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The article announces the appointment of Rosemary Bryant as Australia's first chief nursing and midwifery officer (CNMO).

Rapid urbanization and car-centric mobility solutions have resulted in the degradation of environmental urban quality, impacting people's health and well-being and city economies and harming urban ecosystems. Faced with the need to tackle traffic pollution, more than 300 low emission zones (LEZs) have been implemented, causing some social controversy. Nonetheless, researchers have focused their studies on evaluating LEZ efficacy towards urban congestion and air pollutants reduction, health and well-being improvement. This study presents a literature review of what is known about acceptability and acceptance of the population regarding the implementation of LEZs, along with the main issues, best practices, and suggestions to promote a better perception and mobility behavior change. Based on research conducted in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, only 36 of 540 peer-reviewed articles on LEZs address public attitudes. Among the main findings, the following stand out: the existing gap in environmental urban quality approaches between countries, namely the Global North; the existence of few studies that evaluate perceptions before and after LEZ implementation; the lack of LEZ studies that consider noise and biodiversity, seeking a broader approach to this measure; and the importance of developing a support package measures that involves affected stakeholders and are adapted to each city's characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a number of books and articles in major sociology journals have cast doubt on the theoretical assumptions, methods, and results of positivist sociology. In contrast to earlier positivism debates, the current critique comes from positivist sociologists themselves, including some of the leading representatives of quantitative research. Although limited by a continuing commitment to the positivist paradigm, their discussion suggests that this paradigm may be intrinsically unsuitable for the analysis of social processes whose non-linear and chaotic nature conflicts with the assumptions of linear causality and predictability basic to positivist analysis. Ironically, one impetus for this reevaluation comes from the natural sciences from which positivism has taken its cues for such a long time, in particular the development of theories of chaos which have replaced linear Newtonian physics in the analysis of many inherently unpredictable natural phenomena.