Meteorological influences on the spatial and temporal variability of NO2 in Toronto and Hamilton

The spatial and temporal variability of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) concentrations and their relationships with meteorology was evaluated in the Toronto–Hamilton urban airshed. NO₂ concentrations were highest in the early morning and late evening. Mean concentrations were highest in winter, although individual one-hour NO₂ concentrations were found to be highest in summer. Wind direction was the strongest control on hourly NO₂ concentration, and temperature and wind speed also had an effect. Our analysis of NO₂ concentration variation by wind direction showed that areas downwind of major highways, urban centres and industry were exposed to higher pollutant concentrations. Seasonal patterns of NO₂ concentration displayed significant spatial heterogeneity, in particular, in Toronto. Onshore winds sheltered coastal inhabitants from the full extent of NO₂ exposure they would otherwise experience. Seasonal variations in meteorology and emissions mean that the degree of spatial variability in NO₂ concentrations changes from season to season. This study will help to improve existing land-use regression-based NO₂ prediction models by incorporating meteorological controls on NO₂ distributions for health effect studies.     

Democracy and Instrumentalism

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of state socialism, among other factors, has led to a renewed interest in a certain conception of democracy as a fundamental organising principle for political debate and decision-making. Yet there are good reasons to suppose that the concept of democracy is severely limited in the role it can play here. This article examines some of these limits. In the first section we summarise a number of arguments from the 'revivalist' democratic literature and the conception of democracy presented within it. In doing so, we identify a conception of democracy-a conception we refer to generically as 'the democratic ideal'-that is defined both in relation to certain structural features and also in terms of a set of progressivist and socially ameliorative ends to which that ideal is seen as being especially conducive. In this reason our interest is not in any one version of the democratic idealalthough we do take many contemporary forms of the ideal in question to combine two central strands-as in the promotion of that ideal as instrumental in furthering certain economic and social ends. In the second section we call this ideal into question through a discussion of some of the problems associated with democratic forms of governance. We conclude with a discussion of the way in which the appeal to the democratic ideal in political debate and decision-making may actually depend on ignoring or suppressing the very politics that it aims to address.     

Did the 1996 Federal Election See a Blue-collar Revolt against Labor? A Queensland Case-study

In the immediate wake of the 1996 Australian federal elections pundits variously attributed the ALP's defeat to the loss of its 'heartlands', to the party's failure in government to retain the support of 'battlers', or even to the collapse of Labor's traditional blue-collar 'core' constituency. Using Queensland as a case-study, and drawing on aggregate as well as survey data, this research note provides support for claims that Labor's traditional support base deserted it in 1996.     

TOPOLOGIES OF HISTORY

History, it is routinely assumed, belongs primarily to time and the temporal. Yet although routine, the assumption is nevertheless mistaken. It is place or topos, which encompasses both time and space (and that is intimately tied to the notion of bound or limit), that is primary here, and so history has to be understood as determined topologically, and not merely temporally. The exploration and elaboration of this claim involves rethinking the ideas of time, space, and place as well as of language and narrative. History appears in its adventual character, but its adventuality is itself seen as a happening of place.     

The Troubled Courtship of Gladys and Mick

In 1959, a Northern Territory bureaucrat refused permission for Mick Daly, a non-Aboriginal drover, to marry his Aboriginal girlfriend, Gladys Namagu. Their case sparked a national controversy involving federal and state politicians, academics, the media, and even the United Nations. This article reconstructs the story of Gladys and Mick's romance, comparing their particular corporealities to that conjugal body demanded as the 'proper' subject of matrimony. In their troubled courtship, how was marriage deployed as a regulatory strategy, and how did the specificities of race disrupt or contest the corporeal body politic discursively figured therein? The story of Gladys and Mick is part of a longer work in progress concerning 'the conjugal body politic'-the corporeal, political subjectivities produced and regulated in Australian legislation on marriage and marriage-like relationships. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband. O me, the word 'choose'! I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike The Merchant of Venice I 2