Spatial and environmental impacts on adverse birth outcomes in Ontario

This study assesses the overall spatial variations and neighbourhood‐level “hot spots” of low birth weight and preterm birth incidence within three public health units in Ontario, Canada. The analysis uses a stepwise approach of intra‐class correlation analysis, a spatial scan statistic, and multilevel spatial modeling. Results show that neighbourhood level variation accounts for only 2–3 percent of the total variation of adverse birth outcomes in the study area. However, strong spatial autocorrelation is observed at the neighbourhood level, and spatial clusters of relatively high adverse birth outcome rates exist in areas that are associated with environmental risks, including pollution sources and proximity to highways. Thus, although estimated neighbourhood impacts on adverse birth outcomes are small compared with those of individual‐level risks, local high potential environmental risk areas are identifiable. Environmental surveillance and spatial statistical analysis should be conducted regularly by local health authorities to identify and monitor the impact of environmental changes on health in general and on birth outcomes in particular. Specific community‐oriented health interventions may be required to reduce observed local health impacts.     

Church Architecture in Devon

Identity is formed and reproduced through our relationships with human and non-human others. This paper applies this perspective to conduct an archaeological investigation of how identities emerged in urban environments during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through cuisine. This is achieved through a comparative analysis of food remains and the associated material culture from a range of medieval sites in Hampshire of different size and status. I argue that choices and strategies in preparing, cooking and consuming food were enmeshed within multiple facets of urban identity including gender, status and profession.     

The Nominations Presidents Make: Appointing Supreme Court Justices

This paper tests the hypothesis that presidents are more successful in Congress during their first hundred days in office. Analyzing an original dataset composed of the bills on which presidents took official positions, it finds that presidents indeed have higher success rates during the first hundred days of their first year than they do later during their first year or during the first hundred days of noninaugural years. This effect is strongest for presidents who face divided government.     

The Role of Faith in Historical Research

The implied strategy and the history projected in the new book of Jens Bruun Kofoed, Text and History, fails to measure up to the critical principles of both theology and science established by Thomas Acquinas' centuries' old distinction between faith and reason. An apologetic intention in Kofoed's book attempts to demonstrate that the biblical history of his evangelical faith is not unreasonable. Thomas Thompson, on the other hand, thinks it is necessary to hold the line between faith and science, which St. Thomas drew some seven centuries ago. What Kofoed argues in an effort to project a history of Israel, which would be an alternative to that of the “Copenhagen school” is not science. Nor are his rules of evidence those that the world of secular history requires. Led by an apologetic rhetoric and understanding of historical argument, Kofoed's revised Århus dissertation is dominated by a critique of the “Copenhagen school,” which attempts to show that an alternative answer is not impossible. Although emphasizing the historical methods of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche in his critique, Kofoed neglects to include in his discussion their discussions of method or, in Lemche's case, anything he has written before 1991. His understanding of their dependency on the Annales school is clearly mistaken as is his understanding of the debates about the relationship between historicity, genre and composition. Finally, his discussion of the comparative method is misleading and ill informed.     

Death in the sun: the bioarchaeology of an early post-medieval hospital in Gibraltar

SUMMARY: In 2014, during construction work at the ex-Civil Hospital in Gibraltar, excavations led by the Gibraltar Museum revealed a major, previously unknown burial ground containing more than 200 skeletons. We present the historical, archaeological and radiometric dating evidence from the site alongside the results of initial osteological analyses. The data indicate that the burials pertain to an earlier 16th-century Spanish hospice, and therefore stand to offer new insights into the functioning of this early modern hospital and the health and movements of people at a time of incipient globalization.     

Progress and pitfalls in survey methodology

William M. O'Barr, David H. Spain, and Mark A. Tessler, eds. Survey Research in Africa: Its Applications and Limits. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973. x + 349 pp. Illustrations, tables, references, bibliography, and index. $15.00 (doth), $4.95 (paper).