The impact of governmental structure and expenditures on the quality of life in urban areas

Despite the obvious complementarity in their objectives, public policy and quality of life or social indicators research have been done in mutual isolation. The integration of these streams of research offers policy analysts an alternate method for measuring impacts. Using this approach, the current study focuses on two questions: 1) Are variations in municipal structure related to policy outputs, i.e., municipal expenditures? 2) Are variations in municipal structures and overall targeted municipal expenditures related to the general quality of life in municipalities and the quality of specific services?

The sample for this study includes the central cities of the sixty-five most populated SMSAs in the United States. Pearson Product Moment correlational and crosstabulational techniques were used to examine these relationships. The results indicate that council manager systems tend to spend less than mayor council systems, yet, in some ways, offer a better quality of life. Differences in size and regional location were investigated by factor analysis as possible influences in this regard.     

Suspect burial excavation procedure: A cautionary tale

Geographic location, time of reporting and need for rapid evaluation contributed to a lack of intelligence concerning a suspect burial site in scrub woodland (～15 km from the last known location of a missing person) in Northern Ireland. Police received reports of a subsiding ‘grave’, which was evaluated positively using GPR and victim recovery dogs (VRD). After 24 h work, archaeological excavation showed a vertical-sided, stepped excavation on undisturbed clay with no inhumation. Subsequent research showed the feature to be an engineering trial pit. The GPR response was a water table and rocks, VRD were possibly reacting to disturbed ground. The work serves as a demonstration of good archaeological practice in suspect burial excavation, following a lack of landscape evaluation and poor overall intelligence.     

Religion,Same-Sex Desire,and the Imagined Geographies of Empire: the case of Constance Maynard (1849–1935)

Although a devout Evangelical, living in an era that largely predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard (1849–1935), the prominent Victorian educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. This essay focuses on Maynard's relationship with the Anglo-Irish Marion Wakefield (1876–1956), exploring the role of Maynard's erotic imagination in the constitution, contestation, and consolidation of the imagined geographies of imperialist discourse. Maynard's erotic positioning of her lover in diverse imperial landscapes reveals the ostensibly ‘private’ discourses of the erotic imagination to be profoundly implicated in the ‘public’ discourses of empire. At the same time, the domestic settings in which these landscapes were imagined and in which the women's illicit desires were enacted, pose a challenge to the gendered spatial dichotomies—private/public, domestic/imperial, and home/away—of both imperialist discourse and the historiography of empire.