PLANNING: LESSONS FROM THE PORTS

The National Ports Council, created in 1964 and abolished in 1982, was engaged in one of the rare sustained attempts at planning in Britain. This article explains the Council's decision not to carry out full-scale planning because of the difficulties of collecting information, assessing technological and economic changes, and reconciling rational economic planning with short term political pressures.     

Institutionalized Evaluation and Intergovernmental Relations: The Case of Coastal Zone Management

The enactment of national environmental management programswas prompted, in large part, by the perceived failure of stateand local government officials to deal adequately with pollutioncontrol and resource management problems. Paradoxically, theimplementation of several important environmental managementprograms relies heavily on these same state and local officials.Congress has sought to resolve this paradox by requiring federalevaluation of state and local environmental planning and managementactivities. Many of these evaluations are little more than routinefiscal audits. However one agency, the Office of Coastal ZoneManagement, has sought to develop a systematic evaluation processfocusing on all aspects of state coastal zone programs. Theseevaluative efforts have led to intergovernmental tensions, mostnotably with regard to the purposes and methods of evaluation,the appropriate roles of federal and state officials, and theresources available for evaluation. In spite of these tensions,there is broad agreement about the value of the evaluation processand its potential applicability in other contexts.     

THE LOGIC OF J. S. MILL ON FREEDOM

Abstract Mill's aim in Chapter 2 of Book 6 of the System of Logic, to reconcile human freedom with universal causality whilst at the same time answering the challenge of Owenite 'social fatalism', pushes him into attempting an ambitious reconstruction of the traditional Compatibilist conception of freedom as absence of constraint. An examination of the convolutions through which the argument goes before culminating in the conclusion that genuine freedom is the same as complete virtue reveals over half-a-dozen distinct varieties of freedom and a remarkably chaotic mixture of insight and confusion, much of which bears directly upon an understanding of the kind of freedom Mill was out to protect in On Liberty.     

Forensic archaeology.

This presentation attempts to demonstrate the value of the use of improved methods in the excavation of buried bodies involved in a criminal investigation. Care in the removal of the skeleton and proper recording will document the interrelationship of all objects found in and around the grave and can, to a certain extent, recreate the event. Carelessness will result in evidence being irretrievably lost. The crime scene investigator's problem, arachaeologically, includes the nature of the remains, dating the time of burial, and techniques of excavation. Archaeological recovery techniques should be adopted in homicide investigation involving buried bodies.     

Transfer of nitroglycerine to hands during contact with commercial explosives

The techniques of thin-layer chromatography, gas chromatography with electron capture detection, and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry were used to analyze hand swab extracts for the presence of nitroglycerine. Both the amount of nitroglycerine transferred to the hands after handling commercial explosives and its persistence were measured. Gas chromatography-electron capture detection was found to be the most accurate and sensitive technique for making such determinations, especially if the extract was partially purified by thin-layer chromatography prior to analysis. The lowest limit of detection was 10 ng of nitroglycerine, and residues could be detected over 20 h after handling the raw explosive.