Sovereignty and inconvenience: The significance of Bentham's exasperation

This article explores the meaning of ‘inconvenience’ and ‘convenience’ in legal and philosophical reasoning. The argument is that such considerations were crucial in the practice of Australian courts in marking out the boundaries of judicial propriety in relation to parliamentary proceedings. This argument is made with recourse to usages of the terms in constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. The older meanings of these terns have now been lost to Australian constitutional law. Hence, I argue, the problem of the boundaries of judicial propriety must be the subject of broader or more theoretical considerations such that the political preferences of judges will be less capable of insulation from their judgments.     

Archaeology and Nationalism: Excavating the Foundations of Identity

Margarita Diaz-Andreu and Timothy C. Champion Nationalism and Archeology in Europe. P. Graves-Brown, S. Jones, C. Gamble (eds.) Cultural Identity and Archaeology: the Construction of European Communities. P. Kohl, C. Fawcett (eds.) Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology.     

Transitional change in proto-buildings: a quantitative study of thermal behaviour and its relationship with social functionality

The almost universal transition from ‘brushwood’ huts to ‘pithouses’ to above-ground rectilinear huts constitutes an example of architectural convergence, having occurred in numerous culturally unrelated regions around the world. This transition was accompanied by a pattern of change in the way these proto-buildings performed thermally. A quantitative study using engineering-analysis, outlined here, shows that the thermal microclimatic range and potential for selective thermal control (the building's thermal capacity) gradually increased throughout the proto-building phase. This means that the range of thermally dependent functions that the occupants were capable of performing would have correspondingly increased throughout the phase. This pattern, of increasing thermal capacity and the potential for social functionality that is present throughout the proto-building phase, is also present throughout the vastly longer term trajectory of change evident in the built environment generally. Over time, change in the built environment has tended towards the prevalence of classes of buildings that possess selectively adjustable thermal systems, systems that can accommodate diverse and changing social options.