Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat,India

This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the outcome of a dialectic between the limited capacity of the state to provide public services and the strategies that local politicians employ to win elections.     

Remote Runways: Air Transport and Distance in Tonga

Air transport brings areas 'closer together'. But it leaves some places relatively more isolated than when all depended on other modes of transport. Improved technology accentuates this tendency. Where traffic is low and distance long, the maintenance of links is costly. These issues are examined at both international and national scales in the case of Tonga, using several measures of distance and relative accessibility.     

Residential movement among the poor: the constraints on housing choice in Latin American cities

"The paper examines the validity of current theories of intra-city migration, subjecting those theories to the test of explaining new data collected in a total of 13 low-income settlements in three Latin American cities: Bogota, Mexico City, and Valencia, Venezuela. The study focuses attention upon the principal reception points for migrants; the location of previous place of residence for contemporary barrio dwellers; [and] the tenure and dwelling characteristics of previous places of residence. The authors conclude that residential patterns in Latin American cities are less the outcome of migrant choice, as some theories argue, and more the product of constraints imposed upon the land and housing markets."     

Luminescence dating of anthropogenic deposits from Tall Zarʿa in the Jordan Valley

This study uses quartz-based optically stimulated luminescence dating to determine when a massive fortification wall (W11186) was constructed in the archaeological site of Tall Zarʿa in the Jordan Valley. A total of 11 samples of sediments were taken from a trench on the north side of the wall (extramuros). The extracted quartz grains had good luminescence characteristics and were identified as well bleached by comparison with feldspar infrared-stimulated luminescence (IRSL) ages. The optical ages showed that the deposition against the wall occurred in two different periods. The first was around 3.20 ± 0.07 ka ago (Iron Age), and the second was around 2.28 ± 0.08 ka (Hellenistic period). Human activity was evident because of the intermixing of cultural material with the presumed naturally deposited units.     

Parties,Governments and Pollsters: A New Form of Patronage?

In its first term, the Howard government hired Australasian Research Strategies (ARS), headed by pollster Mark Textor, to conduct market research for several Commonwealth departments and agencies. This was, the Labor Opposition claimed, a case of the Liberals handing jobs to their 'mates'. Textor played a key role in the Liberals' 1996 and 1998 federal election campaigns. However, Labor's attack rings hollow since in the 1980s the Hawke government similarly contracted Rod Cameron's ANOP to conduct opinion research for Commonwealth departments and agencies. At the time Cameron was Labor's strategic pollster and centrally involved in planning Labor election campaigns. On both sides of Australian politics, governments have begun to channel patronage towards their party's pollsters. In this research note, we suggest that this development cannot be explained as 'jobs for the boys'. Instead, this new form of patronage has its roots in the vital role that pollsters now play in guiding election campaigns, and in the commercial reality that Australian politics provides too little work to sustain specialist political pollsters. Parties in government now appear to utilise incumbency to sustain an ongoing relationship with the commercial polling organisations like ANOP and ARS to whom they will entrust much of the planning of their campaign for re-election.     

Letter to the Editor: Reexamining Penfield’s Homunculus

Snyder and Whitaker’s (2013) discussion of Penfield’s homunculus in a recent issue of this journal was stimulating but I believe mistaken in several ways. This letter clarifies the diagram’s supposed ambiguity, highlights a largely overlooked problem with improper scaling and challenges the authors’ argument for the superiority of the 1950 version of the image.     

The development of a scientific understanding of synesthesia from early case studies (1849-1873)

The first case of synesthesia was reported in 1812 ( Jewanski, Day, & Ward, 2009 ). However, it took almost seven decades before the idea of synesthesia entered the mainstream of science and, subsequently, art. There are no known new cases described between 1812 and 1848, but in the following three decades there are at least 11 reported cases of synesthesia and many reviews of these cases. This comes at an important period in the history of the neurosciences, and for sensory physiology in particular. However, the literature that describes synesthesia during this period is largely unknown to contemporary researchers and historians. The aim of this review is to discuss the reports of synesthesia during this period, providing translations of some key passages, and to place these reports within the contextual framework of nineteenth-century neuroscience.