Mass deaths by gas or chemical poisoning. A historical perspective

This review chronicles the characteristics of deliberate and accidental mass poisonings that occurred in World Wars I and II, in Bhopal, and in other historical cases up to and including modern wars. It also considers approaches to the investigation of such cases from the medicolegal as well as general standpoints.     

From rags to robes

He is author of many works about social class, including The Protestant Establishment Revisitedand Philadelphia Gentlemen,both published by Transaction Publishers.     

Modernising the management of British diplomacy: towards a Foreign Office policy on policy-making?

The management of British diplomacy is being modernised in order to meet the challenges of foreign policy-making in a transformational age. Changing patterns of conflict and cooperation and the progressive erosion of hierarchies and their replacement by networking require that diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy be better integrated with other government actors in order to sustain its relevance and effectiveness. Focusing on the changed role of planning within the United Kingdom Foreign & Commonwealth Office, this article argues that while these reforms have made some progress towards the integration of diplomats, this process has not gone far enough. It also argues that such integration should not be achieved at the expense of the traditional planning function which contributes a vital source of innovation and analysis in the policy-making process.     

The Relationship Between Religious and Spiritual Factors and the Perpetration of Intimate Personal Violence

Despite some understanding of general correlates and possible antecedents to intimate partner violence (IPV) within the Christian community, the impact of religious and spiritual factors tends to be confounded by other factors and is often misjudged. Archival data from Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) were used to examine the impact of nine religious and spiritual factors on the probability of IPV perpetration by males, aged 18 to 26, who nominally classified themselves as Catholic, Protestant, or Christian. Logistic regression results indicated that IPV perpetration could not be adequately predicted from the religious and spiritual factors. Given the geographic breadth and the size of the Add Health sample, no finding of a predictive model for Christian male-perpetrated IPV challenges the paradigm that religious and spiritual factors should be overtly addressed in faith-based batterers’ programs targeting young adult males.     

The State of the Science in Technology Transfer: Implications for the Field of Assistive Technology

The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technology Transfer (T²RERC) hosted a “State of the Science” conference in November, 2001. The conference reviewed technology transfer work within the field of assistive technology, and summarized related work in public, private and academic sectors. Invited speakers prepared papers on various topics concerning technology transfer, and related their findings to the field of assistive technology during the ensuing discussion sessions. This paper provides an overview of the material presented by the participants, and explores the implications of their findings for one particular field of application—assistive technology for people with disabilities.     

The Australian Welfare State: Has Federalism Made a Difference?

This paper examines the historical development of the Australian welfare state with a view to identifying the role that Australia's federal constitutional arrangements have played in shaping that development. Theoretical paradigms have been unanimous in their prognoses: that federal states are likely to be slow in developing welfare state programmes and typically spend less on them than unitary states. But recently it has been argued that federal institutions may have a “ratchet effect” of slowing down the pace of change, irrespective of its direction. The purpose of this chronological account of significant stages in the development of the Australian welfare state is to use the unfolding of historical events — far too rich in nuance and detail to be captured in quantitative modelling — as a test‐bed for establishing whether, and, if so, to what extent, federalism has impacted on the trajectory of Australian welfare state development.