Gender Composition and Household Labour Strategies in Pre-Famine Ireland

This paper examines the relationship between gender composition and rural household strategies in Cavan, a county in north-central Ireland, during the first half of the 19th century. I show that the ratio of adult females to males was highest in small farm households that depended for their survival on intensively deployed family labour in agriculture, flax-cultivation and spinning. By contrast, households without land or with micro-holdings relied on the income from menâs employment as agricultural labourers, supplemented by womenâs work as spinners. More substantial landholders employed men as agricultural labourers. In both of the latter categories household labour strategies centred on menâs activities, with womenâs work representing an important supplement, whereas in the small-farm category household labour strategies centred on a strategic balance between menâs and womenâs labour input. Amongst households engaged in linen weaving the ratio of women to men was lower across all landholding categories. Differences in gender composition resulted from a complex interplay amongst household labour and inheritance strategies in a changing socio-economic environment

How Can I use Learning Analytics in my Teaching Practice

In this guest lecture, Geraldine gave an overview of the genesis and practice of learning analytics in higher education in Ireland and beyond

No Justice without Narratives:Transition, Justice and the Khmer Rouge Trials

The article addresses the relationship between the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the supposed constituents of that transitional justice institution. The article sets out to offer a sociological methodology that TJ mechanism could contemplate in the process of enabling victims/witnesses to narrate justice and transition in their own terms and using Cambodia as a case study. It offers a theoretical and methodological approach to be reflected upon by transitional justice scholars and practitioners, which may enable a more victim-centered attitude in practical interactions with atrocity survivors ( not a cure-all policy solution ). My own research has actively used this methodology to serve this task. This article draws on 70 in-depth oral histories taken from regime survivors, former Khmer Rouge, religious leaders, international and domestic jurists at the ECCC ,witnesses, civil parties, historical and cultural figures from multiple communities in 10 provinces in Cambodia. I have established some basis for situating individual voices into a specifically Cambodian intellectual context. In discussing the Cambodian case from the position of those outside the ECCC (but whom that institution serves) the article engages with the normative assumptions of transitional justice praxis and broader thematic problems such as bridging local and global conceptions of justice

Knowing when to stop: Rhythms of locomotor activity in the high-shore limpet, Cellana grata Gould

The high shore limpet, Cellana grata, forages whilst awash, moving upshore with the rising tide and retreating downshore on the ebbing tide to become inactive in refuges. Spraying inactive, emersed individuals with seawater at low tide invokes a locomotory response, with limpets moving up the shore. Controlled laboratory experiments under continuous white or red light (to simulate light or dark periods respectively) and continuous emersion, immersion or seawater spray showed that C. grata possesses a free-running endogenous rhythm of locomotor activity. This rhythm was maintained over 30. days in continuous seawater spray and white light. Maximum entropy spectral analysis (MESA) revealed two major components to this rhythm, at 7.2. h and 12.4. h. The 12.4. h component is of a circatidal nature and appears to initiate activity, allowing individuals to anticipate immersion by the incoming tide, although this clock can be over-ridden by strong wave splash or spraying vigorously with seawater. The 7.2. h period, however, was the most significant component and is suggested to act as a stopwatch enabling the limpet to assess the duration of each foraging excursion in order to prevent being stranded at the wrong height on the shore. The environmental stimulus for both components of the endogenous rhythm in C. grata appears to be the time of first exposure to wave wash from the incoming tide. C. grata, therefore, has behavioural rhythms entrained to initiate and also terminate activity, which play a role in the limpet maintaining a fixed vertical level on the shore when inactive. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.postprin

Maintaining Effective Deterrence

While deterrence is as old as human conflict itself, it became particularly important with the advent of nuclear weapons when armed conflict between the superpowers had the potential to end civilization. Today there is a sense that terrorism has rendered deterrence obsolete and forced the United States to substitute preemption for it. The author illustrates that strategic reality is not simple. Instead, the two are inextricable. He provides both a conceptual framework for understanding deterrence or, more accurately, the psychology of deterrence and policy guidance on how the United States can most effectively use it. The author concludes that an adaptable and flexible military with robust landpower is the only tool that can maintain deterrence.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1786/thumbnail.jp

Making Strategic Sense of Cyber Power: Why the Sky Is Not Falling

View the Executive SummaryCyber is now recognized as an operational domain, but the theory that should explain it strategically is, for the most part, missing. It is one thing to know how to digitize; it is quite another to understand what digitization means strategically. The author maintains that, although the technical and tactical literature on cyber is abundant, strategic theoretical treatment is poor. He offers four conclusions: (1) cyber power will prove useful as an enabler of joint military operationsl; (2) cyber offense is likely to achieve some success, and the harm we suffer is most unlikely to be close to lethally damaging; (3) cyber power is only information and is only one way in which we collect, store, and transmit information; and, (4) it is clear enough today that the sky is not falling because of cyber peril. As a constructed environment, cyberspace is very much what we choose to make it. Once we shed our inappropriate awe of the scientific and technological novelty and wonder of it all, we ought to have little trouble realizing that as a strategic challenge we have met and succeeded against the like of networked computers and their electrons before. The whole record of strategic history says: Be respectful of, and adapt for, technical change, but do not panic.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1528/thumbnail.jp

Transformation and Strategic Surprise

The current process of military transformation will enable the Armed Forces to do better what they already do superbly well. It is important to excel at decisive maneuver and in the application of precise, yet overwhelming firepower. But those attributes, though key in warfare against regular enemies, tend to be less valuable in conflict with irregulars. In war after war, the United States has been surprised by the poor political reward it has earned for its military effort. The IT-led transformation will do nothing to help correct the persisting American difficulty in functioning strategically and politically in its conduct of war. The author develops a cumulative seven-point argument.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1750/thumbnail.jp

Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory

The author explores the concept of victory in the war in terrorism, but he does so by placing it within the larger currents of change that are sweeping the global security environment. He contends that the time-tested idea of decisive victory is still an important one, but must be designed very carefully in this dangerous new world. To do so correctly can provide the foundation for an effective strategy. To fail to do so could be the first step toward strategic defeat.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1822/thumbnail.jp

Thucydides Was Right: Defining the Future Threat

To define future threat is, in a sense, an impossible task, yet it is one that must be done. The only sources of empirical evidence accessible are the past and the present; one cannot obtain understanding about the future from the future. The author draws upon the understanding of strategic history obtainable from Thucydides’ great History of the Peloponnesian War. He advises prudence as the operating light for American definition of future threat, and believes that there are historical parallels between the time of Thucydides and our own that can help us avoid much peril. The future must always be unpredictable to us in any detail, but the many and potent continuities in history’s great stream of time can serve to alert us to what may well happen in kind.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1457/thumbnail.jp

Categorical Confusion? The Strategic Implications of Recognizing Challenges Either as Irregular or Traditional

Strategic theory should educate to enable effective strategic practice, but much of contemporary theory promotes confusion, not clarity, of suitable understanding. A little strategic theory goes a long way, at least it does if it is austere and focused on essentials. Unfortunately, contemporary strategic conceptualization in the U.S. defense community is prolix, over-elaborate, and it confuses rather than clarifies. Recent debate about irregular, as contrasted allegedly with traditional, challenges to U.S. national security have done more harm than good. Conceptualization of and for an operational level of war can imperil the truly vital nexus between strategy and tactics. In much the same way, the invention of purportedly distinctive categories of challenge endangers the relationship between general theory for statecraft, war, and strategy, and strategic and tactical practice for particular historical cases. It is not helpful to sort challenges into supposedly distinctive categories. But, if such categorization proves politically or bureaucratically unavoidable, its potential for harm can be reduced by firm insistence upon the authority of the general theory of strategy.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1560/thumbnail.jp