Titus's Tinnitus

Historical approaches to tinnitus have depended highly on cultural factors. While ancient Oriental mysticism regarded it as sensitivity to the divine, Roman medicine associated it with depressive and seizure disorders on the basis of presumed common pathophysiology shared by the three conditions. In the Babylonian Talmud, tinnitus appears as Titus's curse: a gnat buzzing in the brain, responding to sound therapy, and then habituating. Various sources show varied emphases with common attention for contextual and emotional aspects that have become an important focus in modern management of tinnitus.     

La persistance des relations pre-politiques entre agents de l'autorite et classes populaires pendant la revolution francaise (le discours public de l'autorite en situation d'emeute)

This article provides an intellectual history of the status of wage earners as conceptualized within the natural law paradigm by European writers both on the Continent and in Britain. Historians of political discourse have mostly investigated the consequences of such a status for the political rights of labourers. This article shows that the crucial moves were made by different authors analysing the relation of servant to master either in the domestic sphere or in private contracts. The article further contends that that resulting deeply ambiguous analyses implied a far from complete personal freedom for wage earners. This had a decisive impact on different visions of commercial society in early modern times, and left a significant legacy for moderns.     

Stocking Up: The Role of Temporal and Spatial R&D Stocks

Endogenous growth models are built around the concept of a knowledge stock. This knowledge stock can also be interpreted as a localized stock that operates at the regional level, as is common in the regional innovation systems literature. We use data from the second, third and fourth Community Innovation Surveys (covering 1994–1996, 1998–2000 and 2002–2004) to measure the build-up of knowledge at a very low regional aggregation level (“across streets and hallways”) in the Netherlands. In doing so, we account for regional agglomeration effects. We find that such local knowledge stocks have a small influence on innovation and are far outweighed by firm-specific characteristics.     

Scaling heritage. The construction of scales in the submission process of alpinism to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list

ABSTRACT

For the last two decades, the polysemous notion of ‘scale’ has drawn an increasing amount of attention among scholars studying heritage policies and practices, often with regard to UNESCO conventions. Significantly, in many of these works, terms such as ‘global’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ are connected to categories of ‘scale’ or ‘level’ that are taken for granted by the scholars who use them to guide their analysis. This paper, in contrast, promotes a different, constructivist understanding of the notion of scale. From our perspective, there is an added value to be found in focusing—without using any preconceived or external conception of scale—on the ways in which stakeholders conceive of and use scale throughout the processes of heritage making. Using the case of alpinism and the creation of its file for submission to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, we show that the interest of this approach lies in its comprehensive ability to highlight how people define, elaborate and use scale in order to qualify their practices or to achieve specific goals.     

Industrial Policy in Wallonia: A Rupture with the Past?

One of the main issues facing almost all European regional policy-makers is how to ensure a smooth adaptation of their industrial structure in the face of changing societal and technological parameters. In the case of the Belgian region Wallonia, industrial decline has particularly marked the economy during recent decades and the need to promote structural change has been a central preoccupation of national and, subsequently, regional governments. At the same time, the highly complex system of governance in Belgium renders the definition and application of a coherent regional industrial policy difficult. This paper explores the development of industrial policy in the Walloon region with particular attention to the period since 1990 and the pertinence of the instruments and delivery mechanisms with respect to the underlying structural issues facing the regional economy. The paper is divided into four sections: the first offers a historical profile of the industrial development of the Walloon economy and in particular identifies some of the factors which provoked a serious structural crisis. The section reviews the economic impact of the successive phases of rationalization and diversification which have taken place since the 1970s and discusses how the industrial strategies adopted by the business sector and supported by the regional government have influenced the speed of economic regeneration. The second section considers the complex federal system of government in Belgium and how it influences the freedom of action for regional industrial policy. The governance of the economy by the numerous public or semi-public institutions active in the field of industrial policy is a crucial issue. A critical review of the main initiatives, instruments and targets of industrial policy in Wallonia is offered in section three, while the paper concludes by contrasting the Walloon industrial policy with initiatives taken in the neighbouring area of South-West Flanders and ponders the issue of whether in the end the key factor arresting the development of Wallonia is the insufficient level of 'social capital'.