“An Italian of the Vatican type” : The Roman formation of Cardinal Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin

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The Irish Reform Act of 1868

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Changes in hedgerows in Britain between 1984 and 1990

1. This report summarises the results of work on changes in hedgerows which was commissioned by the Directorate of Rural Affairs, DOE, as part of the analysis of data collected during 'Countryside Survey 1990'. 2. The primary purpose of the report is to present data on change, and to provide descriptions of the methods used to obtain them. Discussion of results, and especially their relevance to countryside policy matters, is minimal although a short comment section is included to cover research and methodological aspects

Data provision in the games industry in Scotland

This project was initiated to explore data-related issues in Scotland’s games industry, an area that has been subject to debate within industry and government. The importance of Scotland’s games industry has been highlighted by both industry and government organisations in Scotland and the UK. The industry’s success is recognised both nationally and internationally and has been used in various guises to promote Scotland, recruit talent and attract inward investment. However, despite this level of interest and visibility, questions have been raised about how accurately the industry is portrayed given some issues with accuracy, availability and relevance of data about the games industry in Scotland. Industry practitioners, support agencies, public bodies and academic organisations have expressed data-related issues in various forums including committee hearings held by the Scottish and UK governments. While data about the industry do exist, there appears to be a lack of accessible public data that can provide the requisite detail, and limited integration of that data which are available. Such issues can negatively impact on decision-making by policy-makers and industry. For example, the 2015 enquiry by the Scottish Government’s Economic Environment and Tourism Committee indicated that a lack of such data resulted in difficulties identifying the economic impact of Scotland’s games industry

Data provision in the games industry in Scotland

This project was initiated to explore data-related issues in Scotland’s games industry, an area that has been subject to debate within industry and government. The importance of Scotland’s games industry has been highlighted by both industry and government organisations in Scotland and the UK. The industry’s success is recognised both nationally and internationally and has been used in various guises to promote Scotland, recruit talent and attract inward investment. However, despite this level of interest and visibility, questions have been raised about how accurately the industry is portrayed given some issues with accuracy, availability and relevance of data about the games industry in Scotland. Industry practitioners, support agencies, public bodies and academic organisations have expressed data-related issues in various forums including committee hearings held by the Scottish and UK governments. While data about the industry do exist, there appears to be a lack of accessible public data that can provide the requisite detail, and limited integration of that data which are available. Such issues can negatively impact on decision-making by policy-makers and industry. For example, the 2015 enquiry by the Scottish Government’s Economic Environment and Tourism Committee indicated that a lack of such data resulted in difficulties identifying the economic impact of Scotland’s games industry

“An Italian of the Vatican Type”: The Roman Formation of Cardinal Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin

Paul Cullen was the most influential figure in Ireland between thedeath of Daniel O’Connell in 1847 and the rise of Charles StewartParnell in the late 1870s. As Archbishop of Armagh (1849-52) andthen Dublin (1852-78) and Ireland’s first Roman Catholic cardinal(1866), he exercised an unprecedented influence in both Ireland’sdominant Roman Catholic Church and in Irish society. What isless known is the nearly 30 years he spent in Rome, first as a studentat the Urban College of the Propaganda Fide and then as rectorof the Irish College in the city. His immersion in the multilingualenvironment of papal Rome was crucial in the shaping of his latercareer in Ireland. This essay traces the first ten or so years of Cullen’stime in Rome, focusing on the important lessons, experiences,and networks that he developed there. Most importantly, attentionis given to Cullen’s relationship with Mauro Cappellari, from 1831Pope Gregory XVI. Cullen’s academic success drew him into thesmall network of Cappellari’s protégés and informed the whole ofhis life, including in Ireland

Land cover and vegetation data from an ecological survey of `key habitat' landscapes in England, 1992-1993

Since 1978, a series of national surveys (Countryside Survey, CS) have been carried out by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) (formerly the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, ITE) to gather data on the natural environment in Great Britain (GB). As the sampling framework for these surveys is not optimised to yield data on rarer or more localised habitats, a survey was commissioned by the then Department of the Environment (DOE, now the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA) in the 1990s to carry out additional survey work in English landscapes which contained semi-natural habitats that were perceived to be under threat, or which represented areas of concern to the ministry. The landscapes were lowland heath, chalk and limestone (calcareous) grasslands, coasts and uplands. The information recorded allowed an assessment of the extent and quality of a range of habitats defined during the project, which can now be translated into standard UK broad and priority habitat classes. The survey, known as the "Key Habitat Survey", followed a design which was a series of gridded, stratified, randomly selected 1 km squares taken as representative of each of the four landscape types in England, determined from statistical land classification and geological data ("spatial masks"). The definitions of the landscapes are given in the descriptions of the spatial masks, along with definitions of the surveyed habitats. A total of 213 of the 1 km2 square sample sites were surveyed in the summers of 1992 and 1993, with information being collected on vegetation species, land cover, landscape features and land use, applying standardised repeatable methods. The database contributes additional information and value to the long-term monitoring data gathered by the Countryside Survey and provides a valuable baseline against which future ecological changes may be compared, offering the potential for a repeat survey. The data were analysed and described in a series of contract reports and are summarised in the present paper, showing for example that valuable habitats were restricted in all landscapes, with the majority located within protected areas of countryside according to different UK designations. The dataset provides major potential for analyses, beyond those already published, for example in relation to climate change, agri-environment policies and land management. Precise locations of the plots are restricted, largely for reasons of landowner confidentiality. However, the representative nature of the dataset makes it highly valuable for evaluating the status of ecological elements within the associated landscapes surveyed. Both land cover data and vegetation plot data were collected during the surveys in 1992 and 1993 and are available via the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5285/7aefe6aa-0760-4b6d-9473-fad8b960abd4. The spatial masks are also available from https://doi.org/10.5285/dc583be3-3649-4df6-b67e-b0f40b4ec895

“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life