The Influence of Indoor Climate Control on Risk for Damages in Naturally Ventilated Historic Churches in Cold Climate

This article analyzes the indoor climate that creates risk of damages in naturally ventilated churches in the cold climate of Estonia. Indoor temperature and humidity were measured over a one-year period and the results were analyzed on the basis of damage functions: mold growth, risk of cracking and fracturing of wooden objects, and delamination of the gesso layer of panel paintings.

In unheated churches, one of the most dominant problems was very high relative humidity throughout the year, creating a high risk for mold and algae growth. Churches may need background heating to avoid freezing during a long cold winter that causes low surface temperatures of massive walls during the spring–summer period. It was found that mold risk was significantly lower in heated churches than in unheated or intermittently heated churches. The risk of mold growth was not decreased by the use of intermittent heating.

In heated churches, overheating (room temperature >+10ºC) causes a RH below 50% during cold periods, and the favorable period for irreversible response of panel paintings was significantly longer, so there is a higher risk that the gesso may crack or delaminate. From the point of view of the cracking and fracturing of wood, indoor climate conditions are in the safe range for most of the year.     

Diplomacy and revolution: The London conference of 1830 and the Belgian revolt

This paper examines Thomas Hill Green's changing attitude to the Reform Question between 1865 and 1876. Section 1 sketches the Radical landscape against which Green advocated reform between 1866 and 1867, paying particular attention to the respective positions of Gladstone, J.S. Mill and Bright on the relationship between responsible citizenship and class membership. Section 2 examines Green's theories of social balance and responsible citizenship at the time of his lectures on the English Civil War. Section 3 argues that, contrary to the established scholarship, Green's Radicalism was closer to Bright than to Gladstone and Mill during this period. Section 4 counters Richter's claim that Green abandoned democracy following the 1874 General Election, while arguing that even sympathetic commentators misunderstand Green's attitude to the Reform Question immediately after this date.     

Computed tomography study of snuff trays from San Pedro de Atacama (Northern Chile)

Wooden snuff trays from San Pedro de Atacama (SPA) in northern Chile are objects of particular museological value. Computed tomography (CT), a non-destructive analytical technique useful in the analysis of archaeological objects in which physical tampering is not desirable, was used to study provenience of wood, quality of craftmanship, taphonomic processes and nature of gemstone inlays in a group of snuff trays. While wood used in the manufacture of trays was mostly exogenous to SPA, gemstones used in inlays were likely of local origin. These findings support the active exchange of goods proposed for the south-central Andes region. Several features revealed in the trays support the view that craftsmen producing them were skillful artisans.     

Miocene scleractinian corals from a mixed siliciclastic–carbonate system: Bakhtiari succession,Zagros Basin (central-western Iran)

Colonial scleractinian corals were sampled from three levels within a Miocene marine unit of the Bakhtiari succession, Zagros Basin, central-western Iran. The first two coral-bearing intervals, A and B, contain small-scale scattered colonies and show a poor coral diversity, whereas the third, consisting of a strongly lithified limestone package, reflects a well-developed biostromal framework with higher coral skeletal volume within the Bakhtiari succession. The Bakhtiari succession coral assemblages are characterized by Porites sp. cf. P. maigensis, Porites sp. cf. P. mancietensis, Porites sp. cf. P. collegniana, Tarbellastraea reussiana, Favia sp., Montastrea sp. cf. P. tchihatcheffi, Favites sp. cf. P. neugeboreni, Favites sp. cf. P. neuvillei, Agathiphyllia sp. and Acropora sp. Sedimentological and palaeontological data indicate that the depositional environment is consistent with a mixed carbonate–siliciclastic ramp that was gently deepening basinwards from the shoreline. The hemispherical and massive growth forms of colonies and sparse branching forms dominated the well-illuminated euphotic zone. Abundant domestone and dense pillarstone coral growth fabrics interdigitating with coarse-grained terrigenous sediments developed in the shallow inner ramp environment. Branching forms and meandroid branching colonies together with some massive forms mostly inhabited the low-energy conditions of the lower euphotic to oligophotic zones of the middle ramp. In the middle parts of the mixed carbonate–siliciclastic ramp, sparse pillarstone together with domestone comprises a mixstone coral growth fabric. Fluctuations in nutrient and clastic sediment input, salinity and the growth of red algae likely terminated coral growth.     

Economic Globalization and its Problems: A Response to Eaton,Herpel, and Moe-Lobeda and Spencer

Abstract

Building on the other papers in this issue, I offer a theological critique of economic globalization. The theory, or "theology" that supports it leads people of good will, despite the many negative consequences of the globalized pursuit of growth, to pursue such growth, as measured by GDP, as the goal of economic policy. This economistic theology takes no account of human community or ecological sustainability. Until it is changed economists will continue to direct us toward catastrophe.     

LABOUR FORCE GROWTH IN SINGAPORE

Singapore's labour force participation rates are at high levels. Age-specific rates, especially of men, have approached those of developed countries. The current very low total fertility rate of 1.25 would have major implications for Singapore's labour supply and economy in a closed population. Multi-pronged approaches such as measures to increase fertility, increase labour force participation, and to augment the local workforce with migrants are discussed. In the context of Singapore's physical land constraint, continued growth in the labour force in the long term would be challenging. Future gross domestic product growth is likely to be more sustainable via labour productivity growth. Identifying new niche areas of growth and having a nimble and quality workforce would become more important than labour force growth.     

Regional Policy as Interaction between National Institutions and Regional Science

As a reaction to emerging regional imbalances, discussions regarding growth centre policy began in the Nordic countries during the latter part of the 1960s. At this time, a working group within the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) provided a policy option based on international theories from urban and agglomeration economics. Within the actual growth centre policies in Norway, Sweden and Finland, central elements from the EFTA concept related to the scale of the centres were, however, not adopted. Instead, growth centres were located to places that had a smaller population than the 30,000 inhabitants recommended by the EFTA concept. This outcome was related to the fact that the EFTA concept was adapted to the existing regional policy institutions. As these institutions were egalitarian and redistributive in character, the Nordic growth centre policies favoured a more dispersed settlement structure than suggested by the EFTA concept.     

Let there be light … and bread: the United Nations,the developing world,and atomic energy’s Green Revolution

Although President Eisenhower’s 1953 ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech typically is associated with the promotion of nuclear power, it also recommended other peaceful uses of the atom, including applications in agriculture. ‘Developing’ countries in particular took a keen interest in food preservation, grain disinfestation, fertilizer studies, insect control, and mutation breeding, all using irradiation. A conflict of philosophies emerged at the United Nations between the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA stood accused of promoting a narrow range of technological solutions, ignoring more sensible but less sensational techniques, and tempting the poorest countries of the world to achieve ‘modernization’ with unproven technologies. The present essay outlines the origins of FAO/IAEA conflict and collaboration in the 1960s, and explores the failed effort of plant geneticist Ronald Silow to stop what he saw as the IAEA’s hijacking of agriculture at the UN.     

“Where can we put our homes?” Gypsies and Travelers in the English Green Belt

For the past few centuries, anti-nomadic legislation has attempted to settle nomads who traveled throughout England and elsewhere in Europe, as their mobilities challenged the sedentarist goals of modern nation states. As recently as 1994, the nomadic way of life was effectively criminalized in England and Wales, revealing the unbalanced power relations between Gypsies and Travelers and the state. This article will examine and highlight the agency and spatialities of resistance of nomadic Gypsy and Traveler groups in England who are struggling for the recognition of their right to legally inhabit caravan sites in areas such as Green Belt land. The selection of places in the Green Belt for their homes offers another contested landscape that runs counter to the typical understanding of Gypsies and Travelers residing in marginalized places due to discrimination or wanting to remain unnoticed. By drawing from Gypsies and Travelers' own narratives, this article documents how they navigate through policies designed to constrain them.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.