Re-examining the Australian public's attitude to military casualties: post-heroic or defeat-phobic?

Australia, like most other developed democracies, is often alleged to suffer from ‘casualty phobia’. The perception that the Australian public will not tolerate casualties in foreign conflicts has shaped the decisions of both civilian and military policy makers. Measures taken to protect Australian forces from casualties may, for instance, also serve to increase the risk to civilians in the country to which they are deployed. The USA underwent a similar debate some years ago. Innovative public opinion research techniques—especially ‘survey experiments’ which allow researchers to establish causal relationships by consciously manipulating one variable while holding others constant—have established that the American public are not reflexively casualty-phobic and that the impact of casualties on public opinion can be outweighed by other factors, such as the public's confidence in the mission's overall success. In this article, the author replicates one of the key survey experiments from the US debate, suitably adapted to Australian conditions, with a nationally representative sample of Australian voters. The author finds that the same pattern holds in Australia as in the USA: casualties do lower public support for a given mission, but the mission's chances of success matter more.     

Policy Bubbles

We develop the concept of a policy bubble to capture the notion of long‐term overinvestment in a policy. In sketching the relation of policy bubbles to economic bubbles, we describe how these two concepts have similar origins but different trajectories because they are filtered by different institutions. We examine in some detail three likely instances of ongoing policy bubbles: crime policy, school reform (charter schools and private education vouchers), and the contracting and privatization of public services. We show how these cases differ from the housing bubble of 1997–2007, how they differ from each other, and the extent to which they can be considered policy bubbles. Last, we suggest this concept can help unify the policy process literature with the practice of policy evaluation and outline testable hypotheses for future research.     

The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It

Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front‐page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Attention diversity is an important variable in its own right, offering insight into how agendas vary in their accessibility to policy problems and perspectives. Yet despite the importance of attention diversity, we lack a standard for how best to measure it. This paper focuses on the four most commonly used measures: the inverse Herfindahl Index, Shannon's H, and their normalized versions. We discuss the purposes of these measures and compare them through simulations and using three real‐world datasets. We conclude that both Shannon's H and its normalized form are better measures, minimizing the danger of spurious findings that could result from the less sensitive Herfindahl measures. The choice between the Shannon's H measures should be made based on whether variance in the total number of possible items (e.g., issues) is meaningful.     

Iron isotope analysis of red and black pigments on pottery in Nasca,Peru

The Nasca culture of the south coast of Peru developed during the first millennium ad and is known internationally for its elaborately decorated polychrome pots. Despite decades of iconographic analysis, little is known about the more technological aspects of Nasca pigment production and application. We present results from a pilot study on iron isotopes as a potential line of inquiry into the differences between red and black pigments in Nasca pigments. As well, we conduct a small firing experiment to examine potential changes in isotope composition. Our analyses show three significant results. First, firing does not change the isotopic ratios of Fe in pigments. Second, red and black pigments show differences in their iron isotope composition, which relate to differences in the minerals used to make the different colors. Third, naturally available hematite samples show greater isotopic variation than pigment samples, suggesting that people selected a limited range of iron oxides to produce pigments.     

Albert Lautman et le souci brisé du mouvement

We locate Albert Lautman's work as a sort of agent of the break of symmetry in the framework of the traditional opposition of speculative philosophy and the physico-mathematical sciences. The stakes for philosophy are, with very rare exceptions, very poorly perceived. On this level, we return to the question of Lautman's supposed «Platonism» and we confront it with its fundamental reading of Martin Heidegger. The consequences of this insertion in the heideggerian furrow are fundamental for a just restitution of this thought and this philosophy into what they retain in current thought. On the other side, that of Lautmanian entries in the field of mathematical physics, we insist on the extreme prospective alacrity of his gaze, his philosophic power which comes to reinforce this strange sensibility toward what constituted the essential part of theoretical mathematics and physics in his time. In this sense, his position occupies actually one of the nodal points of the «surrationalistic» landscape.