98 Abstracts / Mathematical Social Sciences 33 (1997) 93-99

death penalty, or how you can love your country and hate your government. Conservatives tend not to understand how liberals can be for protecting children while upholding the rights of criminals such as child molesters. The logic behind such positions for both liberals and conservatives is a metaphorical logic based on opposite family models and the shared 'Nation as Family' metaphor. In addition, varieties of liberals and conservatives (for example, libertarians) can be seen as arising from the parameters of variation within the models.

What conservatives know that liberals don't is that American politics is about morality and the family. Conservatives are more aware of the relationship than liberals are, largely because conservative intellectuals have thus far done a better job of spelling out the links. Liberals, of course, have an implicit morality and model of the family, but liberal intellectuals have been remiss in failing to characterize them adequately.

There is evidence from the studies ~of child development suggesting that the conservative family model is a disaster when it becomes to raising children, as well as results from cognitive science indicating that the model of mind required by conservative morality and politics is empirically false. For the first time, we can see results from the cognitive sciences as having a crucial bearing on morality and politics. This places the study of cognition alongside the study of economics, class, race, ethnicity, and gender as central to politics.

This talk is a brief overview of a book by the same title to appear in April from the University of Chicago Press.

Demography in global change studies. Waldo Tobler, Department of Geography, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

It is often considered that environmental impact is a function of population, affluence and technology. As interest has grown in the human dimensions of global change, attempts are being made to pin down the role of population and, especially, population growth. Demographic information is usually provided on a national basis, but we know that countries are ephemeral phenomena. As an alternative scheme, one might use ecological zones rather than nation states to organize environmental data. However, there is no agreement as to what these zones should be. By way of contrast, global environmental studies t h a t use satellites as collection instruments yield results indexed by latitude and longitude. Thus, it makes some sense to assemble information on the terrestrial arrangement of people in a compatible manner. This alternative is explored in the work described here, in which latitude-longitude quadrilaterals are used as bins for population information. This data format also has considerable advantage for analytical studies in which spatial series can be thought of as a two-dimensional extension of time series, or for simulation modeling, etc. The result of our recent work is a five minute by five minute raster, 4320 rows by 1548 columns in size and

Abstracts / Mathematical Social Sciences 33 (1997) 93-99 99

is available on FTP, of estimated 1994 world population generated from over 19 000 administrative unit boundaries and covering 221 countries. The number of people in these countries is estimated to be 5.618 billion, spread over 132 million km 2 of land. The paper details the methods used, problems encountered, applicability to movement modelling and other uses, and extensions needed.