Hidden Wires Research Articles

Performing Welsh Government 1999–2016: how insider narratives illuminate the hidden wiring and emergent cultural practices

ABSTRACT Despite more than 20 years of Welsh democratic devolution, the Welsh Government, and Welsh Ministers particularly, have not generally been an object of academic study. There has been little systematic historical analysis of the new institution of the Welsh Government, its structures, operations and practices. In recent years, a variety of insider accounts by former Welsh Ministers and former First Ministers have started to appear in print, and 1997 Cabinet papers relating to the making of devolution policy have been released. This paper performs two functions. It will explore the learning so far, examining the limited ‘insider accounts’ which have appeared in the context of the documentary evidence, and the light that they shine on everyday life in Welsh Government, its hidden wiring and emergent cultural practices, addressing questions such as internal power structures, the governance innovations of the Welsh Government, and the continuities and contrasts with Westminster and Whitehall traditions. The paper also attempts a contextual, integrated and thematic overview of the making of Welsh Government over this period.

Causal Information-Seeking Strategies Change Across Childhood and Adolescence.

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each puzzle comprised a three- or four-node computer chip with hidden wires. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip's hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures versus those that had high causal centrality in one of the two causal hypotheses but did not necessarily discriminate between them. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. Further, developmental improvements in intervention strategy were related to changes in the ability to accurately judge the strength of evidence that interventions revealed, as indexed by participants' confidence in their selections. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information-seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas.

Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2012: The BBC and the 'Hidden Wiring' of the British Constitution: The Imposition of the Broadcasting Ban in 1988

Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture 2012: The BBC and the 'Hidden Wiring' of the British Constitution: The Imposition of the Broadcasting Ban in 1988

The Hidden Wiring: Networks, Firms and the Transfer of Electrolytic Refining Technology

The Hidden Wiring: Networks, Firms and the Transfer of Electrolytic Refining Technology

The people. Ruth Kirschstein and Alan Rabson.

Every institution has a hidden wiring plan. At NIH, the circuits all seem to connect to Ruth Kirschstein. For more than 4 decades, she and her husband Alan Rabson, both M.D.s and civil servants, have worked and lived on NIH9s tree-shaded campus in Bethesda, Maryland. That9s a lifetime of service as colleague, friend, and supervisor of the government9s top biomedical scientists.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Uniting the United Kingdom? The Making of British History, edited by Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer. Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485–1725, edited by Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber. A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707, edited by John Robertson. The British Problem, c.1534–1707, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill. Macmillan. Three Nations—A Common History? England, Scotland, Ireland and British History c.1600–1920, edited by Ronald G. Asch. Brockmeyer. Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, edited by Roger A. Mason. The Monarchy and the Constitution, by Vernon Bogdanor. The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution, by Peter Hennessy. Prime Minster, Cabinet and Core Executive, edited by R. A. W. Rhodes and Patrick Dunleavy. SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King. Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age, by John Gray. The Way We Live Now, by Richard Hoggart. Arts and Cultures: The History of the 50 Years of the Arts Council of Great Britain, by Andrew Sinclair. The Faber Book of Science, edited by John Carey. But is it True? by Aaron Wildavsky. Orchestrating Europe: The Informal Politics of the European Union 1973–95, by Keith Middlemas. Living Islam:From Samarkand to Stomoway, by Akbar S. Ahmed. Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet is both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy, by Benjamin Barber. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, by Francis Fukuyama.