The Allure of Blue Ribbon Taskforces and The Hard Reality of Immigration Grand Bargains

High status “blue-ribbon” taskforces combine prestige organizations and notable participants to help solve complex problems like immigration reform. Drawing on diverse views one of the ways they can reach common ground is through “grand bargains,” in which each side gives up contested ground to reach a solution through which they gain a major goal. In immigration reform proposals, this takes the form of trading legalization for enforcement. Yet, a closer look at this grand bargain suggestions that the give and take is asymmetric, because the benefits of legalization are immediate and the capacity for effective enforcement many years away. The Brookings-Duke Immigration Report suggests a possible way around this imbalance.     

Women's employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth-century Ireland and England

Abstract

The early nineteenth century saw expanding work opportunities for women in commercial lace embroidery in Britain. This article traces the connection between the development of commercial lace embroidery in several locations – Nottingham, Essex and Limerick. Despite the fame of the Irish industry, it has received almost no academic attention. The differing structures of the Irish and English industries are examined. Aspects of lace manufacture highlight the increasing emphasis on cleanliness and the respectability of women's work in the nineteenth century. The authors suggest that to appreciate fully the impact of the Industrial Revolution on women's employment opportunities, we must look to the periphery of the national economy, as well as the centre.     

Resistance to Position Change,Motivated Reasoning,and Polarization

Political Behavior - People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms...     

Women have servants and men never eat: issues in reading gender,using the case study of mass-observation's 1937 day-diaries

Abstract

The category ‘gender’ has become axiomatic to feminist analysis: analysing the dynamics and outcomes of gender has come to be seen as constituting ‘what academic feminists do’. Within feminist analysis, gender is positioned as ana prioricharacteristic of social life; and gender is also analytically privileged as the most salient characteristic of people and social situations. Both assumptions are challenged. This article argues instead that gender is not a discovery, something innately ‘there’ in social life, but is rather to be understood as an invention, an imposed analytic category of great utility for academic feminism, but also one which creates as many analytic troubles as it solves. The article problematises thea prioriand privileged status of gender within feminist analysis by discussing various interpretational issues involved in analysing a set of day-diaries written by women and men for Mass-Observation in 1937, in particular focusing on reading and writing as interpretational acts which are often treated as analytically transparent. Here, however, this epistemological bracketing is suspended, and instead both are scrutinised in analytical detail. Although the argument is discussed in relation to these specific historical materials, it is argued that the same epistemological issues arise in relation to the analysis of all kinds of research materials, whether historical or present-day, for reading and writing are the crucial elements of interpretation, and interpretation is itself central to feminist as to all other analysis.     

Kelsen,Authority and Competence: An Introduction

Law and Philosophy -     

Delayed death in sudden infant death syndrome: a San Diego SIDS/SUDC Research Project 15-year population-based report

A fraction of SIDS cases have death delayed by successful CPR, yet they have not been compared to SIDS cases which were found dead or not successfully resuscitated. Our aims were to: (1) determine the percent of SIDS cases in the San Diego SIDS Research Project database for whom death was delayed by CPR and subsequent life support; (2) compare demographics, circumstances of death and autopsy findings of delayed death SIDS cases (delayed SIDS) with those whose deaths were not delayed (non-delayed SIDS); (3) examine the evolution of pathologic changes in delayed SIDS as a function of survival interval. A retrospective 15-year population-based study of 454 infant deaths attributed to SIDS revealed 29 delayed SIDS cases (Group I) and 425 non-delayed SIDS cases (Group II). Group I cases were significantly older than Group II cases (mean age 132 days vs. 102 days and p<0.0001). Eighty-nine percent of the Group I cases were discovered between 08.00 and 19.59 h; none were found between 00.00 and 07.59 h, compared to 38% of the Group II cases. Group I infants were found significantly more often away from home (at daycare, or at the home of a relative, friend, or baby sitter) than Group II infants (45% vs. 25%, p<0.05). There were no differences between groups with regard to gender, gestational age, type of delivery, bed sharing, URI within 48 h of death, ALTEs, a history of referral to child protective services, body position when placed or found, or face position when found. Pathologic changes were semiquantitatively evaluated; findings were characteristic of anoxic-ischemic injury that generally became more severe with increasing survival intervals. Anoxic-ischemic brain injury was the immediate cause of death in all delayed SIDS cases. Aspiration of gastric contents was identified in Group I cases surviving less than 48 h and was the likely etiology of acute bronchopneumonia occurring in 83% of the Group I cases. We did not identify factors that would reliably predict which SIDS cases might be discovered soon enough to allow earlier and more effective CPR and survival without permanent brain injury.