The 1970 British Commonwealth Games: Scottish reactions to apartheid and sporting boycotts

Abstract The 1970 British Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh is widely thought to have been a barnstorming success and an excellent advertisement for Scotland. Recent research by the authors, however, shows that the event was a deeply politicized one: reflective of Scotland’s status as a “stateless nation,” of Westminster politics during the era more generally, and of the politics surrounding apartheid South Africa’s sporting contacts with the outside world. The games managed to avert a mass boycott organized by the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), in retaliation for the Marylebone Cricket Club’s recent invitation of the South African national cricket team. This article will explore Scotland’s place as a nonstate actor within the 1970 crisis. Attention will be given to the domestic political response from Scottish members of Parliament, members of local Scottish councils (particularly within Edinburgh itself), and Scottish National Party (SNP) activists, angered that Scotland should pay for the crimes perceived to be made by an English sporting body. However, our piece goes beyond these discourses, to examine the broader sporting relationship that Scots had with South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), governed by white supremacist regimes during the period. Policy documents, housed in the National Records of Scotland, express UK Cabinet-level concerns about the actions of individual sporting clubs’ tours of the countries. This article will also look at how cabinet ministers, most notably Labour’s Minister for Sport Denis Howell, intervened to shape Scotland’s devolved sporting councils’ policies on contacts with South Africa and Rhodesia.</jats:p

Redetermination of parameters for semi-empirical model for spallogenic He and Ne in chondrites

A semi-empirical model described previously satisfactorily reproduced a number of shielding-dependent variations in the relative production rates of spallogenic He and Ne in chondrites. However, data for cores of the Keyes and St. Severin meteorites showed a subsurface build-up in He-3 which was not predicted with the original model parameters and the model was not pursued. Renewed interest in the preatmospheric size of meteorites, spurred in part by the desirability of understanding the exposure history of the SNC meteorites, justifies redetermination of model parameters

Analysing assessment practice: how useful is the summative/formative divide as a tool?

A view of assessment as 'naturally' divided into the categories of formative and summative has become a taken-for-granted way of thinking about, talking about and organising assessment in universities, at least in the UK where the division is inscribed in national, institutional and departmental policy and guidance (eg. Quality Assurance Agency, http://www.qaa.ac.uk). In these documents summative and formative assessment tend to be understood as serving separate purposes with summative assessment understood as summing up the level of performance and formative assessment as feeding into future learning. We question the utility of the division in terms of better understanding assessment practices on the basis of an empirical study undertaken in a higher education institution in the UK. The aim of the Assessment Environments & Cultures project is to gain a better understanding of how academics assess and why they assess in the ways that they do. Interview and observational data have been collected from academics working in three subject areas: Design, Business and Applied Sciences. Initial analysis has focussed on the discourses in use and the subject positions taken up by academics when they talk about and undertake assessment. Analysis of our data suggests that, whilst academics used the categories of formative and summative to talk about their assessment practices, the distinction between assessment purposes may be 'messier' than the separate categories imply. Various examples from the project will be introduced to illustrate this point. This raises a number of questions in terms of researching assessment practices that will be raised for discussion at the roundtable. For example:Might it be useful to understand formative and summative assessment as occupying a shared and contested space rather than as distinct categories

Surgical Treatment of the Upper Extremity in Rheumatoid Arthritis

All surgical procedures designed to preserve or improve function in the extremities, whether in rheumatoid arthritis or not, must consider the functional emphasis of the upper extremity as compared to the lower extremity. The upper extremity has, as its primary goal, mobility and prehension, whereas in the lower extremity, stability is the most important goal, mobility the next in order of importance, and prehension the least important. For example, the feet fulfill a need for stability with very little requirement for prehension, but the hand is more an instrument for prehension and there is less need to consider stability. I have divided surgery in the upper extremity of the rheumatoid patient into the surgery of prevention and the surgery of repair--that is, those procedures designed to prevent the loss of function and those designed to restore some measure of function

Highly Original (Book Review)

Since his appointment to the United States Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Justice Antonin Scalia has been (to borrow a felicitous phrase from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) a brooding omnipresence over the constitutional landscape, revered by conservatives and reviled by liberals This first Italian-American justice has electrified American constitutional law (and, thereby, American politics) by his firm and largely unfaltering commitment to the idea that the original meaning of the Constitution is the only legitimate basis for judicial decision. Any other approach, he insists, is nothing less than a standing invitation to judicial arbitrariness and policy-driven decision making

The Perverse Paradox of Privacy

The most recent effort of the Supreme Court of the United States to define the judicially created constitutional right to privacy has demonstrated once again why that contrived right poses such a pronounced threat to constitutional self-government. In writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) to overrule a case of only seventeen years\u27 standing that allowed the states to prohibit homosexual sodomy, Justice Anthony Kennedy insisted that the idea of liberty in the Constitution\u27s due process clauses is not limited to protecting individuals form unwarranted governmental intrusions into a dwelling or other private places but has transcendent dimensions of a more moral sort. The essence of the Constitution for Justice Kennedy and his ilk is that it falls to persons in every generation [to] invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom. Put more simply, there is nothing permanent in the constitution, no fundamental, unalterable principles; its meaning comes only from the changing moral views of successive generations of justices

Judicial Nominees: Defining the Terms of Senate Debates

Since roughly the beginning of the Reagan administration the left wing of the Democratic senatorial cohort has enjoyed remarkable success in disparaging Republican nominees to the federal judiciary as mere conservatives . Its argument has been that those nominees would decide cases on everything from abortion to economic regulation on the basis of their conservative policy preferences. Sadly, as a general rule, the conservatives have allowed the Democrats to get away with this distortion