Judge Parker and the Public Service State

The work described in this thesis is part of the Open Space project, a collaboration between Linköping University, NASA and the American Museum of Natural History. The long-term goal of Open Space is a multi-purpose, open-source scientific visualization software. The thesis covers the research and implementation of a pipeline for preparing and rendering volumetric data. The developed pipeline consists of three stages: A data formatting stage which takes data from various sources and prepares it for the rest of the pipeline, a pre-processing stage which builds a tree structure of of the raw data, and finally an interactive rendering stage which draws a volume using ray-casting. The pipeline is a fully working proof-of-concept for future development of Open Space, and can be used as-is to render space weather data using a combination of suitable data structures and an efficient data transfer pipeline. Many concepts and ideas from this work can be utilized in the larger-scale software project

Trafficking of Migrant Workers from Romania: Issues of Labor and Sexual Exploitation

Part of a major research project on the forms of forced labor today developed by the ILO Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL), this paper argues that trafficking for labor exploitation is an emerging issue in Europe and in particular in Romania. Features a detailed comparison of living conditions prior to the emergence of immigration, trafficking, and/or forced labor

‘Pitch accent’ and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic: Reassessing the role of contact

This paper considers the origin of ‘pitch accents’ in Scottish Gaelic with a view to evaluating the hypothesis that this feature was borrowed from North Germanic varieties spoken by Norse settlers in medieval Scotland. It is shown that the ‘pitch accent’ system in Gaelic is tightly bound with metrical structure (more precisely syllable count), certainly diachronically, and probably (at least in some varieties) synchronically. Gaelic ‘pitch accent’ is argued to be a plausible internal development, parallel to similar phenomena in other branches of Celtic (specifically in Breton), as well as in Germanic. This conclusion may appear to undermine the contact hypothesis, especially in the absence of reliable written sources; nevertheless, a certain role for Norse-Gaelic contact in the appearance of the pitch accent system cannot be completely exclude

Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick’s legacy for mental health movements

This paper re-considers the relevance of Peter Sedgwick's Psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. Psychopolitics offered an indictment of ‘anti-psychiatry’ the failure of which, Sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of ‘mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. ‘The radical who is only a radical nihilist’, Sedgwick observed, ‘is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. Sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed ‘to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. The paper contextualizes Psychopolitics within the ‘crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside Sedgwick's continuing relevance. It considers the dilemma that the discourse of ‘mental illness’ – Sedgwick's critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. Finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating Psychopolitics, remains nonetheless ‘Sedgwickian’

Fiscal determinants of empowerment

Empowerment of local governments and citizens is a primary object of decentralization. Using the analytic lens of empowerment, the author explores the nature of decentralized governance and how this type of structure is likely to be more or less empowering. His primary concern is fiscal decentralization, specifically the association between fiscal determinants and the degree of empowerment of both citizens and local governments. The author's main argument is that both the revenue and expenditure characteristics of local public finances have an effect on the degree of empowerment. His hypothesis is that in a context of decentralized local governance, empowerment is most likely to occur when three conditions prevail: low costs of participation, largeand flexible budgets, and a high proportion of tax revenues from a local base. But these ingredients for empowerment will not necessarily produce outcomes that are progressive and pro-poor. The author contrasts the intrinsic and the instrumental approaches to empowerment, but he does not assess the impact of empowerment on instrumental outcomes. For this hypothesis to support an instrumentalist perspective on empowerment, further empirical work must be conducted.National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Urban Economics

No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration

Reviews research on states' reliance on incarcerating juveniles in dangerous, ineffective, unnecessary, obsolete, wasteful, and inadequate facilities. Recommends ways to redesign corrections systems, including investing in non-residential alternatives