The present system of radio broadcasting in Australia consists of four categories, national, commercial, community, and high-power open narrowcasting (HPON) stations. The national broadcasters are ABC and SBS, nationwide independent nonprofit broadcasting networks, resembling the BBC in the UK, and might be labeled as “public broadcasting” in some contexts. However, “public broadcasting” in the Australian context does not include ABC and SBS. As the Australia imported the concept of “public broadcasting” from the USA, those stations are small, independent, nonprofit broadcasters that provide public access opportunities. Later, under the Broadcasting Act of 1992, community broadcasting was introduced to indicate this category to avoid confusion.
Armidale is a small country town with a population of 25, 000, and home to the University of New England (UNE) with some 4, 000 students. The history of nonprofit local radio broadcasting in Armidale dates back to 1970, when UNE started a campus radio on the AM band with a wireless telegraphy license rather than a radio broadcasting license. The station named itself Radio UNE (RUNE) and was one of the first campus radio services in Australia.
Through the 1970s as the social demand for accessible “public broadcasting” grew in Australia, people involved in RUNE started to seek possibilities to establish a “public” radio station in Armidale, taking advantage of the experience of RUNE. In 1976, a new “public” radio license was issued to 2ARM, which then shared most broadcasting facilities with RUNE. Since 1979, 2ARM has occupied its own studios and facilities in corners of Armidale City Hall buildings and fully separated from RUNE. 2ARM enjoyed a financially healthy period during the 1980s, but its budget gradually shrank in the 1990s, mainly as the result of sliced federal funding to community stations.
Meanwhile, RUNE switched transmission to the FM band in 1986 and renamed itself TUNE! FM. As the new Broadcasting Act of 1992 established HPON as a new category of broadcasting, TUNE! FM applied for a narrowcasting licence in 1994, started narrowcasting service by 1995, and its transmission power was raised to 10 W in 1999, sufficiently strong to cover the most populated area of the city.
Community-category stations are designed to serve a specific audience community, and 2ARM has been expected to serve general geographic communities of Armidale. In reality, however, 2ARM mostly targets the relatively elderly population. The presence of RUNE/TUNE! FM cast shadows on the service of 2ARM. On the other hand, TUNE! FM is a rare example of nonprofit narrowcasting services under the present system. While the other HPON in Armidale is mostly devoted to racing information, TUNE! FM practically functions as community radio for young people in Armidale. In reality, 2ARM and TUNE! FM are slightly different from the typical examples of the categories to which they belong, reflecting the needs and conditions of the locality they serve.

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The concept of the cohort has been broadly adopted in social science because scholars emphasize that those who experience the same era at the same life stage have similar life histories and social attitudes. However, how life is lived and social attitudes are influenced by the region in which one lives or has lived. In this study, the authors examined regions as providers of both opportunities and constraints for human beings and comparatively analyzed the life courses of two groups of women in their 30s, mainly based on data from questionnaire surveys and some interviews.
One group was Kanazawa respondents who had graduated from S High School in the city of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. S High School has a few rival schools in terms of students' performance and continuing to higher education. Teachers eagerly recommended that students enter the faculty of education at local national universities, because places at national universities are highly valued in the region and the faculty of education is easier to enter than other faculties. Apart from which schools to attend, continuing to higher education immediately after high school graduation is given great importance. Thus female students were advised to take the entrance exams to a junior college specializing in nursing just to be on the safe side, irrespective of whether they hoped to be nurses.
This teacher-driven educational tracking was criticized by most of the Kanazawa respondents, and some graduates of S High School were troubled by the gap between the jobs suitable for their major in university/college and the ones they really wanted. But it is also true that a respectable number of female graduates became teachers, nurses, or civil service employees, due to the career guidance of S High School. It is well known that women in these occupations tend to continue to work after marriage and childbirth, supported by fairly good employment conditions. In addition, married couples tend to live with the husband's parents and share housekeeping and childcare in Kanazawa. Therefore the labor force participation rate of married Kanazawa respondents was rather high.
The other group was Yokohama respondents who had graduated from K High School located in the city of Yokohama. K High School ranks with S High School in student abilities, and most students of K High School embark on higher education after graduation. In K High School, there was no substantial intervention of teachers when students considered careers after the high school graduation. Located in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Yokohama respondents had many alternatives of universities/colleges to enter. They did not place much importance on the possibility of obtaining practical knowledge and skills for employment in choosing a university/college in which to enroll, rather it was naïve interest in a specific field of study or the fame of the university that counted. Yokohama respondents also had many options when they sought a job after graduation from university/college. In job hunting, they valued the corporate culture and large firms, rather than the job description itself.
Yokohama respondents mostly followed their life course based on their own volition. However, image-led job hunting with little practical knowledge sometimes resulted in job turnovers due to the gap between hopes for and the reality of employment. Over 90% of married Yokohama respondents were members of nuclear families and this made it difficult to balance employment and childcare. Long and stressful commuting was also a hurdle for Yokohama respondents who worked outside the home, in contrast to the Kanazawa respondents' short commutes by car.
The high labor force participation rate of married Kanazawa respondents was not the result of a reasonable and purposeful determination with consideration for the actual conditions of the local labor market.

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By studying the census data and relevant socioeconomic data at the county level, we analyzed the spatiotemporal properties of the floating population (the number of migrants who did not change their household residence registration) during the period 1990-2000 in China. The results showed that, first, the spatial distribution of migrants (called “floaters” here) became more concentrated in the cities during the 1990s. Second, the number of floaters increased rapidly during this period, and the area in which floaters settled expanded quickly and grew into four population explosion belts: the coastal, Changjiang River, Beijing-Guangzhou Railway, and national border belts. This coincided well with the economic development of these regions, which was authorized and supported by the national government. Third, the number of interprovincial floaters increased rapidly and exceeded that of intraprovincial floaters in the 1990s.
To determine the controlling factors of such migration in China during the 1990s, we selected about 100 cities with a large population of floaters to analyze the relationship between the number of floaters and 10 socioeconomic variables. Stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted to obtain quantitative relationships between the number of floaters and the variables. Consequently, we found that four factors, city GDP, passenger trips per 10, 000 persons, per capita GDP, and foreign direct investment, could explain 83.7% of the number of floaters in 2000. City GDP showed the highest standard correlation with the number of floaters, which suggests that a highly developed economy is the most important factor to attract floaters. We also attempted to obtain a quantitative relationship between the number of floaters and the socioeconomic variables for all counties in China for which data were available (2, 327 counties), and found a fairly close relationship between the number of floaters and county GDP in 2000.

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