Indications of embalming in Roman Greece by physical,chemical and histological analysis

The partially mummified remains of a high-status female (ca. 1700 BP, Thessaloniki, Greece) were found inside a Roman-type marble sarcophagus containing a lead coffin. The individual was positioned on a wooden pallet, wrapped in bandages, and covered with a gold-embroidered purple silk cloth. Besides the clothes, remnants of soft tissue as well as the individual's original hair style and eyebrows were exceptionally well preserved. In addition to the macroscopic examination, microscopic and biochemical analyses were undertaken. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis, and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) were applied to examine the tissue preservation and probable mechanisms of mummification. The presence of chemical components, such as sesquiterpenes, triterpenoids, and diterpenoids, originating from coniferous and pistacia resins, myrrh, and other spices, verify ancient information on preparation methods of the dead in Greek and Roman times. These chemical components are thought to have played a prominent role in the mummification mechanism in this particular case. The potential effect of the lead coffin in the mummification process was also examined. Energy-dispersive X-ray analysis failed to detect lead penetration into the tissues, suggesting that the coffin played a limited role in the preservation of soft tissue.     

Complexity,Capacity, and Budget Punctuations

The budgeting literature has long focused on “institutional friction” as a cause of ubiquitous punctuated equilibrium (PE) findings. A recent wave of scholarship looks to identify specific institutional mechanisms that affect the number of punctuations in policy outputs. We contribute to this growing body of research by focusing on the complexity of the institutional environment surrounding a policy area as well as that of the government as a whole. These factors have opposite effects: the more complex a policy area, the greater the likelihood of extreme spending changes. But, higher institutional capacity in general leads to greater stability. To test these ideas, we develop a novel index of budgetary change that balances the conceptual importance of extreme changes while analyzing the entire distribution of budget changes, not only the tails. In addition, we also demonstrate that findings are robust to a number of important distinctions, such as between series associated with slowly moving demographic trends or quickly moving stochastic events. We, therefore, demonstrate the robustness of important findings from the established literature, add a new measure of the dependent variable, and push the literature forward with a new focus on issue complexity and institutional capacity.     

Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960–2008

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever‐increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960–2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy.     

Recovering a "Lost" Story Using Oral History: The United States Supreme Court's Historic Green v. New Kent County, Virginia, Decision

Abstract In 1965, New Kent County, located just east of Richmond,Virginia, became the setting for the one of the most importantschool desegregation cases since Brown v. Board of Education.Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate butequal" unconstitutional, both public schools in New Kent, theGeorge W. Watkins School for blacks and the New Kent Schoolfor whites, remained segregated. In 1965, however, local blacksand the Virginia State NAACP initiated a legal challenge tosegregated schools, hoping to initiate desegregation where theprocess had yet to begin and to accelerate the process in areaswhere token desegregation was the norm. In 1968, the U.S. SupremeCourt decision in Charles C. Green v. the School Board of NewKent County forced New Kent County and localities across thestate and nation to fulfill the promise of Brown. While thecase has been part of the court records since it was decidedin 1968, it has remained largely unknown to the general publicand many scholars of the era. This article is an attempt touse the tool of oral history to present the people and the storybehind Green v. New Kent County and to add another piece tothe puzzle that was school desegregation in this country.     

Representation and Agenda Setting

We develop a new approach to the study of representation based on agenda setting and attention allocation. We ask the fundamental question: do the policy priorities of the public and of the government correspond across time? To assess the policy priorities of the mass public, we have coded the Most Important Problem data from Gallup polls across the postwar period into the policy content categories developed by the Policy Agendas Project ( Baumgartner & Jones, 2002 ). Congressional priorities were assessed by the proportion of total hearings in a given year focusing on those same policy categories, also from the Agendas Project. We then conducted similar analyses on public laws and most important laws, similarly coded. Finally we analyzed the spatial structure of public and congressional agendas using the Shepard‐Kruskal non‐metric multidimensional scaling algorithm. Findings may be summarized as follows: First, there is an impressive congruence between the priorities of the public and the priorities of Congress across time. Second, there is substantial evidence of congruence between the priorities of the public and lawmaking in the national government, but the correspondence is attenuated in comparison to agendas. Third, although the priorities of the public and Congress are structurally similar, the location of issues within the structure differs between Congress and the general public. The public “lumps” its evaluation of the nations most important problems into a small number of categories. Congress “splits” issues out, handling multiple issues simultaneously. Finally, the public tends to focus on a very constrained set of issues, but Congress juggles many more issues. The article has strong implications for the study of positional representation as well, because for traditional representation to occur, there must be correspondence between the issue‐priorities of the public and the government. We find substantial evidence for such attention congruence here.     

Children's projected political preference: transcending local politics

Traditionally, research on political preference has primarily focused on adults within their local political context. This research attempts to show that the perceived political preference of children is part of their national identity, and encompasses not only local politics but also the global and regional discourse. The present study surveyed 1187 Palestinian adolescents attending school, grades 5–7, in the West Bank to examine whether children's future political party preference is grounded in local/global discourse. The findings revealed a discrepancy between participants' perceptions of the local dominant political party and their projected political party preferences. This research argues that political party preference is facilitated through the transcendence of national identity embedded in children's geopolitical agency. The significance of the findings emphasizes that territorial boundaries are artificial; therefore, children's geopolitical agency is impacted by extraterritorial discourse and is able to transcend the local and regional context into a global politics.