Federal intellectual property policy and the history of technology: The case of NASA patents

This essay explores two closely entwined issues in recent history of federal R&D policy: (a) the disposition of the US government intellectual property (IP), and (b) how to best assess the effectiveness of federal patenting and licensing policies. It does so by examining two decades of patenting policy and practice at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The essay concludes with observations on the limits of our current approach to collecting data on the disposition of federal IP, and an alternative framework for examining the role of IP in the history of modern technology.     

Perspectives on the family and social change: Asia and the Middle East

Hanley, Susan B., and Arthur P. Wolf, eds. Family and Population in East Asian History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985, xx + 360 pp. including reference notes and index. $45.00 cloth.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, ed. Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, xii + 356 pp. including chapter notes. $24.50 cloth, $11.95 paper.

Schrijvers, Joke Therese. Mothers for Life: Motherhood and Marginalization in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka. Delft: Eburon, 1985. xiv + 273 pp. including photographs,. glossary, and references, (n.p.)     

‘Keeping up the Culture’: Gunai Engagements with Tourism

ABSTRACT This paper intervenes in the hidden history of Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia. I argue that for Aboriginal people living in the assimilation era engagement with tourism represented an important means of cultural survival. Working across anthropology and art history this paper focuses on the boomerangs and other artefacts produced by Gunai in Gippsland, Victoria for their own use and for exchange with tourists. The findings from this paper show that, far from being a sign of commodification and a capitulation to capitalism, this cultural production was carried out in opposition to authorities who viewed it as potentially disruptive and counter to assimilation policies. It was this history of cultural practice which contributed to the resurgence of Koorie culture in the 1970s and 1980s.     

Fitting into a New Place: Irish Immigrant Experiences in Shaping a Canadian Landscape

Escaping one heritage of British colonialism for another, Irish immigrants to Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth century helped to shape the image of Canada and Canadian nationalism. In this paper, I compare the diversity of Irish immigrant experiences in Canadas urban and wilderness landscapes. The Irish immigrant experience in major urban centers is well documented. Community neighborhoods, Church activities and domestic and manual labor constitute just part of the stories of urban Irish Canadians in cities such as Toronto. The popular conception of the Irish as strictly city people is strengthened by the lack of discussion of the Irish immigrant role in taming (and ideologically shaping) the wilderness of Western Canada. It is argued that this has to do with the colonial image of the Irish from which British imperialist Canada sought to distinguish itself.     

Estimating the Number of Combatants during the Mixtón War in the Peñol de Nochistlán

Abstract

The objective of this article is to determine the number of combatants in the Mixtón War (1541–42), one of the most important military confrontations of the early years of the vice-royalty in Western Mexico, by analysing the Peñol de Nochistlán. To this end, information provided by historians has been compared with the population estimates established from the density of settlements known from archaeological evidence in order to define the area occupied by the armies involved in the conflict. This exercise resulted in a shifting array of spaces that could have been used by the combatants during confrontations. However, it will enable more intense archaeological prospecting in the area around the site of El Tuiche — the place identified as the Peñol of Nochistlán — revealing new evidence of the events that occurred on this battlefield.     

Gender and poverty: what we know,don’t know,and need to know for Agenda 2030

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.     

Sea level rise or shallow-water midden deposition? Archaeopedology at the Seminole Rest archaeological site,coastal East-Central Florida

Sedimentological and faunal studies at the Seminole Rest archaeological site on the Atlantic coast of Volusia County, FL, addressed the question of whether construction of the large shell mound at the site began on dry land or in the shallow waters of Mosquito Lagoon. Particle-size analysis defined a sand body beneath the hardshell clam mound, which is bordered by mucky tidal marsh and the shallow, silty lagoon. Weathered kaolinite, hydroxy-interlayer vermiculite, and gibbsite clays in the sub-mound sediments, identified by X-ray diffraction, contrasted with the ‘shrink-swell’ smectite clays of the tidal marsh and mound periphery and corroborated the particle-size evidence of a sand bar or bank. The presence in the sub-mound sediments of articulated valves of the diminutive Brown Gem Clam (Parastarte triquetra, Family Veneridae), and their absence in the silty marsh sediments, presented another line of evidence for a sand body beneath the mound. Parastarte is a common inhabitant of shallowly submerged sand bars. The existence of articulated valves of all size classes below the mound argues for a thriving population of the clams in their preferred habitat at the onset of mound deposition, which would have begun in the shallow water adjacent to the shore and not on dry land.