Skirting the Issue: Interweaving Dress into Sociopolitical Histories

This thesis seeks to provide the social history that brought about such voices as [Steedman’s mother’s] in post-war Britain, through the analysis of dress that such women wore and aspired to purchase following the end of the war. As the shoppers and makers for their families, working class women like [Steedman’s mother], especially felt the restrictions imposed by austerity measures and government policies. I argue a deeper understanding of how these citizens, who had generally supported the Labour government during the war, came to vote for the Conservative party following the end of the Second World War, can be reached by examining clothing in the same manner in which historians analyze critical texts. Because, even before citizens could use the 1951 elections to punish the Labour party for its failure to deliver the better Britain it had promised during the war, British working class women had already taken a stance: Christian Dior’s New Look skirt

Upholding the Promise: Supporting Veterans and Military Personnel in the Next Four Years

After more than a decade of war, several years of constrained national budgets and a changing veteran population, the second Obama administration must confront how best to uphold its promises to the nation's men and women who serve or have served in uniform.In this report, CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Phillip Carter urges the Obama Administration to develop an inclusive, strategic policy approach that serves veterans and military personnel as well as they have served the nation. He calls upon the administration to tackle urgent issues such as military and veteran suicide, while working over the long term to prevent the civilian "sea of goodwill" toward veterans from turning into an ocean of apathy as current wars wind down, and public attention turns away from the men and women who have fought those wars

The Hippocratic Myth: Why doctors are under pressure to ration care, practice politics, and compromise their promise to heal

Not many policymakers or scholars can write with the authority of Gregg Bloche. Bloche is not only a law professor, but a physician, who knows his way around a hospital. Throughout The Hippocratic Myth, Bloche cements his authority in the mind of the reader by relating stories of his experience as a clinician. In each of these stories, his humane and insightful approach as psychiatrist shines through. I do not say this to imply that Bloche uses his book to brag about his own abilities. Rather, these fluently-written passages strike one as the work of one of those rare practitioners who manages to care deeply about the patient at hand while simultaneously contextualizing the encounter in a larger framework. Thus The Hippocratic Myth should take its place among other well-received books by physicians with a sense of the big picture, including Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and Better and Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think. In The Hippocratic Myth, Bloche leverages this authority to advocate for a more cost sensitive health care system, where individuals frankly acknowledge that they should expect trade-offs between cost and access to certain forms of care. My concern in this review is that Bloche the caring and expert physician would have a tough time in a health care world too deeply influenced by Bloche the cost-conscious author

The Hidden Costs of Health Care Cost-Cutting: Toward a Postneoliberal Health-Reform Agenda

This project is a study of the wastescape - a network of waste - of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in Odisha, India.  The study incorporates key locations, e.g. landfills, urban wastelands and waste warehouses; major actors in the formal and informal waste sector; and flows of waste through economic and social systems. Drawing from the studies, multiple interventions within the wastescape are proposed for improvement of the economic, ecologic and social situation. An important aspect of the project is the development of an approach for how to, as architects, work with big, complex, contingent networks; how to map and understand such a system; and how to determine where to intervene. To improve the existing wastescape, interventions must consciously and holistically address multiple scales; levels of formal-informal; and phases within the waste cycle. The study includes a vast amount of possible interventions. Some of the interventions are further detailed to show feasibility; impact on the wastescape; and synergies with other interventions within the wastescape.Projektet “Wastescape of Bhubaneswar & Cuttack” är en studie av ett nätverk av skräpflöden genom Bhubaneswar och Cuttack i Odisha, Indien. Studien inkorporerar viktiga platser, t.ex. deponier, urbana ödemarker och lokaler för skräphandel; stora aktörer i den formella och informella skräpsektorn; och flöden av skräp genom ekonomiska och sociala system. Utifrån dessa studier, ett flertal interventioner i “the wastescape” föreslås för att förbättra den ekonomiska, ekologiska och sociala situationen. En viktig aspekt av arbetet är utvecklingen av ett sätt att, som arkitekt, arbeta med storskaliga, komplexa och inter-beroende nätverk; hur sådana system kan kartläggas och förstås; samt hur det går att avgöra vart och hur interventioner passar in i “the wastescape”. För att förbättra “the wastescape”, interventioner måste medvetet och holistiskt adressera multipla skalor; nivåer av formell-informell; och faser i skräpets kretslopp. Studien innehåller ett stort nummer av möjliga interventioner. Några av dessa interventioner är ytterligare detaljerade för att visa på genomförbarhet; påverkan på “the wastescape”; och synergier gentemot andra interventioner i “the wastescape”

Special Libraries, May-June 1943

Volume 34, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1943/1004/thumbnail.jp

The Variance and Acceleration of Inflation in the 1970s: Alternative Explanatory Models and Methods

The paper attributes the behavior of U.S. inflation to four sets of factors: aggregate demand shifts; government intervention in the form of the Nixon price controls and changes in the social security tax rate and the effective minimum wage; external supply shocks that include the impact of the changing relative prices of food and energy, the depreciation of the dollar, and the aggregate productivity slowdown: and inertia that makes the inflation rate depend partly on its own lagged values. Considerable attention is given to alternative methods of measuring the impact of government intervention, including the Nixon controls, Kennedy- Johnson guideposts, and the Carter pay standards. The results imply that direct intervention has been futile, since the guidelines and pay standards had no effect at all on inflation, while the Nixon-era controls had only a temporary impact that stabilized both the inflation rate and the level of real output. Some previous studies have had a problem in explaining why inflation was so rapid in 1974 and have been forced to conclude that the termination of the Nixon controls raised prices more than the imposition of controls had lowered them. We find that much of the explanation of rapid inflation in 1974 is the same as that in 1979-80: the shortfall of productivity growth below its ever-slowing trend rate of growth raised business costs and forced-extra price increases, and the depreciation of the dollar in 1971-73 and 1978 boosted the prices of exports and import substitutes, Rapid demand growth, the 1979-80 oil shock, the depreciation of the dollar, the productivity slow- down, and payroll tax increases all help to explain why the inflation rate accelerated between 1976 and 1980 by much more than was generally expected two or three years ago.

Representations of the family in postwar British amateur film: family histories in the Lane and Scrutton collection at the East Anglian Film Archive

This article examines the construction of the postwar British family in amateur film with reference to the Sidney Lane and Cecil Scrutton collection held at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA), particularly the films covering 1948 – 1961. Heather Norris Nicholson argues that home movies contribute to 'an understanding of leisure and visual-related practices of consumption as well as the social processes by which people came to give themselves, and others, identities' in the mid-twentieth century (Nicholson, 2004, p. 323). By considering the social and historical contexts in which these home movies were produced, and using accompanying notes by one of the filmmaker’s sons, the leisure time films of Lane and Scrutton can be analysed in order to understand how the amateur cine hobby ideologically constructed family, community and national identity in postwar Britain. The images of Christmas parties, daytrips and holidays in these films reveal much about this particular family, and are therefore very illuminating to the social historian and film scholar of today

Rethinking bicycle histories: Rethinking cycling histories

Bicycle history and historiography is currently undergoing significant reassessment. Historical studies on bicycles and bicycle mobility have been dominated by the legacy of chronologically organised accounts of the bicycle as artefact. While valuable, this approach has had a tendency to elide significant differences between specific histories of the place of the bicycle as a component of broader mobility systems in varying geographical locations. New areas of social and cultural history are combining with colonial and post-colonial analyses to understand both the Eurocentric nature of dominant accounts and the hidden possibilities of multiple and plural narratives. Moving away from an artefactual bicycle history, this study embraces recent developments in the study of technology and draws on use-pattern approaches to the study of bicycle technology. Shifting focus to a use-centred account and comparing experiences across geographical boundaries reveals substantial differences in patterns and timescales of adoption of the bicycle as basis for mass mobility. By taking a comparative approach to the historical and developmental patterns of bicycle use across varying geographies it becomes possible to isolate the significant factors that may be responsible for shaping cycle use. A comparative use-centred history, placing the bicycle in the context of broader mobility and energy use patterns can enable better understanding of the social forces at work to shape constraints and opportunities, and provides the capacity to interpret the factors at work in the rise and fall of cycle use. The paper re-examines patterns of growth and decline of cycle use for transport in a number of locations (including UK, USA, Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and China), in order to elucidate the factors which have surrounded important change in cycle use. To briefly summarise the main argument of the paper, the roles and influences of a number of actors in times of modal shift are examined. In particular, consideration is given to the contrasting roles of industry and national economic production regimes; users and non-user groups, with specific reference to the role of symbolic value in respect of cycle use; Public policy frameworks; infrastructural provision; and finally, attention is paid to the relationship between cycle use and the use of other mobility modes. In conclusion, it suggests new ways in which to think about bicycle history, moving away from the dominant periodised model and pointing instead towards mechanisms of change in bicycle usage