Retro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks back at Its Analogue Past

This article explores the definition of ‘vintage cinema’ and specifically re-evaluates the fetishism for the past and its regurgitation in the present by providing a taxonomy of the phenomenon in recent film production. Our contribution identifies three aesthetic categories: the faux-vintage, the retro and the anachronistic and by illustrating their overlapping and discrepancies, it argues that the past remains a powerful negotiator of meaning for the present and the future. Drawing on studies of memory and digital nostalgia, this article focuses on the latter category: anachronism and unravel the persistence of and the filmic fascination for obsolete analogue objects through an analysis of Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013).

Past and future climate change in the context of memorable seasonal extremes

It is thought that direct personal experience of extreme weather events could result in greater public engagement and policy response to climate change. Based on this premise, we present a set of future climate scenarios for Ireland communicated in the context of recent, observed extremes. Specifically, we examine the changing likelihood of extreme seasonal conditions in the long-term observational record, and explore how frequently such extremes might occur in a changed Irish climate according to the latest model projections. Over the period (1900-2014) records suggest a greater than 50-fold increase in the likelihood of the warmest recorded summer (1995), whilst the likelihood of the wettest winter (1994/95) and driest summer (1995) has respectively doubled since 1850. The most severe end-of-century climate model projections suggest that summers as cool as 1995 may only occur once every ∼7 years, whilst winters as wet as 1994/95 and summers as dry as 1995 may increase by factors of ∼8 and ∼10 respectively. Contrary to previous research, we find no evidence for increased wintertime storminess as the Irish climate warms, but caution that this conclusion may be an artefact of the metric employed. It is hoped that framing future climate scenarios in the context of extremes from living memory will help communicate the scale of the challenge climate change presents, and in so doing bridge the gap between climate scientists and wider society.

Victims, Violence and Voice: Transitional Justice, Oral History and Dealing with the Past

Transitional justice is concerned with the legal and social processes established to deal with the legacy of violence in post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts. These processes are essentially “creatures of law” – they are established by statute, their work is molded and shaped by lawyers, and their outcomes are benchmarked against what is or is not acceptable in domestic and international law. Concerns have mounted in recent years about the dominance of legalism within the field and the instrumentalization of those most directly affected by past violence. A commonly prescribed – but as yet largely empirically untested – corrective is that transitional justice theory and practice must become more open to interdisciplinary insights and perspectives. The interview – in different guises, contexts and settings – is at the heart of most transitional justice processes. As a historian now working in a School of Law I reflect in this article on the theoretical and practical intersections between law, history, and the interview. Drawing on more than 200 interviews concerning the Northern Ireland conflict and six other international case studies I concentrate in particular on interview-based initiatives that purport to be “victim-centered”. Having identified three interrelated risks - the manipulation of victim voice by vested interests, the affording of authority to particular voices, and the reification or “freezing” of identity - and having related these to the constraints of legal mechanisms and a wider failure to manage victims’ expectations, I argue that a greater familiarity with oral history theory and praxis can usefully illuminate the tensions between legal and historical approaches to engaging voice, and ultimately offer guidance to the shared challenge of victim-centered transitional justice.

Justice, Truth and Oral History: Legislating the Past 'From Below' in Northern Ireland

Drawing on the ‘from below’ perspective which has emerged in transitional justice scholarship and practice
over the past two decades, this article critically examines the dealing with the past debate in Northern
Ireland. The paper begins by offering an outline of the from below perspective in the context of post-conflict
or post-authoritarian societies which are struggling to come to terms with past violence and human rights
abuses. Having provided some of the legal and political background to the most recent efforts to deal with
the past in Northern Ireland, it then critically examines the relevant past-related provisions of the Stormont
House Agreement, namely the institutions which are designed to facilitate ‘justice’, truth recovery and the
establishment of an Oral History Archive. Drawing from the political science and social movement
literature on lobbying and the ways in which interests groups may seek to influence policy, the paper then
explores the efforts of the authors and others to contribute to the broader public debate, including through
drafting and circulating a ‘Model Bill’ on dealing with the past (reproduced elsewhere in this issue) as a
counterweight to the legislation which is required from the British government to implement the Stormont
House Agreement. The authors argue that the combination of technical capacity, grass-roots
credibility and ‘international-savvy’ local solutions offers a framework for praxis from below in other
contexts where activists are struggling to extend ownership of transitional justice beyond political elites.
Keywords: transitional justice; from below; dealing with the past; legislation; truth
recovery; prosecutions; oral history

Our Past Betrays Us: Collective Memory, Homicide and Southern Lynching

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2013

Historic and recent occurrences of pinnipeds in the Archipelago of the Azores

The Archipelago of the Azores (Portugal) is located between 378 and 418N and 258 and 318W and crosses the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is the most isolated archipelago in the Atlantic, situated 1600 km west of mainland Portugal and 3500 km from the eastern coast of the United States of America. At present, the only population of seals occurring in the Portuguese territory is found on Desertas Islands, Archipelago of Madeira, where a colony of 24 Mediterranean monk seals, Monachus monachus (Hermann, 1779), still persists (Pires and Neves 2001). Nonetheless, historical accounts reported by Frutuoso (1983) dating from the early to late 1500s mention sightings of ‘‘sea wolves’’ (the old Portuguese folk term for the Mediterranean monk seal) at several sites along the Azorean Island of Santa Maria. Little is known about the occurrence of monk seals in this area over the past five centuries, but the species certainly did not escape deliberate killing by the first settlers. While the early monk seal reports by Frutuoso (1983) are the only reports referring to the presence of colonies of seals in the Azores, more recently several sightings and strandings of vagrant seals of other species have been noted.

Social Choice: Recent Developments

In the past quarter century, there has been a dramatic shift of focus in social choice theory, with structured sets of alternatives and restricted domains of the sort encountered in economic problems coming to the fore. This article provides an overview of some of the recent contributions to four topics in normative social choice theory in which economic modelling has played a prominent role: Arrovian social choice theory on economic domains, variable-population social choice, strategy-proof social choice, and axiomatic models of resource allocation.

'Are We Now Equal?' Recent experiences and perceptions of South American migrants in Argentina under MERCOSUR

De manière générale, ma thèse examine les mécanismes des processus sociaux, économiques et politiques ayant contribué, souvent de manière contradictoire, à la (re)définition des critères d’adhésion au sein de la nation et de l’Etat. Elle le fait par le dialogue au sein de deux grands corps de littérature intimement liés, la citoyenneté et le transnationalisme, qui se sont penchés sur les questions d’appartenance, d’exclusion, de mobilité et d’accès aux droits chez les migrants transnationaux tout en soulignant la capacité accrue de l’Etat à réguler à la fois les déplacements de personnes et l’accès des migrants aux droits. Cette thèse remet en question trois principes qui influencent la recherche et les programmes d’action publique ayant trait au transnationalisme et à la citoyenneté des migrants, et remet en cause les approches analytiques hégémoniques et méthodologiques qui les sous-tendent. L’étude a été menée à deux niveaux distincts d’analyse empirique et analytique. D’une part, nous examinons les « technologies de la citoyenneté » (Ong 2003, Fujiwara 2008) qui ont été développées par le gouvernement pour transformer l’Argentine en une nation latino-américaine diverse et inclusive pendant la dernière décennie, en nous intéressant particulièrement à la création, par le Kirchnerisme, d’une « nouvelle légalité » pour les Paraguayens, les Boliviens et les Péruviens résidant dans le pays. D’autre part, nous analysons la « dimension horizontale des processus de citoyenneté » (Neveu 2005, Pickus and Skerry 2007, Gagné and Neveu 2009) chez ces migrants dans des aires urbaines, périphériques et rurales du partido de La Plata. Plus spécifiquement, nous examinons dans quelle mesure les conditions socioéconomiques des migrants ont changé suite à leur nouveau statut légal (en tant que ressortissants du MERCOSUR en Argentine, dont les droits sont égaux à ceux des citoyens) et aux politiques de « citoyenneté inclusive » déployées par le gouvernement. Cette thèse se penche particulièrement sur les fondations et l’incarnation (« embodiment ») des droits en examinant comment le nouveau statut légal des migrants se manifeste au quotidien en fonction de a) où ils vivent et travaillent, et b) leur statut social perçu par les autres migrants et non-migrants. D’une part, nous examinons les aires urbaines, périphériques et rurales de La Plata en tant que « zones de souveraineté graduée » (Ong 1999), où des régimes de gouvernementalité locaux spécifiques se sont développés en lien avec l’installation de groupes ethniques souvent distincts, et dont les droits et devoirs diffèrent de ceux d’autres zones. D’autre part, nous étudions la façon dont le statut social est produit à travers les interactions sociales quotidiennes en transposant des distinctions construites socialement telles que race, classe, genre et origine nationale, en systèmes d’exclusion formels (Gregory 2007). Notre analyse ethnographique de ce que nous appelons les « expériences de légalité » des migrants démontre que leur égalité formelle vis-à-vis des Argentins, loin d’être simplement donnée comme un nouveau statut légal uniformément garanti pour tous, est à la fois inégalement vécue par les divers migrants, et différemment respectée dans les zones géographiques dirigées par divers régimes de gouvernementalité (Foucault 1978).

Onset of recent rapid sea-level rise in the western Atlantic Ocean

A high-resolution record of sea-level change spanning the past 1000 years is derived from foraminiferal and chronological analyses of a 2m thick salt-marsh peat sequence at Chezzetcook, Nova Scotia, Canada. Former mean tide level positions are reconstructed with a precision of +/- 0.055 in using a transfer function derived from distributions of modern salt-marsh foraminifera. Our age model for the core section older than 300 years is based on 19 AMS C-14 ages and takes into account the individual probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon ages. The past 300 years is dated by pollen and the isotopes Pb-206, Pb-207, Pb-210, Cs-137 and Am-241. Between AD 1000 and AD 1800, relative sea level rose at a mean rate of 17cm per century. Apparent pre-industrial rises of sea level dated at AD 1500-1550 and AD 1700-1800 cannot be clearly distinguished when radiocarbon age errors are taken into account. Furthermore, they may be an artefact of fluctuations in atmospheric C-14 production. In the 19th century sea level rose at a mean rate of 1.6mm/yr. Between AD 1900 and AD 1920, sea-level rise accelerated to the modern mean rate of 3.2mm/yr. This acceleration corresponds in time with global temperature rise and may therefore be associated with recent global warming. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. II. Different reconstructions of the total solar irradiance variation and dependence on response time scale

We have previously placed the solar contribution to recent global warming in context using observations and without recourse to climate models. It was shown that all solar forcings of climate have declined since 1987. The present paper extends that analysis to include the effects of the various time constants with which the Earth’s climate system might react to solar forcing. The solar input waveform over the past 100 years is defined using observed and inferred galactic cosmic ray fluxes, valid for either a direct effect of cosmic rays on climate or an effect via their known correlation with total solar irradiance (TSI), or for a combination of the two. The implications, and the relative merits, of the various TSI composite data series are discussed and independent tests reveal that the PMOD composite used in our previous paper is the most realistic. Use of the ACRIM composite, which shows a rise in TSI over recent decades, is shown to be inconsistent with most published evidence for solar influences on pre-industrial climate. The conclusions of our previous paper, that solar forcing has declined over the past 20 years while surface air temperatures have continued to rise, are shown to apply for the full range of potential time constants for the climate response to the variations in the solar forcings.

Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature. III. Analysis of contributions to global mean air surface temperature rise

A multivariate fit to the variation in global mean surface air temperature anomaly over the past half century is presented. The fit procedure allows for the effect of response time on the waveform, amplitude and lag of each radiative forcing input, and each is allowed to have its own time constant. It is shown that the contribution of solar variability to the temperature trend since 1987 is small and downward; the best estimate is -1.3% and the 2sigma confidence level sets the uncertainty range of -0.7 to -1.9%. The result is the same if one quantifies the solar variation using galactic cosmic ray fluxes (for which the analysis can be extended back to 1953) or the most accurate total solar irradiance data composite. The rise in the global mean air surface temperatures is predominantly associated with a linear increase that represents the combined effects of changes in anthropogenic well-mixed greenhouse gases and aerosols, although, in recent decades, there is also a considerable contribution by a relative lack of major volcanic eruptions. The best estimate is that the anthropogenic factors contribute 75% of the rise since 1987, with an uncertainty range (set by the 2sigma confidence level using an AR(1) noise model) of 49–160%; thus, the uncertainty is large, but we can state that at least half of the temperature trend comes from the linear term and that this term could explain the entire rise. The results are consistent with the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) estimates of the changes in radiative forcing (given for 1961–1995) and are here combined with those estimates to find the response times, equilibrium climate sensitivities and pertinent heat capacities (i.e. the depth into the oceans to which a given radiative forcing variation penetrates) of the quasi-periodic (decadal-scale) input forcing variations. As shown by previous studies, the decadal-scale variations do not penetrate as deeply into the oceans as the longer term drifts and have shorter response times. Hence, conclusions about the response to century-scale forcing changes (and hence the associated equilibrium climate sensitivity and the temperature rise commitment) cannot be made from studies of the response to shorter period forcing changes.

Climate change and coastal waterbird populations – past declines and future impacts

Considerable attention has been given to the impact of climate change on avian populations over the last decade. In this paper we examine two issues with respect to coastal bird populations in the UK: (1) is there any evidence that current populations are declining due to climate change, and (2) how might we predict the response of populations in the future? We review the cause of population decline in two species associated with saltmarsh habitats. The abundance of Common Redshank Tringa totanus breeding on saltmarsh declined by about 23% between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, but the decline appears to have been caused by an increase in grazing pressure. The number of Twite Carduelis flavirostris wintering on the coast of East Anglia has declined dramatically over recent decades; there is evidence linking this decline with habitat loss but a causal role for climate change is unclear. These examples illustrate that climate change could be having population-level impacts now, but also show that it is dangerous to become too narrowly focused on single issues affecting coastal birds. Making predictions about how populations might respond to future climate change depends on an adequate understanding of important ecological processes at an appropriate spatial scale. We illustrate this with recent work conducted on the Icelandic population of Black-tailed Godwits Limosa limosa islandica that shows large-scale regulatory processes. Most predictive models to date have focused on local populations (single estuary or a group of neighbouring estuaries). We discuss the role such models might play in risk assessment, and the need for them to be linked to larger-scale ecological processes. We argue that future work needs to focus on spatial scale issues and on linking physical models of coastal environments with important ecological processes.

Paraben esters: review of recent studies of endocrine toxicity, absorption, esterase and human exposure, and discussion of potential human health risks

This toxicology update reviews research over the past four years since publication in 2004 of the first measurement of intact esters of p-hydroxybenzoic acid (parabens) in human breast cancer tissues, and the suggestion that their presence in the human body might originate from topical application of bodycare cosmetics. The presence of intact paraben esters in human body tissues has now been confirmed by independent measurements in human urine, and the ability of parabens to penetrate human skin intact without breakdown by esterases and to be absorbed systemically has been demonstrated through studies not only in vitro but also in vivo using healthy human subjects. Using a wide variety of assay systems in vitro and in vivo, the oestrogen agonist properties of parabens together with their common metabolite (p-hydroxybenzoic acid) have been extensively documented, and, in addition, the parabens have now also been shown to possess androgen antagonist activity, to act as inhibitors of sulfotransferase enzymes and to possess genotoxic activity. With the continued use of parabens in the majority of bodycare cosmetics, there is a need to carry out detailed evaluation of the potential for parabens, together with other oestrogenic and genotoxic co-formulants of bodycare cosmetics, to increase female breast cancer incidence, to interfere with male reproductive functions and to influence development of malignant melanoma which has also recently been shown to be influenced by oestrogenic stimulation. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Climate change and coastal waterbird populations - past declines and future impacts

Considerable attention has been given to the impact of climate change on avian populations over the last decade. In this paper we examine two issues with respect to coastal bird populations in the UK: (1) is there any evidence that current populations are declining due to climate change, and (2) how might we predict the response of populations in the future? We review the cause of population decline in two species associated with saltmarsh habitats. The abundance of Common Redshank Tringa totanus breeding on saltmarsh declined by about 23% between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, but the decline appears to have been caused by an increase in grazing pressure. The number of Twite Carduelis flavirostris wintering on the coast of East Anglia has declined dramatically over recent decades; there is evidence linking this decline with habitat loss but a causal role for climate change is unclear. These examples illustrate that climate change could be having population-level impacts now, but also show that it is dangerous to become too narrowly focused on single issues affecting coastal birds. Making predictions about how populations might respond to future climate change depends on an adequate understanding of important ecological processes at an appropriate spatial scale. We illustrate this with recent work conducted on the Icelandic population of Black-tailed Godwits Limosa limosa islandica that shows large-scale regulatory processes. Most predictive models to date have focused on local populations (single estuary or a group of neighbouring estuaries). We discuss the role such models might play in risk assessment, and the need for them to be linked to larger-scale ecological processes. We argue that future work needs to focus on spatial scale issues and on linking physical models of coastal environments with important ecological processes.