English funding of the Scottish armies in England and Ireland 1640-1648

The rebellion against Charles I's authority that began in Edinburgh in 1637 involved the Scots in successive invasions of England and armed intervention in Ireland. Historians have almost universally taken a negative view of Scottish involvement in these wars, because it has been assumed that the Scottish political leadership sacrificed all other considerations in order to pursue an unrealistic religious crusade. This article suggests that aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship need to be reappraised. Using estimates of English payments to the Scots during the 1640s, it will be argued that the Scottish leadership made pragmatic political decisions based on a practical appreciation of the country's military and fiscal capacity. Substantial payouts from the English parliament enabled the Scottish parliamentary regime to engage in military and diplomatic activities that the country could not otherwise have afforded. The 1643 treaty that brought the Scots into the English Civil War on the side of parliament contrasts favourably with the 1647 Engagement in support of the king. It will be shown that, although the English parliament did not honour all of its obligations to the Scots, it does not automatically follow that the alliance was a failure in financial terms

Food additives and children's behaviour: evidence based policy at the margins of certainty

The possible effects of food additives (specifically artificial colours) have been debated for over 30 years. The evidence accumulated suggests that for some children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) food colours exacerbate their condition. Two studies undertaken by a research group at the University of Southampton have extended these findings to the effects on hyperactivity in children from the general population who do not show ADHD. This article reviews the response from policy-makers to these findings and concludes that the failure to impose a mandatory ban on the six food colours in the Southampton study is inadequate and that such a ban would be an appropriate application of the precautionary principle when the evidence is considered to be at the margins of certaint

The cybercultural moment and the new media field

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the regenerative “belief in the new” in new media culture and web history. I begin by noting that discursive constructions of the web as disruptive, open, and participatory have emerged at various points in the medium’s history, and that these discourses are not as neatly tied to economic interests as most new media criticism would suggest. With this in mind, field theory is introduced as a potential framework for understanding this (re)production of a belief in the new as a dynamic of the interplay of cultural and symbolic forms of capital within the new media field. After discussing how Bourdieu’s theory might be applied to new media culture in general terms, I turn to a key moment in the emergence of the new media field—the rise of cybercultural magazines Mondo 2000 and Wired in the early 1990s—to illustrate how Bourdieu’s theory may be adapted in the study of new media history

Narrative in picture books, or, The paper that should have had slides

In this sense picture books resemble other combinative art forms, such as opera or musical theater, films, and ballet; older examples include the courtly masque and the emblem book. This resemblance is good for me, since I thrive on analogies (I was apparently permanently warped by that section of the SATs), and I therefore often find it useful to consider picture books along with those other media, without, of course, ignoring the fact that picture books also have their own individual charms and characteristics. I'd like to examine the aspects of the picture book the text, the art and other physical factors and then discuss how these narratives work together to affect each other and the final outcome.published or submitted for publicatio

Introduction to Library Trends 21 (1) Summer 1972: Trends of Archival and Reference Collections of Recorded Sound

published or submitted for publicatio

Slashdot, open news and informated media: exploring the intersection of imagined futures and web publishing technology

"In this essay, my interest is in how imagined media futures are implicated in the work of producing novel web publishing technology. I explore the issue through an account of the emergence of Slashdot, the tech news and discussion site that by 1999 had implemented a number of recommendation features now associated with social media and web 2.0 platforms. Specifically, I aim to understand the connection between the development of Slashdot’s influential content-management system (CMS) - an elaborate publishing infrastructure called “Slash” that allowed editors to choose reader submissions for publication and automatically distributed the work of moderating the comments sections among trusted users - and two distinct visions of a web-enabled transformation of media production.