Pining for the periphery: German decolonisation and the negative nostalgia of Hans Grimm

The literature of Hans Grimm is an expression of the intransigence of Germany's liberals in the face of the historical change brought about by the First World War and the persistence of imperialism as a central tenet of the liberal concept of German national identity. Since the time of Friedrich List, German liberalism had expressed its vision of modernity and progress in imperialist, colonial terms. Despite the defeat of this imperialist vision in the First World War, German liberals considered themselves as imperial masters in exile, and it was not until the Untergang of 1945 that the German middle classes jettisoned their colonial nostalgia and revised their understanding of what it meant to be a liberal nation.Unley, S

The fiscal capacity of New England

New Englanders may demand high levels of government services, but their underlying need for public service provision remains quite low, and they tend to be able to better afford the costs of these services relative to the rest of the nation. As a result, the region’s state and local governments face relatively less pressure to raise taxes or increase spending in order to achieve a basic level of public services, and constituent preferences may play a larger role in the fiscal decisions that New England policymakers make.State finance - New England ; Local finance - New England

Targeting vaccination against novel infections : risk, age and spatial structure for pandemic influenza in Great Britain

The emergence of a novel strain of H1N1 influenza virus in Mexico in 2009, and its subsequent worldwide spread, has focused attention to the question of optimal deployment of mass vaccination campaigns. Here, we use three relatively simple models to address three issues of primary concern in the targeting of any vaccine. The advantages of such simple models are that the underlying assumptions and effects of individual parameters are relatively clear, and the impact of uncertainty in the parametrization can be readily assessed in the early stages of an outbreak. In particular, we examine whether targeting risk-groups, age-groups or spatial regions could be optimal in terms of reducing the predicted number of cases or severe effects; and how these targeted strategies vary as the epidemic progresses. We examine the conditions under which it is optimal to initially target vaccination towards those individuals within the population who are most at risk of severe effects of infection. Using age-structured mixing matrices, we show that targeting vaccination towards the more epidemiologically important age groups (5-14 year olds and then 15-24 year olds) leads to the greatest reduction in the epidemic growth and hence reduces the total number of cases. Finally, we consider how spatially targeting the vaccine towards regions of country worst affected could provide an advantage. We discuss how all three of these priorities change as both the speed at which vaccination can be deployed and the start of the vaccination programme is varied