Risk and injury portrayal in boys' and girls' favourite television programmes.

OBJECTIVES: To analyse the injury-related content of children's television programmes preferred by boys and by girls, and to determine whether there are more televised models of unsafe behaviour in programmes preferred by boys. METHODS: Parents of 4-11-year-old children identified their children's favourite television programmes. Content analysis of 120 episodes of children's favourite programmes was used to quantify safe and risky behaviours, actual injuries and potential injuries. The gender of the characters portraying the behaviours was also analysed. RESULTS: More risky behaviour was portrayed in the boys' favourite programmes (mean per episode = 6.40) than in the girls' favourite programmes (mean = 2.57). There were almost twice as many potential injuries (n = 310) as actual injuries (n = 157). Potential injuries were portrayed more often by male characters (mean = 1.92) than female characters (mean = 0.98), mostly in the boys' favourite programmes. Actual injuries occurred more often to male characters (mean = 1.04) than to female characters (mean = 0.27) overall. CONCLUSIONS: Television programmes preferred by this sample of boys portrayed male role models engaging in risky behaviours and injuries more often than the programmes preferred by the sample of girls.

Integrated modelling of nitrate loads to coastal waters and land rent applied to catchment-scale water management.

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires an integrated approach to river basin management in order to meet environmental and ecological objectives. This paper presents concepts and full-scale application of an integrated modelling framework. The Ringkoebing Fjord basin is characterized by intensive agricultural production and leakage of nitrate constitute a major pollution problem with respect groundwater aquifers (drinking water), fresh surface water systems (water quality of lakes) and coastal receiving waters (eutrophication). The case study presented illustrates an advanced modelling approach applied in river basin management. Point sources (e.g. sewage treatment plant discharges) and distributed diffuse sources (nitrate leakage) are included to provide a modelling tool capable of simulating pollution transport from source to recipient to analyse the effects of specific, localized basin water management plans. The paper also includes a land rent modelling approach which can be used to choose the most cost-effective measures and the location of these measures. As a forerunner to the use of basin-scale models in WFD basin water management plans this project demonstrates the potential and limitations of comprehensive, integrated modelling tools.