The first record of palaeopathology from the zooarchaeological record of late Pleistocene,southwest Tasmania

Several bones from the Late Pleistocene archaeological site, Kutikina Cave, in southwest Tasmania, show pathological conditions. The majority of these specimens represent Bennett's or red‐necked wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus), with a single specimen of the Common wombat (Vombatus ursinus) recorded. While there has been extensive work in this region of Australia since the early 1980s, this is the first record of palaeopathology from the late Pleistocene of Tasmania, and the first from a human accumulation of predominately macropod material. The palaeopathology raises several questions concerning the mobility of these animals which might have increased their susceptibly to predation, while some of the effected elements are fragmented, suggesting that people utilised these bones despite their deformities. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public Contest through the Popular Media: The Mining Industry's Advertising War against the Australian Labor Government

This article explores the ‘mining tax ad war of 2010’, which contributed to the removal of a first-term Labor prime minister and shaped Australia's Minerals Resource Rent Tax. In particular, it examines the uses, ethics and consequences of advocacy advertising, which is an under-explored aspect of communication power. The article identifies advocacy advertising as an increasingly prevalent technique used by corporations and lobby groups to influence public policy in Australia. In conclusion, the article focuses on the regulatory environment for such campaigns and the areas of future research that might help to safeguard democratic practices.

本文讨论了2010年的矿税广告战,该战把第一任期的工党领袖拉下了马,并造就了澳大利亚矿产资源租赁税。作者特别分析了广告宣传作为一种没太被研究的通讯权力的用途、伦理和结果。本文指出广告宣传日益成为公司和游说集团用以影响澳大利亚公共政策的流行工具。作者最后集中讨论了这类竞争的管制环境,以及有助于保护民主实践的未来研究领域。     

The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship

The Times was a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper phenomenon, defeating rival London newspapers through its skilful management, advanced technology, greater editorial resources and access to powerful politicians. Its authority enabled it to make and break governments. However, the uniqueness of The Times limits its usefulness as a historical source. This article begins with a brief history of The Times, before analysing how the newspaper remains centre stage in the historiography of journalism and of nineteenth-century culture more broadly, despite the digitization of provincial and other London papers. Over-dependence on The Times, it argues, has exaggerated the significance of London daily newspapers and underplayed the importance of weekly papers, particularly those published outside London. The Times was unusual because it was a metropolitan rather than provincial paper, with a focus on political news and a dearth of lighter, broader content, or news of events around the UK. Using quantitative analysis of recent scholarship, the article demonstrates that unwarranted conclusions are still drawn from over-use of this source and from a wider view that it was representative of nineteenth-century newspapers in general. The conclusion urges a more geographically and culturally nuanced approach to Victorian newspapers, beyond a metropolitan-focused political and cultural history.     

Empirical Zoning Distributions for Small Area Data

It is well established that using data summaries for a set of geographic areas or zones to estimate the parameters of a statistical model, commonly called ecological inference, frequently leads to the modifiable area unit problem (MAUP). In this article, the zoning effect of the MAUP is investigated for a range of scales. A zoning distribution is defined, and then used to characterize the zoning effect for parameter estimates from ecological analyses. Zone‐independent parameter estimates are obtained using the mean of the zoning distribution, and assessed using the variance of the zoning distribution. Zoning distributions are illustrated for parameter estimates from two ecological regression models at multiple scales using Australian National Health Survey data. For both a continuous response variable and a binary response variable, the empirical zoning distributions are unimodal, relatively symmetrical with appreciable variation, even when based on a large number of zones. The “ecological mean,” or expected value of the empirical zoning distribution at each scale, displays systematic variation with scale and the zoning distribution variance also depends on scale. The results demonstrate that the zoning effect should not be ignored, and the sensitivity of ecological analysis results to the analysis zones should be assessed.     

Kimberley Friction: Complex Attachments to Water‐Places in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT Water, in all its physical, symbolic and metaphorical guises, has an obvious interconnection with people. Without water, human and other life forms cannot (and do not) exist. Less obvious is water's potential as a site of anthropological investigation to explore attachments to place. Such attachments, as Arturo Escobar observes, facilitate a multiplicity of place‐based cultures, and emerge when ‘connectivity, interactivity and positionality’ are present. His observation makes epistemological room for what Anna Tsing conceptualises as the ‘friction’ that permeates environmental and indigenous projects. Via Australian‐based Kimberley ethnographic insights, this article examines people's attachments to place‐based cultures when they become meaningful through multi‐layered tensions about water.     

Senate Retirements and Progressive Ambition among House Members in 1996

In this article we examine the decisions made by the 85 United States representatives from the 13 states from which United States senators were retiring in 1996 and by the 137 representatives from states holding Senate elections in which incumbents were seeking reelection. We use these data to examine individual-level decision making in order to reassess the conventional wisdom on progressive ambition of House members. Using a decision calculus derived from previous studies, we are able to understand the decisions made by all but a handful of the representatives under study. These findings should prove useful in predicting which representatives will exhibit progressive ambition in the future.     

ENSO influence on Holocene Aboriginal populations in Queensland, Australia

In the Pacific region, the onset of modern El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) activity at approximately 5000 years ago may have played a significant role in the development of cultures in the Pacific basin. Within Australia, similar trends in population and resource use have been identified but largely ascribed to cultural changes. To test human responses to changing ENSO activity through the Holocene we analysed a comprehensive suite of 710 radiocarbon ages from archaeological sites in ENSO-sensitive Queensland. We observe a dramatic and sustained increase in landscape activity at inland sites from 4860 ± 15 years ago, statistically indistinguishable from the timing of the onset of modern ENSO activity. Subsequent changes in long-term activity directly impacted on human populations indicating that once established, ENSO maintained a continuous influence on disparate cultures throughout the Pacific basin.