Adolescent Criminal Justice Involvement and Adulthood Sexually Transmitted Infection in a Nationally Representative US Sample

Criminal justice involvement (CJI) disrupts social and sexual networks, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) thrive on network disruption. Adolescent CJI may be a particularly important determinant of STI because experiences during adolescence influence risk trajectories into adulthood. We used Wave III (2001–2002: young adulthood) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 14,322) to estimate associations between history of adolescent (younger than 18 years) CJI and adult STI risk. Respondents who reported a history of repeat arrest in adolescence, adolescent conviction, and arrest both as an adolescent and an adult (persistent arrest) had between two to seven times the odds of STI (biologically confirmed infection with chlamydia, gonorrhea, or trichomoniasis) in adulthood and between two to three times the odds of multiple partnerships and inconsistent condom use in the past year in adulthood. In analyses adjusting for sociodemographic and behavioral factors, history of having six or more adolescent arrests was associated with more than five times the odds of STI (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 5.44, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 1.74–17.1). Both adolescent conviction and persistent CJI appeared to remain independent correlates of STI (conviction: AOR 1.90, 95 % CI 1.02–3.55; persistent CJI: AOR 1.60, 95 % CI 0.99–2.57). Adolescents who have repeat arrests, juvenile convictions, and persist as offenders into adulthood constitute priority populations for STI treatment and prevention. The disruptive effect of adolescent CJI may contribute to a trajectory associated with STI in adulthood

Temporal Dynamics of Bird Community Composition: an Analysis of Base-line Conditions from Long-term Data

Numerous anthropogenic activities threaten the biodiversity found on earth. Because all ecological communities constantly experience temporal turnover due to natural processes, it is important to distinguish between change due to anthropogenic impact and the underlying natural rate of change. In this study, we used data sets on breeding bird communities that covered at least 20 consecutive years, from a variety of terrestrial ecosystems, to address two main questions. (1) How fast does the composition of bird communities change over time, and can we identify a baseline of natural change that distinguishes primeval systems from systems experiencing varying degrees of human impact? (2) How do patterns of temporal variation in composition vary among bird communities in ecosystems with different anthropogenic impacts? Time lag analysis (TLA) showed a pattern of increasing rate of temporal compositional change from large-scale primeval systems to disturbed and protected systems to distinctly successional systems. TLA slopes of <0.04 were typical for breeding bird communities with natural turnover, while communities subjected to anthropogenic impact were characterised by TLA slopes of >0.04. Most of the temporal variability of breeding bird communities was explained by slow changes occurring over decades, regardless of the intensity of human impact. In most of the time series, medium- and short-wave periodicity was not detected, with the exception of breeding bird communities subjected to periodic pulses (e.g. caterpillar outbreaks causing food resource peaks).

The city politics of an urban age: urban resilience conceptualisations and policies

Abstract Around the globe, cities seek to improve their resilience to face the stresses and shocks that are expected from global climate change and other threats. In implementing urban resilience policies, they are guided by different urban resilience conceptualisations. What is meant by the concept differs between scholars, governments, as well as international organisations that seek to study, advise on and implement urban resilience policies and governance interventions. This article presents a review of the urban resilience literature since the 1970s. It seeks to map and interrogate dominant urban resilience conceptualisations, and decipher whether and how different understandings of the concept can result in essentially different policies and governance interventions and outcomes. In contrasting the ‘what’ of urban resilience (various conceptualisations) with the ‘why’ of urban resilience policy (bouncing back, falling forwards, persistence) it investigates approaches to overcome some of the key critiques to urban resilience policy and research

A critical overview of migration and development: The Latin American challenge

There is an intense ongoing debate on migration and development in LatinAmerica. This article offers a critical overview of themain perspectives surrounding the Latin American debate across the social sciences. A brief historical background is provided, followed by a characterization of the three main paradigms prevailing in the region: the dominant perspective, grounded in modernization and neoliberal principles; the southern perspective, which has growing influence in the region and is rooted in theLatin American development school; and the transnational approach, which stands in between the first two paradigms and is circumscribed to a meso-level of analysis. The final section highlights five cutting-edge topics that have emerged in the region’s scholarship. The article emphasizes the specificity and the main contributions made by Latin American scholars to understanding and demystifying the complex relationship between migration, development, and human rights