Most environmental statutes passed since 1970 have endorsed a pragmatic or 'precautionary' principle under which the existence of a significant risk is enough to trigger regulation. At the same time, targets of such regulation have often argued on grounds of inefficiency that the associated costs outweigh any potential benefits. In this work, Jason Johnston unpacks and critiques the legal, economic, and scientific basis for precautionary climate policies pursued in the United States and in doing so sheds light on why the global warming policy debate has become increasingly bitter and disconnected from both climate science and economics. Johnston analyzes the most influential international climate science assessment organizations, the US electric power industry, and land management and renewable energy policies. Bridging sound economics and climate science, this pathbreaking book shows how the United States can efficiently adapt to a changing climate while radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment. Reading and evaluating student writing is a time-consuming process, yet it is a vital part of both student placement and coursework at post-secondary institutions. In recent years, commercial computer-evaluation programs have been developed to score student essays in both of these contexts. Two-year colleges have been especially drawn to these programs, but four-year institutions are moving to them as well, because of the cost-savings they promise. Unfortunately, to a large extent, the programs have been written, and institutions are installing them, without attention to their instructional validity or adequacy. Since the education software companies are moving so rapidly into what they perceive as a promising new market, a wider discussion of machine-scoring is vital if scholars hope to influence development and/or implementation of the programs being created. What is needed, then, is a critical resource to help teachers and administrators evaluate programs they might be considering, and to more fully envision the instructional consequences of adopting them. And this is the resource that Ericsson and Haswell are providing here.

This study examines prison sexual violence in adult and juvenile New York State prisons. To an inmate, the formal structure of a prison – its planned work, recreation, and rehabilitation – may be a thin veneer. The ‘real’ world is the social environment, created by the convict community, and sexual violence is a traditional part of that environment. A range of sexual behaviors, all perceived as threatening and offensive by the targets of aggressors were examined, with discussion on the nature of the overture, the physical and verbal response of the target, his thoughts and feelings, the living patterns resulting from sexual pressure, and how peers and staff react. In this population, sexual aggression is shown to be racially-based: most aggressors were black, and most victims were white, of a slighter build than the aggressor, and perceived as having feminine physical and personality characteristics. About half of the 152 incidents examined involved physical violence, half initiated by aggressors coercing targets; the rest from targets reacting to threats. Both aggressors and targets tended to come from outside and prison social subcultures which used aggression as a primary means of relieving frustration and irritation. After fights, targets reported that aggressors left them alone, that they moved around the prison with less fear, felt better about themselves, and had a higher status among other prisoners. Sexual attacks increased fear, and victims continued to be affected emotionally months after the event. Prison staff did not usually intervene directly in the incidents, nor is there evidence that such intervention would be effective in reducing the problem. The author recommends the provision of program alternatives such as the Alternatives to Violence (AVP) and other conflict resolutions programs. (NCJRS, modified).