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This paper presents a proposal for an advanced system of debate in an environment of digital democracy which overcomes the limitations of existing systems. We have been especially careful in applying security procedures in telematic systems, for they are to offer citizens the guarantees that society demands. New functional tools have been included to ensure user authentication and to permit anonymous participation where the system is unable to disclose or even to know the identity of system users. The platform prevents participation by non-entitled persons who do not belong to the authorized group from giving their opinion. Furthermore, this proposal allows for verifying the proper function of the system, free of tampering or fraud intended to alter the conclusions or outcomes of participation. All these tools guarantee important aspects of both a social and technical nature, most importantly: freedom of expression, equality and auditability.

The article discusses some of the economic effects of war in northern Mozambique. It indicates how the historical and structural features of the economy of northern Mozambique restricted post-war reconstruction and post-war poverty alleviation. These features include the dominance of only a few cash crops for export, the absence of much rural trading, poor communication infrastructure, and weak political and state institutions. The specific nature of the internal war further weakened the state through the collapse of tax revenue and export earnings and the massive growth of debt and aid, of which little reached rural northern Mozambique. The article also summarizes key aspects of the geography, climate, markets, and social institutions of northern Mozambique, which define the potential production opportunities for peasant households. Finally, the article suggests how post-war reconstruction could have been more effective in achieving faster post-war poverty alleviation in northern Mozambique.

I call illocutionary externalism (IE) the approach to the study of illocutionary force that I favor. IE is inspired by Austin's seminal ideas on performatives and speech acts. According to IE, in the analysis of a paradigmatic illocutionary force we must essentially mention some aspects of the social and natural environment that cannot be reduced to the (de dicto) speakers' mental states, no matter how these are individuated. A difficult problem for IE derives from the possibility of making explicit the force of an utterance. This fact invites us to focus our attention on the utterer (the person who makes the force explicit) and his mental states (illocutionary intentions), and to support a mentalist approach in the study of forces. In this article I shall argue for the compatibility of IE with the phenomenon of the explicitability of illocutionary force.

Dans les sociétés européennes des siècles passés, les relations de parrainage et de compérage, qui étaient tissées sous une forme de parenté particulière (la « parenté spirituelle »), jouaient un rôle social important. Bien qu'il ait des spécificités importantes, le marrainage présente encore de nombreux aspects obscurs car il a été souvent assimilé au parrainage. Avant le Concile de Trente, les marraines avaient moins d'importance que les parrains ; elles étaient même absentes dans beaucoup de communautés italiennes. C'est justement le Concile qui, en imposant une très nette diminution du nombre des parrains, revalorisa le marrainage et favorisa la participation des femmes à des systèmes complexes de parenté spirituelle. Dans le cadre de cette évolution, l'activité des marraines se dessine comme une sorte de « carrière » qui règle et conditionne l'élaboration progressive d'un réseau de relations qui a été souvent intégré dans celui des hommes (pères ou maris).

Among the social practices that the world of advertising draws upon in order to convey its message, science is used to convince the target audience of the effectiveness of the product it is promoting. The study of the presence and use of science to encourage consumer spending provides information on the public perception of science itself. The present work analyzes these aspects with reference to the Italian press. A quantitative study was carried out on a sample of daily, weekly and monthly publications throughout 2002 and 2003, using a coding frame that enabled the identification of the frequency of scientific messages in advertising, the occurrence of scientific content in the images, the context in which they are set and the type of language used. The results demonstrate that science has a consistent presence in advertising and the image of science that derives from this is a positive one.

Through a comparative discussion of public rituals of national commemoration in India and Turkey, this essay examines the relationship between the formation of the public sphere, the production of national identity, and the establishment of state sovereignty. The central organizing principle is the notion of the "creation of the public" as a historically specific political and cultural project. This departs from the evolutionary understanding of the public sphere as a derivative byproduct or "unintended, rolling effect"1 of social, economic, and political "structural transformations" that took place in the course of the longue durée of European history.2 By theorizing the formation and reproduction of the Indian and Turkish public spheres as deliberate projects or strategies of nationalization and étatization,3 I draw attention to several significant aspects of political modernity that have been obscured in prevailing theories of public sphere formation and transformation.

The article advances a case for greater consideration of the moral aspects of the experience of class, and the concerns that people have regarding their class position and how others view them. First it outlines an approach to understanding lay normativity, especially morality, in which moral sentiments are viewed as evaluative judgements on how behaviour affects well-being. Drawing upon concepts from moral philosophy and examples of moral boundary drawing and shame, it argues that lay morality is weakly differentiated and assumes a universalizing character. Secondly it considers the close relations between economic distribution and recognition, arguing that it is necessary to distinguish between conditional and unconditional recognition, and internal and external goods in order to understand the struggles of the social field. Class inequalities render equality of conditional recognition impossible, because they prevent equal access to practices and goods worthy of recognition.

'Believing without belonging' has become the catchphrase of much European work on religion in the past decade. The thesis that religious belief is fairly robust even if churchgoing is declining is examined using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Social Attitudes surveys. The evidence suggests that belief has in fact eroded in Britain at the same rate as two key aspects of belonging: religious affiliation and attendance. Levels of belief are lower than those of nominal belonging. The roles of period, cohort and age effects on religious change are considered; the conclusion is that decline is generational. In relation to the rates at which religion is transmitted from parents to children, the results suggest that only about half of parental religiosity is successfully transmitted, while absence of religion is almost always passed on. Transmission is just as weak for believing as for belonging.

Examines the increasing GOP dominance in South Carolina, both in terms of party strategy & of shifts in the state's economic & social makeup & in white voter attitudes. Industrialization, suburbanization, the expansion of the white middle class, & a growth in the number of retirees from other states are key features in the fortification of Republican dominance in South Carolina. Other significant aspects include the mobilizing capacities of the religious right, the increasing conviction that the national Democratic party is "out of touch" with South Carolina, & the lasting effects of Ronald Reagan's popularity. While Democrats hold on to their overwhelming support among black voters &, to a lesser extent, in rural areas & inner cities, in general the GOP's strength among most white South Carolinians at the turn of the new century was staggering. Statewide, Democrats were rarely able to garner more than 25 per cent of the white vote. Tables, References. K. Coddon

This article reviews the cumulative development of New Labour's attitude and strategy towards the EU since the late 1980s and argues that the first two New Labour governments' approach to the EU represented a distinct retreat from the 'constructive engagement' and social democratic philosophy of Tony Blair's early modernising phase, moving steadily to occupy a much more traditional British position of 'defensive engagement', mixing national preferences with Atlanticism, and resisting further political integration in favour of traditional 'intergovernmentalism'. It is further argued that New Labour's prioritisation and preferencing of a UK institutional and political economy based upon economic liberalisation, the preservation of key aspects of national sovereignty, and maintaining Atlanticism as the bedrock of Europe's external foreign and defence policies have left Britain almost as far from the true 'heart of Europe' as when Blair inherited office from John Major in 1997.

"October 2005." ; Cover title. ; ". compiled by Mr. Elwood L. White, Social Sciences and Humanities Librarian." -- Introd. ; "This bibliography is a supplement to the Special Bibliography Series, Number 80, compiled in 1990 to support the 14th Military History Symposium" -- Introd. ; I. Reference works -- II. Bibliographies -- III. Overall accounts and assessments -- IV. Background and causes -- V. Civilian leadership and the home front -- VI. The war on the ground -- VII. Aerial operations -- VIII. Naval operations -- IX. Intelligence operations and the clandestine war -- X. Allied participation -- XI. Global context of the war -- XII. Prisoners of war -- XIII. Atrocities -- XIV. Peace negotiations and the end of the war -- XV. Lessons of the war -- XVI. Protest movements -- XVII. Veterans and the memorial wall -- XVIII. Effects of the war -- XIX. The Vietnamese -- XX. Women in the war -- XXI. Press and television coverage of the war -- XXII. Cultural and artistic responses to the war -- XXIII. Miscellaneous aspects of the war. ; Mode of access: Internet.

In February 2000, the Austrian Christian conservative People's Party ÖVP and the right wing nationalist Freedom Party (under its notorious leader Jörg Haider) formed a new government in Austria. This political change resulted not only in heavy political protests in Austria, but also caused bilateral sanctions of the other 14 EU member states against the new government. In March 2000, Austria's public broadcasting company organised a media discussion between representatives of the then government, opposition politicians, representatives of the Austrian civil society and 'ordinary people' to establish a 'national consent' towards the sanctions. Drawing upon insights from appraisal theory, social semiotics and critical discourse analysis, this paper demonstrates how non-verbal situational aspects as well as discursive features of this program are used by the programme makers to create an overall impression of 'Austria as a victim' and how dissenting voices are silenced.

ABSTRACTTwo classic ethnographies, Hortense Powdermaker'sAfter Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep Southand John Dollard'sCaste and Class in a Southern Town, contributed to a "master narrative" of the Mississippi Delta and the South that viewed class largely through the lens of race. Their work contributed to the community studies and culture and personality traditions and became part of the public discourse of race in the United States. This article examines the institutional and theoretical frameworks within which they worked. We focus on three aspects of their work: (1) their definition of class that left race as the only salient social divide; (2) their portrayal of middle‐ and upper‐class statements as normative; and (3) their uncritical use of data from elsewhere in the South to interpret their Indianola data. We report the events at the Yale Institute of Human Relations that led Dollard to publish before Powdermaker.

Sense of community is often mentioned as an asset of new urbanism. The purpose of the study was to explore this claim by comparing Kentlands, a prototypic new urbanist community, with a traditional suburban development near it. Four domains of sense of community were examined, each in terms of 17 distinct aspects of the physical environment, through surveys as well as interviews with residents. The findings suggest thatKentlands residents perceive substantially greater sense of community; they express stronger attachment to their community and sense of identity with it. Natural features and open spaces play a particularly important role in sense of community and Kentlands provides a rich variety of these, fostering pedestrianism and increasing the likelihood of social interactions. The overall layout of the community and traditional architectural style, as well as many other physical features, play vital functions in achieving sense of community

Does the ethnic and immigrant composition of a community and existence of immigrant enclaves or barrios influence community level drug violence? This study explores the relationship between these and other factors in Miami and San Diego census tracts. We employ data about the distribution of Cubans, Central Americans, Haitians, Mexicans and Southeast Asians, controlling for social and economic influences of drug versus non-drug violence. We also analyze the impact of various waves of immigration and immigrant communities to understand the circumstances under which drug violence occurs or is limited at the census tract level. The findings lend some support to the positive and negative aspects of Portes and Rumbaut's (2001) segmented assimilation hypothesis in Miami and San Diego neighborhoods. The strength of this conclusion varies and is contingent upon ethnic composition, new versus old immigration, and the all-encompassing effects of economic deprivation