Red Light

It is generally accepted that in sexual interaction men are the hunters and women the gatherers. An expressly sexual environment such as a red-light district would be expected to only reinforce this image. Strikingly enough, however, it is precisely prostitutes who seem able to break with these established gender roles. This ethnographic study uses participant observation to demonstrate how assumptions about sexual interaction may be specious: female prostitutes are frequently not the passive victims and male clients not the active sex-hunters they are taken for. Both the communicative function and protection of privacy play an important role in these processes in a red-light district. In the red-light district, gender interaction is bound by social regulation and unwritten rules that greatly exceed the influence of formal institutions. In this paper, the case of the red-light district "De Wallen" in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, is discussed in the context of several disciplines including urban anthropology, social psychology, geography, gender studies, and urban sociology.

Research Findings: The present study examined the efficacy of a self-regulation intervention with 65 preschool children. Using circle time games, the study examined whether participating in a treatment group significantly improved behavioral self-regulation and early academic outcomes. Half of the children were randomly assigned to participate in 16 playgroups during the winter of the school year. Behavioral aspects of self-regulation and early achievement were assessed in the fall and spring. Although there was no treatment effect in the overall sample, post hoc analyses revealed that participation in the treatment group was significantly related to self-regulation gains in children who started the year with low levels of these skills. Children in the treatment group also demonstrated significant letter-word identification gains compared to children in the control group. Practice or Policy: The findings from this study provide preliminary evidence for the efficacy of the intervention in terms of improving preschoolers’ behavioral self-regulation for children low in these skills and improving letter-word identification. Although preliminary, these results have the potential to inform preschool curricula that emphasize behavioral self-regulation as a means of facilitating school readiness.

After 89 years of prohibiting brothels, the Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000. The legislations of both 1911 and 2000 did not only mark the beginning of a new phase of in/formalizing prostitution and the spatial-institutional setting in which it takes place, but were also the result of the changing image of prostitution related to the wider sexual order. Despite the apparent contradiction between prohibition and legalization, both are central moments in the spatialization of prostitution. Prostitution, in parallel to the civilizing of other manners, is relegated to increasingly confined spaces and as such banned from “normal” social life. While reducing the visibility of prostitution in “normal” life, it increases the visibility in these spatially confined zones that we know as red-light districts, Amsterdam’s Wallen district being the paradigmatic example.

During the 19th century prostitution was increasingly seen as a prison, both morally and physically. This new imaginary of prostitution was institutionalized in the 1911 morality laws. Prostitution did not die out, but got relegated to more informal circuits. The 2000 legalization had few direct spatial effects because most of what was written in the law was already the practice in regulated prostitution. The recent plans of the city government for Amsterdam’s major red-light district, however, have dramatic consequences for prostitution. The growing regulation not only of prostitution as such but also of the places of prostitution results in the increasing concentration of brothels in an ever-smaller red-light district. Paradoxically, formal regulation also pushes part of the commodified sexual activities out of the red-light district and into informal circuits that are far less spatially bound. The new in/formalized spatial-sexual order recursively affects the imaginary of prostitution.

The first step towards the widespread use of renewable energy sources and preservation of our environment for the people of the future is to adopt the “green accounting” standards that translate socially and environmentally responsible behavior into monetary terms, the only language businesses understand. These standards have the potential of switching on the red light for all pollution-causing power plants, and those depleting the natural capital in any way, be it over-harvesting the forests, or exhausting the underground treasures – coal, oil, natural gas, etc. This paper will show how green accounting can help in changing the focus from the economic welfare to the total societal welfare, acknowledging the fact that human society is an integral part of the natural world. The paper will also briefly present the software developed by the authors that introduce the green accounting principles into the investment appraisal process, aiming at encouraging investments into renewable energy. The tool is also useful as a platform facilitating calibration of economic/financial instruments, like environmental taxes of governmental incentives, that are usually to boost renewable energy sector. The comparative analysis of investment into biofuel-powered combined heat and power production plant using two types of investment valuation standards, one based on conventional cash-flow analysis, the other based on green-accounting standards is detailed in the paper. The analysis is performed as a part of the European Commission Framework Program Project AFTUR, undertaken by the consortium consisting of respectful European Research Establishments in renewable energy area as well as major European biofuel-powered turbine producers. The results show that the wider adoption of green accounting standards would induce the unprecedented growth of the renewable energy sector, because it would make the investment into renewable energy attractive for investors.

Node cuttings of in vitro chrysanthemum (1.0 cm) were transplanted on MS basal media supplemented with 30gl− 1 sucrose and cultured for 35 days under six different light qualities: fluorescent (FL), blue LEDs (B), red LEDs (R), red and blue LEDs (RB), red and ...

We present a color tuning technique allowing to control the emission colors of polymer light emitting diodes (PLEDS), which is of considerable interest for flat panel display applications. The emission color variation of the PLED from blue to red-orange is achieved by blending small amounts of a red light emitting guest polymer with the active PLED layer consisting of a blue emitting laddertype poly (paraphenylene) (LPPP). Using this new technique we realized highly efficient stable single layer PLEDs emitting different colors including white light emission. Besides the color tuning, which is established by an efficient excitation energy transfer (EET) and charge transfer from the host, m-LPPP, to the guest polymer, a significant increase of the photoluminescence (PL) and the electroluminescence (EL) quantum efficiency is observed.