What good is that bird? In a state department of conservation report John Schwegman writes about a study coauthored by suburban Morton Arboretum foresters in which they caged some small oak trees to keep away insect-eating birds and left other trees alone. Sure enough, over two growing seasons the bird-free trees grew significantly less than did the controls.
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AIDS educators in denial. “Despite the concerted efforts of AIDS educators, rates of HIV transmission among gay men began to rise in the mid-Eighties almost as suddenly as they had plummeted only a few years earlier,” writes clinical psychologist Walt Odets in AIDS & Public Policy Journal, reprinted in Harper’s (May). “By 1988 studies of gay men in urban centers were showing that about one third were willing to self-report the practice of unprotected anal intercourse. The real figures are certainly higher and are in fact astonishingly close to the figures we had on anal intercourse before there was an epidemic. In other words, years of AIDS education has probably produced almost no change whatsoever in the behavior that all gay men and their grandmothers know to be the most dangerous for transmitting HIV.” Odets’s diagnosis: AIDS educators blew it by insisting on “erring on the safe side,” requiring a nearly unattainable standard of behavior and thus unintentionally convincing many gay men that contracting HIV is inevitable.
The average amount loaned for multifamily buildings [five units or more] in low- and moderate-income community areas of the city was $54 million from 1983 to ’85 and $240 million from 1991 to ’93, according to a recent press release from the Woodstock Institute on South Dearborn. “Multifamily [buildings of 5 units or more] lending is crucial to economically healthy communities,” says Institute president Malcolm Bush. “It is a key source for neighborhood stability and revitalization. This increase is a CRA [federal Community Reinvestment Act] success–CRA is responsible for introducing financial institutions to new markets and business opportunities.”
