The man in the scarlet robe: 2000 years of searching for Jesus

Reviewed Book: Steinhauser, Michael G. The man in the scarlet robe: 2000 years of searching for Jesus. Etobicoke, Ont: United Church Pub House, 1996

The Reality and Hyperreality of Human Rights: Public Consciousness and the Mass Media

Scholarship on international human rights generally adopts two approaches. The normative approach focuses on treaties or other authoritative sources. The institutional approach emphasises governments, organisations or other actors charged with the norms' implementation. Much writing inevitably involves both approaches. Any critical stance is then often limited either to examining obstacles within the norms or their interpretation, or to pointing out the shortcomings of actors responsible for implementation. The authors of human rights scholarship are often activists, lawyers, diplomats or judges, and may include scholars with professional affinities to those circles. They largely confine their critical scope to those normative or institutional levels. Some theoretical writings go further, proposing broader frameworks, such as liberal, legal-realist, post-Marxist, post-colonial, feminist, communitarian or deconstructionist. Those analyses too, however, frequently focus either on prevailing norms (individually or as a system) or on the performance of the relevant actors. In this chapter, I shall examine a third layer of activity, the mass media. I shall treat the media as being on a par with, or more powerful than, the dominant systems of norms, insofar as the media determine the situations with which those norms are associated in the public mind; and as being at least on a par with organisations and governments, insofar as the media determine which situations are most visibly and urgently acted upon. The neglect of this decisive strand underscores the ongoing formalism of legal practice: norms and institutions receive the most attention, since they assume the official status proper to the promulgation, interpretation and implementation of rights. In most scholarship on international law and human rights, the role of the media, lacking any such formalised status, is cited, if at all, only tangentiallyMost human rights scholarship remains highly formalist, with a focus on norms and institutions. However, at least as powerful as, if not more powerful than, those norms and institutions, are the mass media. Consonant with David Kennedy’s concern that rights discourse can privilege some interests at the expense of others, the media must be seen as the force that overwhelmingly decides which norms and abuses count, and which are neglected. Public consciousness of human rights emerges not out of political reality, but out of a media-generated ‘hyper-reality’, impermeable to some of the world’s most heinous abuses. The media remain immune from the values of even-handedness that are conceptually presupposed by human rights law. In principle, human rights shun any zero-sum game, whereby the rights of one person or group may be traded off against those of another. The media not only plays that game, but must play it, as a matter of sheer time and resources. A ‘Hollywoodisation’ of rights still further contributes to forging a hyper-reality that remains at odds with the realities of global human rights

Paperless assessment via VLE: the pros and the cons

The aim of this short paper is to share our experience of paperless assessment using the submission facility provided in the Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). An important part of a tutor’s work is monitoring and assessing students’ work on modules of study, in order to measure progress and attainment. Assessment may be continuous throughout the module to help students progress by providing feedback on their learning, or it may be a final summative examination to measure attainment at the end of the module. Most modules make use of a combination of the two types of assessment. In the Research and Information Technology Skills (RITS) module in Salford Business School, we have endeavoured to use the Blackboard VLE to manage a portfolio of continuous assessment exercises and a final summative examination. This Level 1 module comprises activities to develop Information Communication Technology (ICT) and research skills, and is an important foundation for new students, both to encourage good study habits and to ensure that a minimum level of expertise in skills is achieved. Student numbers on this module were about 40 this year

Mechanism-Based Thinking on Policy Diffusion. A Review of Current Approaches in Political Science

Despite theoretical and methodological progress in what is now coined as the third generation of diffusion studies, explicitly dealing with the causal mechanisms underlying diffusion processes and comparatively analyzing them is only of recent date. As a matter of fact, diffusion research has ended up in a diverse and often unconnected array of theoretical assumptions relying both on rational as well as constructivist reasoning – a circumstance calling for more theoretical coherence and consistency. Against this backdrop, this paper reviews and streamlines diffusion literature in political science. Diffusion mechanisms largely cluster around two causal arguments determining the desires and preferences of actors for choosing alternative policies. First, existing diffusion mechanisms accounts can be grouped according to the rationality for policy adoption, this means that government behavior is based on the instrumental considerations of actors or on constructivist arguments like norms and rule-driven actors. Second, diffusion mechanisms can either directly impact on the beliefs of actors or they might influence the structural conditions for decision-making. Following this logic, four basic diffusion mechanisms can be identified in mechanism-based thinking on policy diffusion: emulation, socialization, learning, and externalities.policy diffusion

Seniority in quantum many-body systems. I. Identical particles in a single shell

A discussion of the seniority quantum number in many-body systems is presented. The analysis is carried out for bosons and fermions simultaneously but is restricted to identical particles occupying a single shell. The emphasis of the paper is on the possibility of {\em partial} conservation of seniority which turns out to be a peculiar property of spin-9/2 fermions but prevalent in systems of interacting bosons of any spin. Partial conservation of seniority is at the basis of the existence of seniority isomers, frequently observed in semi-magic nuclei, and also gives rise to peculiar selection rules in one-nucleon transfer reactions.Comment: 41 pages, 7 figures, 1 tables, submitted to Annals of Physic

Explaining international co-authorship in global environmental change research

This paper maps the domain of earth and environmental sciences (EES) and investigates the relationship between cognitive problem structures and internationalisation patterns, drawing on the concepts of systemic versus cumulative global environmental change (GEC) and mutual task dependence in scientific fields. We find that scientific output concentration and internationalisation are significantly higher in the systemic GEC fields of Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography than in the cumulative GEC fields Ecology and Water Resources. The relationship is explained by stronger mutual task dependence in systemic GEC fields. In contrast, the portion of authorships with developing, emerging and transition countries among all international publications is larger for Water Resources than for three other fields, consistent with the most pressing needs for STI capacity development in these countries. --

International collaboration schemes in earth and environmental sciences : IGEC programmes and UNESCO IHP

There is a lack of studies that investigate how internationalization of science can effectively contribute to the globalization of environmental knowledge. Two cases of international collaboration programmes are analyzed from a science and innovation research perspective: (1) The organizational scheme of the International Global Environmental Change (IGEC) programmes in the ICSU tradition, and (2) the International Hydrological Programme (IHP). led by the UNESCO. The paper draws on two analytical distinctions: Firstly, following Turner et al. (1990), systemic global change is distinguished from local or regional environmental change that becomes global by worldwide accumulation. Secondly, collaboration programmes that belong to the social system of science are distinguished from programmes at the intersection of scientific and political spheres. Both cases are compared in terms of their (a) rationales for international collaboration, (b) their organisational structure and fundings, (c) international participation and (d) linkages between problem structure and collaboration. Representative and contrasting examples, their juxtaposition illustrates actual strategies and various constraints faced by scientific and intergouvernmental agencies promoting international collaboration in S & T for sustainability and capacity development. The paper reports research of my ongoing dissertation project under the working title Internationalization in environmental research: The case of freshwater. --