Widening access to higher education: admissions (SPICe Briefing; 11/07)

"This paper describes the recruitment and selection processes of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and explains what is meant by 'contextualised admissions'. It summarises existing research, reports on the use of contextual data for the development of admissions processes and explains the roles of various bodies in developing good practice for HEIs admissions policies. Finally, it provides a brief overview of current Scottish Funding Council activity related to contextualised admissions and 'Widening access to the Professions'." - Cover

Scots in the West Indies in the colonial period: a view from the archives

No abstract available

Public interest litigation in Scotland

No abstract available

Twenty years at the margins: the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model, 1988-2008

2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. This comment briefly assesses how the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has been received within the field of media and communication studies in the United Kingdom

Abnormal attentions towards the British Royal Family. Factors associated with approach and escalation

Abnormal approach and escalation from communication to physical intrusion are central concerns in managing risk to prominent people. This study was a retrospective analysis of police files of those who have shown abnormal attentions toward the British Royal Family. Approach (n = 222), compared with communication only (n = 53), was significantly associated with specific factors, most notably serious mental illness and grandiosity. In a sample of those who engaged in abnormal communication (n = 132), those who approached (n = 79) were significantly more likely to evidence mental illness and grandiosity, to use multiple communications, to employ multiple means of communication, and to be driven by motivations that concerned a personal entitlement to the prominent individual. Logistic regression produced a model comprising grandiosity, multiple communications, and multiple means of communication, for which receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis gave an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.82. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to those for other target groups

The Referendum and after: Scotland’s constitutional future

No abstract available

Devolution of social security

No abstract available

Tales from nowhere : Burma and the lonely planet phenomenon

This essay is an archival reading of the nine editions of Lonely Planet travel guides (published from 1979 to the 2005 edition) containing the progressive creation and narration of the tourist space of Lonely Planet’s Myanmar—in the formative years of its narration as elsewhere as nowhere. I extend Dean MacCannell’s argument from The Tourist to suggest that the function of forbiddenness and nowhere is central to Lonely Planet’s idea of the tourist experience in Myanmar. Moreover, the rhetoric of Lonely Planet has determined particularities of the spatial orderings of Myanmar as a result of tourist structures catering to the idea of the forbidden. Through a reading of Lonely Planet’s rhetoric in its Myanmar texts, we can see the construction of a forbidden place on both literal and metaphorical levels. A rhetorically unique situation exists in Lonely Planet’s role in the Myanmar tourism debate. A project of this scope suggests some ways of reading Lonely Planet’s role in the creation and manipulation of space of tourism in Myanmar. I argue for a careful examination of how Lonely Planet articulates Myanmar as specifically nowhere and, therefore, suitable for appropriation.peer-reviewe

Gamble v. United States: A Commentary

Under the judicially created dual-sovereignty exception, a defendant may be prosecuted by state and federal governments for the same conduct, due to the fact that the state and federal government constitute two separate sovereignties. The doctrine is grounded in the idea that each sovereign derives its power from independent sources—the federal government from the Constitution and the states from their inherent police power, preserved to them by the Tenth Amendment—and thus, each sovereign may determine what constitutes an offense against its peace and dignity in an exercise of its own sovereignty. Under this exception, defendants, by a single act, may violate the laws of both sovereigns and therefore be liable to prosecutions by both governments for the same conduct without their Fifth Amendment rights being infringed. This Commentary will proceed by examining the precedents behind the current separate-sovereigns doctrine and analyzing the anachronistic results they have produced. It concludes by arguing that although the Court will most likely not overrule the dual-sovereignty exception to the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Court should examine how the legal and factual underpinnings of the doctrine have changed and, ultimately, choose to overrule the exception