The Un-Politics of New Public Management in Ireland

Many of the principles and indeed the rhetoric of New Public Management proved attractive to both politicians and senior bureaucrats across the developed world as a remedy for problems in policy processes. Ireland shares many features of its constitutional structures and political practices with Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all of them early and enthusiastic adopters of NPM. Some of the organizational and procedural changes in Irish public administration do indeed bear similarities to those we would expect to see as a result of adopting principles of NPM. However, we contend that surface impressions are misleading. Drawing on a time-series database of Irish state institutions, we show that organizational changes were not necessarily driven by NPM. The absence of strong political drivers meant that reform initiatives did not fundamentally alter the configuration of the Irish public administration. Many of the problems that NPM was intended to address are only now coming under scrutiny.

"I Forbid You To Like It:" The Smiths, David Cameron, and the Politics of (Mis)appropriating Popular Culture

The Smiths were a critically acclaimed 1980s “indie” band that achieved cult-status within the five years they were musically active. Several studies on fandom have focused on The Smiths, particularly its frontman Morrissey, whose “apostles” are among the most committed on the popular music circuit. Yet British Prime Minister David Cameron’s repeated claims to Smiths fandom have been rebuked by fans, and the band themselves, as being incompatible with his right-wing political program; former Smiths guitarist and songwriter Johnny Marr tweeted: “David Cameron, stop saying you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it.”

This article proceeds from the possibility that David Cameron was not being cynical in professing his admiration for The Smiths and considers music’s role in the embodiment of a social identity. Drawing on recent examples in the UK and the US, the article explores politicians’ problematic relationship with popular culture, alongside the notion that when an artist’s music is appropriated, they themselves are appropriated.

Constructive Synthesis of Memory-Intensive Accelerators for FPGA From Nested Loop Kernels

Field-programmable gate arrays are ideal hosts to custom accelerators for signal, image, and data processing but de- mand manual register transfer level design if high performance and low cost are desired. High-level synthesis reduces this design burden but requires manual design of complex on-chip and off-chip memory architectures, a major limitation in applications such as video processing. This paper presents an approach to resolve this shortcoming. A constructive process is described that can derive such accelerators, including on- and off-chip memory storage from a C description such that a user-defined throughput constraint is met. By employing a novel statement-oriented approach, dataflow intermediate models are derived and used to support simple ap- proaches for on-/off-chip buffer partitioning, derivation of custom on-chip memory hierarchies and architecture transformation to ensure user-defined throughput constraints are met with minimum cost. When applied to accelerators for full search motion estima- tion, matrix multiplication, Sobel edge detection, and fast Fourier transform, it is shown how real-time performance up to an order of magnitude in advance of existing commercial HLS tools is enabled whilst including all requisite memory infrastructure. Further, op- timizations are presented that reduce the on-chip buffer capacity and physical resource cost by up to 96% and 75%, respectively, whilst maintaining real-time performance.

On the waterfront: neoliberal urbanism and the politics of public benefit

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Party rules, party resources and the politics of parliamentary democracies How parties organize in the 21st century

This article introduces the first findings of the Political Party Database Project, a major survey of party organizations in parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies. The project’s first round of data covers 122 parties in 19 countries. In this article, we describe the scope of the database, then investigate what it tells us about contemporary party organization in these countries, focusing on parties’ resources, structures and internal decision-making. We examine organizational patterns by country and party family, and where possible we make temporal comparisons with older data sets. Our analyses suggest a remarkable coexistence of uniformity and diversity. In terms of the major organizational resources on which parties can draw, such as members, staff and finance, the new evidence largely confirms the continuation of trends identified in previous research: that is, declining membership, but enhanced financial resources and more paid staff. We also find remarkable uniformity regarding the core architecture of party organizations. At the same time, however, we find substantial variation between countries and party families in terms of their internal processes, with particular regard to how internally democratic they are, and the forms that this democratization takes.

Truth Recovery and Transitional Justice: Deferring human rights issues

This book investigates why some societies defer the solution of transitional justice issues, such as the disappeared/missing, even after successful democratic consolidation. It also explains why the same societies finally decide to deal with these human rights issues. In short, it considers the interesting and understudied phenomenon of post-transitional justice. The prolonged silences in Spain, Cyprus and Greece contradict the experience of other countries -- such as South Africa, Bosnia, and Guatemala -- where truth recovery for disappeared/missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democracy. Despite democratization, the exhumation of mass graves containing the victims from the violence in Cyprus (1963-1974) and the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) was delayed until the early 2000s, when both countries suddenly decided to revisit the past. Cyprus and Spain are not alone: this is an increasing trend among countries trying to come to terms with past violence. Interestingly, despite similar background conditions, Greece is resisting the trend, challenging both theory and regional experience. Truth Recovery and Transitional Justice considers three interrelated issues. First, what factors can explain prolonged silence on the issue of missing persons in some transitional settings? Second, which processes can address the occasional yet puzzling transformation of victims’ groups from opponents of truth recovery to vocal pro-reconciliation pressure groups? Third, under which conditions is it better to tie victims’ rights to an overall political settlement? The book looks at Spain and Cyprus to show how they have attempted to bring closure to deep trauma by exhuming and identifying their missing, albeit under considerably different conditions. It then probes the generalizability of the conclusions on Spain and Cyprus by looking at the Greek experience; oddly, despite similar background conditions, Greece remains resistant to post-transitional justice norms. Interestingly, each case study takes a different approach to transitional justice.

The Multidirectional Memory of Charlie Hebdo

This article will discuss notions and concepts of remembering in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Much has been written about the immediate response to the attacks, both commending the collective spirit of unity that defined the ‘marche républicaine’ of 11 January 2015, and criticising the alleged hypocrisy and cynicism of, most notably, the political figures that took to the streets that day, hand in hand. I will consider a selection of the memory practices that have emerged since then, notably on the anniversary of the event. This demonstration of memory provides key insights into the form and manner of remembering within a particular cultural group, but also reflects how the present moment is integral to our understanding of memory. The purpose of this article is to consider how official and non-official remembering of Charlie Hebdo can intertwine as well as pull in separate directions. A focus on the politics, the language, the aesthetics and the geography of commemorative activities in this article will enable an appreciation of the multidirectional character of remembering Charlie Hebdo.

Roles for the subiculum in spatial information processing, memory, motivation and the temporal control of behaviour

The subiculum is in a pivotal position governing the output of the hippocampal formation. Despite this, it is a rather under-explored and sometimes ignored structure. Here, we discuss recent data indicating that the subiculum participates in a wide range of neurocognitive functions and processes. Some of the functions of subiculum are relatively well-known-these include providing a relatively coarse representation of space and participating in, and supporting certain aspects of, memory (particularly in the dynamic bridging of temporal intervals). The subiculum also participates in a wide variety of other neurocognitive functions too. however. Much less well-known are roles for the subiculum, and particularly the ventral subiculum, in the response to fear, stress and anxiety, and in the generation of motivated behaviour (particularly the behaviour that underlies drug addiction and the response to reward). There is an emerging suggestion that the subiculum participates in the temporal control of behaviour. It is notable that these latter findings have emerged from a consideration of instrumental behaviour using operant techniques; it may well be the case that the use of the watermaze or similar spatial tasks to assess subicular function (on the presumption that its functions are very similar to the hippocampus proper) has obscured rather than revealed neurocognitive functions of subiculum. The anatomy of subiculum suggests it participates in a rather subtle fashion in a very broad range of functions, rather than in a relatively more isolated fashion in a narrower range of functions, as might be the case for

Cultural politics and the racial cartographics of human origins

Discussions about human origins, both scientific and pre-scientific, have frequently been freighted with the cultural politics of race relations and questions about human equality. In one way or another, maps have played a critical role in these enterprises by presenting in visual form narratives of human genesis and patterns of human ancestral lineages. In this paper I discuss how a sequence of cartographic representations of human beginnings have transacted racial power from the middle ages to the present day.

Contemporary Radio Art and Spatial Politics: The Critical Radio Utopias of Anna Friz

The article explores the work of the Canadian sound artist Anna Friz over the last decade. Her work deals explicitly with issues of technology and the relative absence of women's voices on radio. Exploring her work as a composer, installation artist, instrumentalist, performance artist and storyteller, and contextualising these practices within feminist critiques and radio conventions, the article explores Friz's ‘self-reflexive radio’. Ideas of ‘supermodernity’, ‘displacement’ and ‘critical utopia’ are deployed to discuss specific pieces of Friz's work in relation to identity and space. The article argues that Friz reconfigures the radio as a site of resistance to dominant constructions of contemporary globalised space and cultures, the politics of informational capitalism and the uneven flows that these cultures and politics engender.

Risk: A Study of Its Origins, History and Politics

Over a period of several centuries, the academic study of risk has evolved as a distinct body of thought, which continues to influence conceptual developments in fields such as economics, management, politics and sociology. However, few scholarly works have given a chronological account of cultural and intellectual trends relating to the understanding and analysis of risks. Risk: A Study of its Origins, History and Politics aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed study of key turning points in the evolution of society's understanding of risk. Using a wide range of primary and secondary materials, Matthias Beck and Beth Kewell map the political origins and moral reach of some of the most influential ideas associated with risk and uncertainty at specific periods of time. The historical focus of the book makes it an excellent introduction for readers who wish to go beyond specific risk management techniques and their theoretical underpinnings, to gain an understanding of the history and politics of risk.