Andrew O’Malley Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe

Invited Commentary Invited Commentary: Rescuing Robinson Crusoe

Estimating the independent effect of ‘‘place’’ on health outcomes has proven quite difficult. In this issue of the Journal, Auchincloss and Diez Roux contribute a lucid introduction to agent-based simulation models and argue that they may be a fruitful alternative to current approaches to the problem. Insofar as conceptual understanding must precede empirical investigation, this author agrees. ...

Christianity and Popular Culture

Strong indication of an extinction‐based saturation of the flora on the Pacific Robinson Crusoe Islands

Oceanic islands are vulnerable ecosystems and their flora has been under pressure since the arrival of the first humans. Human activities and both deliberately and inadvertently introduced biota have had and continue to have a severe impact on island endemic plants. The number of alien plants has increased nearly linearly on many islands, perhaps resulting in extinction-based saturation of isla...

The Somatic Chromosomes of Sophora jernandeziana ( Fabaceae ) , an Endemic Tree from Robinson Crusoe Island 1

The mitotic chromosome number and karyotype of Sophora fernandeziana (Phil.) Skottsb. (subfamily Papilionoideae) are reported for the first time. The chromosome number, 2n = 18, is the modal number reported for the genus. The chromosomes are small (average length 1.55 ± 0.23 J.1m) and bear no satellites. The intrachromosomal and interchromosomal asymmetry indices were AI = 0.26 and A2 = 0.18, r...

Intertemporal Risk Aversion – or – Wouldn ’ t it be Nice to Tell Whether Robinson Crusoe

The paper introduces a new notion of risk aversion that is independent of the good under observation and its measure scale. The representational framework builds on a time consistent combination of additive separability on certain consumption paths and the von Neumann & Morgenstern (1944) assumptions. In the one-commodity special case, the new notion of risk aversion closely relates to a disent...