Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form

Abstract Contemporary artworks in Northern Ireland are explored here as critical constellations, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, that engage the cultural processes of transition through their problematisation of it. It is argued that the artworks become sites in which the assumptions of transition are opened up for critical reflection, requesting attention to the foreclosing of the meanings of memory, of past-and-future, of community. A mode of critical questioning of the present renders the present problematic not in terms of exclusions nor with reference to a past that cannot or will not be erased, but in terms of the present’s inability to be conceived through a linear conception of time. That is, the past and its relation to both the present and to the future are set in oscillation as artworks explore the complex temporalities of a present self-consciously attempting to narrate itself away from the past. The artworks, ‘without the bigotry of conviction’ as Seamus Deane put it, suggest that the task of dealing with the past is flawed wherever the past is conceived as a history that can be rendered present to be judged by subjects who are thereby placed beyond it. That is the illusion of a present ‘no-time’ that dovetails with the desires of commercial enterprise and neo-liberal conceptions of freedom. If this suggests an unceasing restlessness, the consolation is that this questioning does take a form, not as judgement or political decision but as artworks which by definition, remain open to reinterpretation and new understandings. These issues are discussed with reference to the work of four artists in Northern Ireland: the paintings of Rita Duffy, the photography and installation work of Anthony Haughey, and the sculptural works of Philip Napier and Mike Hogg

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder: Performance of the Boolardy Engineering Test Array

We describe the performance of the Boolardy Engineering Test Array, the prototype for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope. Boolardy Engineering Test Array is the first aperture synthesis radio telescope to use phased array feed technology, giving it the ability to electronically form up to nine dual-polarisation beams. We report the methods developed for forming and measuring the beams, and the adaptations that have been made to the traditional calibration and imaging procedures in order to allow BETA to function as a multi-beam aperture synthesis telescope. We describe the commissioning of the instrument and present details of Boolardy Engineering Test Array’s performance: sensitivity, beam characteristics, polarimetric properties, and image quality. We summarise the astronomical science that it has produced and draw lessons from operating Boolardy Engineering Test Array that will be relevant to the commissioning and operation of the final Australian Square Kilometre Array Path telescope

The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Education: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Using a teaching model framework, we systematically review empirical evidence on the impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) in higher education on a range of entrepreneurial outcomes, analyzing 159 published articles from 2004 to 2016. The teaching model framework allows us for the first time to start rigorously examining relationships between pedagogical methods and specific outcomes. Reconfirming past reviews and meta-analyses, we find that EE impact research still predominantly focuses on short-term and subjective outcome measures and tends to severely underdescribe the actual pedagogies being tested. Moreover, we use our review to provide an up-to-date and empirically rooted call for less obvious, yet greatly promising, new or underemphasized directions for future research on the impact of university-based entrepreneurship education. This includes, for example, the use of novel impact indicators related to emotion and mind-set, focus on the impact indicators related to the intention-to-behavior transition, and exploring the reasons for some contradictory findings in impact studies including person-, context-, and pedagogical model-specific moderator

Political Interests and the Emergence of Commercial Banking in Transition Economies

This paper examines how interactions between government agencies and banking organizations led to the emergence of commercial banking in the Czech Republic and Hungary during the 1990s. We rely on interviews with bank managers at six large banks, government officers, and experts at other organizations to learn how actions based on different political ideologies shaped the banking field. We integrate prior research on institutional change, political interest, and transition economies to describe the emergence of commercial banking. Three important problems characterized commercial banking in the two countries: the disposal of bad loans, the privatization of banks, and the establishment of banking services. We argue that the solutions to these problems based on the changing political interests of organizational actors and regulators represent the phases of institutional development in commercial banking during the 1990s. Implications of our research are discussed regarding the political perspective of organizational fields in transition economies. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

Surviving the transition: Central European bank executives' view of environmental changes

Executives of ten large banks in three Central European transition economies were interviewed concerning their views of environmental changes. The study sought to identify environmental sectors that were important and uncertain for the bank executives. Central European bankers perceived customers, competitors, economic, and regulatory environmental sectors more uncertain than international and technological factors, sociocultural issues, and new entrants. We found that executives of banks with poor prior performance viewed environmental changes as threats rather than as opportunities.

Coinfection with Three Ehrlichia Species in Dogs from Thailand and Venezuela with Emphasis on Consideration of 16S Ribosomal DNA Secondary Structure

As part of a larger study to investigate tick-borne infections in dogs from Thailand and Venezuela, documentation of coinfection with three Ehrlichia species in two dogs, one from each country, became the focus of the present study. Although neither dog had clinical signs attributable to ehrlichiosis, both dogs were anemic and neutropenic and the Thai dog was thrombocytopenic. Genus- and species-specific PCR targeting the 16S rRNA genes indicated that both dogs were coinfected with Ehrlichia canis, E. platys, and E. equi. To our knowledge, these results provide the first molecular documentation for the presence of E. equi in dogs from these countries. Using universal bacterial PCR primers, one nearly full-length 16S rRNA gene could be amplified from each dog. The sequences were identical to each other and almost identical to that of E. platys (AF156784), providing the first E. platys 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences reported from these two geographically divergent countries. To determine whether these sequence differences allow differentiation between these two strains and other published 16S rDNA E. platys sequences, we performed a phylogenetic analysis of the rRNA, incorporating the consideration of secondary structure