L’isoloir universel ? La globalisation du scrutin secret au XIXe siècle

Le vote secret est actuellement considéré comme la seule méthode qui puisse assurer la sincérité des élections. Tel n’a pas toujours été le cas. Cet article se veut une contribution à une histoire critique et en devenir de l’acte de vote. Au cours du «  long  » dix-neuvième siècle, l’adoption du vote secret provoqua un grand débat dans les pays occidentaux. Cette discussion devint globale à travers la comparaison entre les systèmes électoraux. Cette approche transnationale de la réforme, fondée sur des réseaux internationaux de communication plus rapides, est cependant restée dans l’ombre, alors qu’elle est essentielle pour comprendre l’invention et la diffusion à travers le monde de l’«  australian ballot  », avec son bulletin officiel imprimé et surtout son isoloir. Une innovation d’origine coloniale a ainsi inspiré le renouveau des procédures électorales en Angleterre et aux États-Unis, puis en Belgique et en France. La diffusion du vote secret offre un excellent exemple de circulation des idées et des pratiques. Dans ce cas néanmoins, des spécificités locales ont persisté, faisant ainsi obstacle à l’adoption d’un modèle uniforme.These days we take it for granted that the secret ballot is the only method of voting compatible with free and fair elections. However, this has not always been the case and the study that follows contributes to a critical history of the vote that historians are beginning to construct. During the long nineteenth century, as countries considered adopting the secret ballot, there was much argument over its relationship to democracy. This debate was conducted on a global scale, as different western countries compared and contrasted various aspects of their respective electoral systems. This transnational approach to reform, based on improved communications and international mobility, has not been recognised. Yet without it the pioneering ‘Australian Ballot’, with its printed ballot papers and polling booths, would not have been invented, nor disseminated across the world. This colonial innovation directly inspired reform in Britain, then the United States, and it was later relayed to France after its adoption in Belgium. Even so, while the diffusion of the secret ballot offers a striking illustration of transnationalism, it was far from imposing uniformity as local variations in practice persisted.Die geheime Abstimmung wird derzeit als einzig ernsthafte Methode für die Durchführung von Wahlen angesehen. Das war nicht immer so. Dieser Artikel möchte einen Beitrag leisten zu einer sich derzeit etablierenden kritischen Geschichte des Wahlakts. Während des langen 19. Jahrhunderts löste die Durchsetzung des geheimen Wahlrechts eine große Debatte in den westlichen Ländern aus. Über den Vergleich der Wahlsysteme wurde daraus eine globale Diskussion. Die transnationale Herangehensweise bei der Reform, die auf internationalen und schneller werdenden Kommunikationsnetzen basierte, ist bisher nicht erforscht. Dabei ist sie grundlegend für das Verständnis der Erfindung und für die weltweite Verbreitung der «  australischen Wahl  » mit gedruckten Wahlzetteln und vor allem mit Wahlkabinen. Eine Erfindung kolonialen Ursprungs hat auf diese Weise die Wahlprozeduren in England und den USA, und dann Belgien und Frankreich erneuert. Die Verbreitung der geheimen Wahl ist ein hervorragendes Beispiel für die Zirkulation von Ideen und Praktiken. In diesem Fall zumindest existierten lokale Besonderheiten fort, und haben so die Übernahme eines einheitlichen Models verhindert

British health policy, 1848–1919

The year 1848 witnessed the arrival of the first dedicated official home for health policy in Whitehall, the General Board of Health. It marked the advent of a new era of central supervision and accountability in the making and implementation of British health policy. Between 1871 and 1919 the key central office was the Local Government Board. Throughout this period, health policy was always a plural formation, composed of a number of overlapping strands: sanitary reform and environmental health; industrial health and the health of children; state medicine and the control of infectious diseases; and welfare and health insurance. This made for problems of institutional coordination and administrative clarity, however. The consolidated leadership of health policy proved elusive. No particular central authority enjoyed a bird’s eye view of health policy across Britain as a whole. The implementation of health policies was highly variable across time and space. This can be explained by a number of factors: the highly localized culture of administration; a pervasive commitment to economy; and active resistance from multiple groups, among them MPs, owners of capital, councillors, and members of the public. These administrative problems should not obscure the considerable gains secured to the health outcomes for the British population. This, too, can be explained by a number of factors: the growing professionalization of health policy and its day-to-day implementation; the gradual accretion and refinement of permanent infrastructural and bureaucratic systems that set new standards of healthcare; and the scope for innovation and experimentation afforded by the relatively localized culture of administration

Groups of Galaxies in the Two Micron All-Sky Redshift Survey

We present the results of applying a percolation algorithm to the initial release of the Two Micron All-Sky Survey Extended Source Catalog, using subsequently measured redshifts for almost all of the galaxies with K < 11.25 mag. This group catalog is based on the first near-IR all-sky flux-limited survey that is complete to |b| = 5 deg. We explore the dependence of the clustering on the length and velocity scales involved. The paper describes a group catalog, complete to a limiting redshift of 10,000 km/s, created by maximizing the number of groups containing 3 or more members. A second catalog is also presented, created by requiring a minimum density contrast of 80 to identify groups. We identify known nearby clusters in the catalogs and contrast the groups identified in the two catalogs. We examine and compare the properties of the determined groups and verify that the results are consistent with the UZC-SSRS2 and northern CfA redshift survey group catalogs. The all-sky nature of the catalog will allow the development of a flow-field model based on the density field inferred from the estimated cluster masses.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ (29 pages including 13 figures). A version with high-resolution figures is available at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~acrook/preprints

The use of germinants to potentiate the sensitivity of Bacillus anthracis spores to peracetic acid

Elimination of Bacillus anthracis spores from the environment is a difficult and costly process due in part to the toxicity of current sporicidal agents. For this reason we investigated the ability of the spore germinants L-alanine (100 mM) and inosine (5 mM) to reduce the concentration of peracetic acid (PAA) required to inactivate B. anthracis spores. While L-alanine significantly enhanced (p = 0.0085) the bactericidal activity of 500 ppm PAA the same was not true for inosine suggesting some form of negative interaction. In contrast the germinant combination proved most effective at 100 ppm PAA (p = 0.0009). To determine if we could achieve similar results in soil we treated soil collected from the burial site of an anthrax infected animal which had been supplemented with spores of the Sterne strain of B. anthracis to increase the level of contamination to 104 spores/g. Treatment with germinants followed 1 h later by 5000 ppm PAA eliminated all of the spores. In contrast direct treatment of the animal burial site using this approach delivered using a back pack sprayer had no detectable effect on the level of B. anthracis contamination or on total culturable bacterial numbers over the course of the experiment. It did trigger a significant, but temporary, reduction (p < 0.0001) in the total spore count suggesting that germination had been triggered under real world conditions. In conclusion, we have shown that the application of germinants increase the sensitivity of bacterial spores to PAA. While the results of the single field trial were inconclusive, the study highlighted the potential of this approach and the challenges faced when attempting to perform real world studies on B. anthracis spores contaminated sites

Lessons from the History of British Health Policy

‘Health policy’ is a slippery concept. In Britain, since the establishment of the National Health Service, it has often come to be associated only with the NHS, but it has a longer running and wider history. Health policy both predates the NHS and goes beyond it. In this introduction we set the chapters in this report in context by exploring some of the issues that run through the history of health policy in Britain. We focus on five areas: (1.) What was or is ‘health policy’? (2.) Where was health policy made? (3.) Who were the policymakers? (4.) What were some of the persisting policy challenges? (5.) What are the politics of health policy

A miniaturized 4 K platform for superconducting infrared photon counting detectors

We report on a miniaturized platform for superconducting infrared photon counting detectors. We have implemented a fibre-coupled superconducting nanowire single photon detector in a Stirling/Joule–Thomson platform with a base temperature of 4.2 K. We have verified a cooling power of 4 mW at 4.7 K. We report 20% system detection efficiency at 1310 nm wavelength at a dark count rate of 1 kHz. We have carried out compelling application demonstrations in single photon depth metrology and singlet oxygen luminescence detection