De-democratising the Irish planning system

This paper examines the practices deployed to de-democratise elements of the Irish planning system. It does so through scrutinizing the processes by which a new streamlined planning procedure for large scale residential developments was institutionalized. The paper investigates how a development lobby group successfully prompted the institutionalization of this streamlined procedure by momentarily capturing the policy formulation agenda surrounding a housing crisis. It demonstrates how this was achieved by defining problems regarding the democratic character of the planning system and accruing agency through solution specification and resonance with the ideologies and rationalities of pertinent political and senior civil servant decision makers. The paper undertakes this analysis by situating a discourse analytical approach within the Multiple Streams Framework. In doing so, the paper provides an original contribution to academic scholarship through novelty of theoretical application on a disquieting aspect of neoliberalism in a planning context that as yet has received limited attention.     

BABYLONIAN THEONUMERICS AND SCALE SYSTEMS

The Neo-Babylonian text UET VII, 126, published by the late Professor O.R. Gurney, shows that in 1.4^2 a fourth-string is listed, bilingually, as Sumerian ＇sa.4.tur＇=‘fourth, small-string＇,     

Early Medieval Trade on Japan’s Southern Frontier and its Effect on Okinawan State Development: Grey Stoneware of the East China Sea

In this paper I examine the development of a particular kind of grey stoneware called kamuiyaki which was produced and traded within the Ryukyu Islands, southwestern Japan, in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. The wares themselves, their chronology, and archaeological context are discussed. The kilns represent the first enterprise in the islands in which a commodity was made for exchange on a substantial scale. The establishment of the kilns in a remote area, with technological borrowing from both Japan and Korea, reflects social and economic trends of the beginning of the Medieval Period in Japan. Greyware production, circulation, and consumption, reconstructed from recent excavations, shows a political economy capable of fostering the development of small states on the island of Okinawa in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.     

Lung cancer, chronic disease epidemiology, and medicine, 1948-1964

Beginning in the early 1950s, a series of epidemiological, biochemical, pathological, and animal studies demonstrated a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. A number of reputable scientists challenged these findings, but for a variety of reasons, including the behavior of the tobacco industry, historians have assumed that these objections were insubstantial and disingenuous. Viewing these objections in scientific and medical perspective, however, suggests that there was a legitimate and reasonable scientific controversy over cigarette smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s and early 1960s. That controversy had important consequences. A new chronic disease epidemiology emerged, transforming the role and importance of epidemiology to medical research. This new epidemiology supplemented Koch's postulates, establishing a statistical method that allowed for linking environmental factors to the etiology of chronic diseases. The 1964 report to the surgeon general, Smoking and Health, represented the denouement and codification of these developments. This reexamination of the scientific controversy over smoking in the 1950s and early 1960s provides an important context for understanding the subsequent public relations battles between the tobacco industry and public health after 1964.