

Takeaway for practice: Planners can advocate for new or improved state water legislation that incorporates integral adaptive and resiliency concepts, encouraging states to include the fundamental features of the social–ecological system that lead to better water management.     

The American-Yugoslav Project

The American-Yugoslav Project was established in 1966 for the purposes of planning research and training. An effort in intevnational planning collaboration, it is funded, directed, and staffed by institutions and professionals from both countries. It has been particularly successful with respect to the training function, and after two years of cooperative experience, the Project is moving forward on a demonstration pvogram of research and planning for the case study area. This report is our-American-attempt to evaluate the joint Project and thus represents the view of but one of the pavtners.     

The European Motherland of American Urban Romanticism

CENTRAL PLACES IN SOUTHERN GERMANY by Walter Christaller translated by Carlisle W. Baskin Prentice–Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966. 230 pp. $9.95.

COMMUNITY AND SCHIZOPHRENIA: AN EPIDEMIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS by H. Warren Dunham Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1965. 308 pp. $12.50.

URBAN ATLAS: 20 AMERICAN CITIES: A COMMUNICATION STUDY NOTATING SELECTED URBAN DATA AT A SCALE OF 1: 48,000 by Joseph R. Passoneau and Richard Saul Wurman M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 1967. 127 plates of maps; 63 double–spread fold–out pages. $100.00.

SLUMS AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: EXPERIMENTS IN SELF–HELP by Marshall B. Clinard The Free Press, New York, 1966. 395 pp. $7.95.

URBANIZATION IN NEWLY DEVELOPING COUNTRIES by Gerald Breese Prentice–Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966. viii+151 pp., tables, illustrations. $4.95 (cloth) or $2.50 (paper).

THE AIRTIGHT CAGE: A STUDY OF NEW YORK'S WEST SIDE by Joseph P. Lyford Harper &; Row, New York, 1966. 356 pp. $6.50.     

Imaging vividness and the outcome of in vivo and imagined scene desensitization.

Reexamined the role of imaging vividness in desensitization success. Scores on the Betts Questionnaire on Mental Imagery were used to divide 48 snake-phobic Ss into high, medium, and low vivid groups, who were assigned to imagined scene or in vivo desensitization treatments. The Fear Survey Schedule was used to measure general fearfulness. Imaging vividness was assessed at scheduled points during therapy. Significant decreases in behavioral and self-reported fear were observed after both treatments, although in vivo desensitization produced significantly greater fear reduction. In therapy, imaging vividness scores were significantly correlated with therapeutic success and were superior to pretherapy ratings as predictors of outcome. (2 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpretations: “New Ideas in Planning”

A critical planning task is recognizing and addressing uncertainty. Actual problems vary in uncertainty over means and ends. If people agree on what they want and how to achieve it, then certainty prevails and planning is rational application of knowledge. If they agree on what they want but do not know how to achieve it, then planning becomes a learning process; if they do not agree on what they want but do know how to achieve alternatives, then planning becomes a bargaining process; if they agree on neither means nor ends, then planning becomes part of the search for order in chaos. Each prototype situation suggests a particular range of planning styles. Planners should tailor their styles to problem conditions. By acting contingently they can use reason to cope with uncertainty.