Digital Commons Network^™

A Comparative Framework: How Broadly Applicable Is A “Rigorous” Critical Junctures Framework?, John Hogan, David Doyle

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The paper tests Hogan and Doyle’s (2007; 2008) framework for examining critical junctures. This framework sought to incorporate the concept of ideational change in understanding critical junctures. Until its development, frameworks utilised in identifying critical junctures were subjective, seeking only to identify crisis, and subsequent policy changes, arguing that one invariably led to the other, as both occurred around the same time. Hogan and Doyle (2007; 2008) hypothesised ideational change as an intermediating variable in their framework, determining if, and when, a crisis leads to radical policy change. Here we test this framework on cases similar to, but different from, …

Identifying Critical Junctures In Macroeconomic Policy - The Cases Of Mexico And Sweden In The Early 1980s, Ana Haro Maza, John Hogan

Articles

Abstract: This paper utilizes a new critical junctures framework to help understand the nature of the changes in macroeconomic policy. The framework consists of three elements which must be identified in sequence to be able to declare, with some certainty, if an event was a critical juncture. These are crisis, ideational change, and radical policy change. Utilizing the critical juncture framework, we will determine whether changes to Mexican and Swedish macroeconomic policy in the early 1980s constituted clean breaks with the past, or were continuations of previously established policy pathways, and why that was.

So Much More Than A "Harmless Drudge": Samuel Johnson And His Dictionary, Joan Howland

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No abstract provided.

Media Discourses On Autonomy In Dying And Death, Christina Quinlan

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THIS PAPER IS A SYNOPSIS of a research project designed to examine the representations of particular experiences of dying and death as represented in media consumed in Ireland. This media research is a small part of a large study commissioned by the Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme, through the Irish Hospice Foundation. The large study, undertaken by a team of researchers from University College Cork and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland, was tasked with the development of an ethical framework for health-care practitioners on patient autonomy in end-oflife care. Patient autonomy at end-of-life is the degree of autonomy or control …

Hollywood Representations Of Irish Journalism: A Case Study Of Veronica Guerin, Pat Brereton

Articles

This paper emanates from an interest in how the journalist profession is represented on film. This discussion is framed, broadly, by an effort to gauge the performative nature of journalists, from ‘hard-boiled’ press hacks to egomaniacal TV reporters, while situating the vocation within conventional media studies, which privileges political and ethical indicators like ‘the Fourth Estate’ or as ‘Public Watchdog’.

Operation Armageddon: Doomsday For Irish Armed Forces, Tom Clonan

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Lynch’s Invasion Plans Exactly forty years ago, in August and September of 1969, intense rioting and civil unrest prevailed throughout Northern Ireland – violence that would ultimately lead to the outbreak of the Troubles. As the violence reached fever pitch the then Taoiseach, Jack Lynch made a televised speech to the nation on RTE in which he used – the now immortal and much misquoted phrase – ‘We will not stand by’. For almost forty years, historians and political pundits alike have argued over the precise meaning of this provocative – and yet somewhat ambiguous phrase. Had Jack Lynch intended …

All Changed, Changed Utterly: The Irish Defence Forces Culture Of Change Management, Tom Clonan

Articles

President-elect Barak Obama’s mandate for the US Presidency was predicated on one simple word – ‘Change’. The simplicity of the word, and of his campaign slogan – ‘Yes We Can’ – belies the complex task of managing change within a dynamic and turbulent fiscal and security environment. Only time will tell whether or not President Obama and his cabinet have the individual and collective skill-sets required to deal with the challenges for change that confront them. Closer to home, the Irish government is also confronted with radical change as it applies to the domestic and international fiscal environment. The Irish …

What's Left Of Solidarity? Reflections On Law, Race, And Labor History, Martha R. Mahoney

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No abstract provided.

A Covert Encryption Method For Applications In Electronic Data Interchange, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitry Dubovitskiy

Articles

A principal weakness of all encryption systems is that the output data can be ‘seen’ to be encrypted. In other words, encrypted data provides a ‘flag’ on the potential value of the information that has been encrypted. In this paper, we provide a new approach to ‘hiding’ encrypted data in a digital image.

In conventional (symmetric) encryption, the plaintext is usually represented as a binary stream and encrypted using an XOR type operation with a binary cipher. The algorithm used is ideally designed to: (i) generate a maximum entropy cipher so that there is no bias with regard to any …