Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts

A Review of Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts by Martin A. Levi

From the strange death to the odd afterlife of Lutheran England

Research on the relationship between England and Protestant Germany during the sixteenth century has recently experienced a revival. A significant area of concentration for confessional interests among Lutherans a century ago, Anglo-German relations took a backseat in Reformation historiography during the twentieth century, but during the last decade or so a host of scholars in the UK, Germany, and USA have once again turned their attention to the topic. This review article surveys trends in scholarship on Reformation studies in both England and Germany before turning specifically to works considering instances of interaction, co-operation, and adaptation across the confessional and geographic divides. Gathering a considerable array of secondary materials, the article offers an overview of the merits and criticisms of previous analyses and concludes by pointing out a few areas for future inquiry

High spatial resolution analysis of ferromanganese concretions by LA-ICP-MS†

A procedure was developed for the determination of element distributions in cross-sections of ferromanganese concretions using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). The effects of carrier flow rates, rf forward power, ablation energy, ablation spot size, repetition rate and number of shots per point on analyte intensity were studied. It is shown that different carrier gas flow rates are required in order to obtain maximum sensitivities for different groups of elements, thus complicating the optimisation of ICP parameters. On the contrary, LA parameters have very similar effects on almost all elements studied, thus providing a common optimum parameter set for the entire mass range. However, for selected LA parameters, the use of compromise conditions was necessary in order to compensate for relatively slow data acquisition by ICP-MS and maintain high spatial resolution without sacrificing the multielemental capabilities of the technique. Possible variations in ablation efficiency were corrected for mathematically using the sum of Fe and Mn intensities. Quantification by external calibration against matrix-matched standards was successfully used for more than 50 elements. These standards, in the form of pressed pellets (no binder), were prepared in-house using ferromanganese concentrates from a deep-sea nodule reference material as well as from shallow-marine concretions varying in size and having different proportions of three major phases: aluminosilicates, Fe- and Mn-oxyhydroxides. Element concentrations in each standard were determined by means of conventional solution nebulisation ICP-MS following acid digestion. Examples of selected inter-element correlations in distribution patterns along the cross-section of a concretion are given