Paper Trail Research Articles

The Information Ecosystems of National Diplomacy: The Case of Spain, 1815-1936

Workers in information-intensive professions live in an information ecosystem in which they create, analyze, store, and communicate information as their core activities. This article illustrates how that happens through the historical case study of Spanish diplomats over the course of more than a century. Their information ecosystem proved extensive, encompassing institutions, bodies of tacit and explicit knowledge, and routine and ad hoc collections of information. This essay offers a model of how to explore the history of a profession's information ecosystem, relying on administrative histories, memoirs, and an analysis of the extant paper trail left by these diplomats.

Privileged and confidential: the secret history of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board

Above the politics and ideological battles of Washington, D.C., is a committee that meets behind locked doors and leaves its paper trail in classified files. The President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) is one of the most secretive and potentially influential segments of the U.S. intelligence community. Established in 1956, the PIAB advises the president about intelligence collection, analysis, and estimates, and about the legality of foreign intelligence activities. Privileged and Confidential: The Secret History of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board is the first and only study of the PIAB. Foreign policy veterans Kenneth Michael Absher, Michael C. Desch, and Roman Popadiuk trace the board's history from Eisenhower through Obama and evaluate its effectiveness under each president. Created to be an independent panel of nonpartisan experts, the PIAB has become increasingly susceptible to politics in recent years and has lost some of its influence. Absher, Desch, and Popadiuk, however, clearly demonstrate the board's potential to offer a unique and valuable perspective on intelligence issues. Privileged and Confidential not only illuminates a little-known element of U.S. intelligence operations but also offers suggestions for enhancing a critical executive function.

Beyond the paper trail: using technology to reduce escalating harms from opioid prescribing in Australia

The paper highlights the extent of pharmaceutical drug misuse problems in Australia and explores how pharmaceutical opioid misuse could be reduced by implementation of a technological tool: a prescription co-ordination program (PCP). The paper explores how enhancements to existing computer-assisted clinical decision support systems through real-time, on-line information to prescribers, pharmacists and regulators could address drug-seeking and improve the quality use of medicines. Trends in national and international prescription opioid use and related harms are examined with attention directed to drug-seeking behaviour and intentional misuse. The international literature concerning PCPs is reviewed and implications for technological advances in Australia are outlined. Australia has a burgeoning problem associated with the misuse of pharmaceutical opioids. There is increased recognition of a range of iatrogenic harms. A number of factors limit Australia's response capacity including lack of technological capacity to provide on-line, real-time information for prescribers and pharmacists. Providing prescribers, pharmacists and regulators with on-line, real-time information about patients' prescription opioid use will improve the quality use of medicines. A national system is required to co-ordinate data on Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Repatriation Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and unsubsidised medicines, including private prescriptions. Pharmaceutical opioids are not the only medicines subject to misuse and therefore the need to capture data on other relevant medicines is also addressed.

Empire’s Babel: US Military Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War

The US military interrogation room has often been the site of controversy, but it has seldom been the object of scrutiny. Faced with photos from Abu Ghraib and reports from Gitmo, the public has primarily honed its outrage on the practice of torture within these interrogation rooms. While the debate about torture escalated over the White House paper trail that provided a legal framework for coercive techniques, the interrogation room itself remained relatively untouched. It was the excessive behavior within the interrogation room that received all the attention. I want to argue that the interrogation room has, in fact, played a pivotal—if little noticed—role in the mainstream discourse of war, law, and violence. Both critics and defenders of torture practices have relied upon a surprisingly similar assumption: that the interrogation room itself can be a rational space for the production of information. For liberal critics, torture is a behavior that exceeds the rational—and thus, moral—bounds of the interrogation room. It is an argument that relies upon the idealized potential of the US military interrogation room as a site of regulated and willing exchange between the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner. In other words, the idea that the interrogation room can be a site for an encounter that is objective, rational, and compassionate in producing information provides the moral horizon for much of the current debate over the use of torture during interrogation. The supporters of coercive techniques frame their arguments along much the same lines, either casting torture techniques as an extension of the objective interrogation process or bracketing the regulated interrogation room as a sort of liberal privilege, one that must be denied to undeserving “enemy combatants” who have already placed themselves outside the bounds of international humanitarian law. For critics and supporters alike, information itself is an unquestioned, self-evident good, and it is a product whose quality reflects

Molière and Paradox: Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age by James F. Gaines (review)

Reviewed by: Molière and Paradox: Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age by James F. Gaines Aurélie C. Capron (bio) James F. Gaines . Molière and Paradox: Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age. Tübingen: Narr, 2010. Pp. 151. $100.00. James F. Gaines acknowledges that, "[a]t first glance, it seems that the ground of seventeenth-century comedy is much too shallow a place to search for the treasure of philosophical wisdom" (9). The religious and intellectual institutions of the time contributed to this well-ingrained idea that stuck for centuries: even in its apogee, seventeenth-century theater, and especially the genre of comedy, had already been condemned by the Church as a sinful entertainment, and as Gaines points out, was discriminated against as an inferior genre by the Académie Française. The author's ambitious task is to disprove this impression by offering careful analyses of Molière's comedies. Yet Moliere, one of the three greatest dramatists of his time as well as one of the greatest masters of Western comedy, is a playwright who, Gaines argues, "of all the French Classical dramatists, seems one of the least qualified as a philosopher" because of his middle-class background and the lack of a "paper trail" on his education (9). But Gaines addresses this issue in the introduction. The author has dedicated much of his scholarly research to Molière, and in the last two decades has published several articles on the paradoxes in Molière's plays. In fact, as mentioned on the Acknowledgments page, this volume draws substantially on the author's six articles published in other journals and books between 1992 and 2003. This book, Molière and Paradox: Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age, gathers a wealth of well-thought-out and ripe ideas, adding to them and producing a cohesive whole demonstrating how the recurring paradoxes in Molière's plays draw a parallel to arguments of skepticism and attempting to position Molière in this movement. With a total of nine chapters, Gaines dedicates a full chapter each to some of the playwright's most popular pieces: L'École des femmes, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, Tartuffe, Le Malade imaginaire. Another two chapters discuss Les Précieuses ridicules, Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire, Amphitryon, L'Avare, and Les Femmes savantes, as well as a few other plays mentioned briefly. [End Page 113] The introduction of the book is a very enticing invitation to the reading of this volume as the author explains why he believes Molière was exposed to and had a disposition toward the skeptic school of thought as it was defined in his time, and it also includes details about Molière's life before he became a playwright for Monsieur (brother of the king, Louis XIV). But the introduction also falls short of a much needed informative introduction to the philosophy of skepticism—its followers and its enemies—to help with its intricacy in the analytical chapters to follow. Gaines is without a doubt very well read in this school of thought. The close readings of his plays use a theoretical and philosophical framework that calls heavily on important thinkers who contributed or were opposed to the movement of skepticism from seventeenth-century thinkers—Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Charron, René Descartes, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Gassendi—all the way back to the classical Greeks, including Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, Agrippa, Lucretius, and Aristotle. He also intelligently supports his arguments with excellent contemporary references from other experts on the topic. Gaines's stance on Molière's works is unusual, but it is not new, as he makes mention of Robert McBride's The Skeptical Vision of Molière: A Study in Paradox, which he often addresses and discusses alongside his readings. Gaines even goes so far as to include a comment by George Soros, a contemporary economist-philosopher whose name is familiar to anyone who keeps up to date with current issues. It is a surprising, but a welcome and most fitting, reference to initiate a discussion of Monsieur Jourdain's mental function in Le...

Disciplining Christians: correction and community in Augustine's letters

Introduction 1. Rebuke, Friendship, and Community 2. Experiments in Epistolary Correction 3. The Honeyed Sword: Rebuking Jerome 4. The Donatists and the Limits of the Corrective Correspondence 5. The Retrospective Correction of Pelagius Conclusion- The Paper Trail

The Law and Black Folk

The Law and Black Folk Katy L. Chiles (bio) Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery by Bryan Wagner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 307. $37.00 cloth. Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, scholars have deliberated over what it means to have a soul, to be black, or to be part of the folk. In Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, Bryan Wagner gives us a new way to consider these issues that is provocative and, indeed, disturbing. Blackness, Wagner claims, is not something passed down through bloodlines or as a cultural inheritance; rather, it is a certain type of statelessness produced when one is allowed to exist—but only without standing—in the eyes of the state. Furthermore, it is this understanding of blackness (one of statelessness, not of soulfulness) that grounds what we commonly call the black vernacular tradition. Indeed, this version of the black tradition predicates its own emergence on its engagement with the law that would construct the existence of its practitioners only as one of criminality. For Wagner, if we miss understanding this aspect of blackness, we miss the violence recorded in these cultural expressions. Wagner proposes this alternative history of the black vernacular tradition by debunking some of what he calls the central myths of its accepted history and by detailing the ethnographic procedure that made certain kinds of music into folk music (253). He begins by showing the way in which the laws arising out of a natural law tradition [End Page 339] produced a particular notion of blackness. For him, the term police power refers not just to the formalized institution of law enforcement (although it certainly includes that) but also more broadly to the power of the state to produce certain types of subjectivities through the writing and enforcing of law. Indeed, the state's sovereignty relates to its police power, and, in the particular case of blackness, the state's police power sees blackness only "for the presumed danger it poses to public welfare" (6-7). Furthermore, this power was not only consolidated in the state itself, as it was extended as a "racial privilege of all whites over all blacks, slave or free" (7). Because this police power conceptualized blackness only as a threat, it legitimated any effort to eliminate that potential threat preemptively before it could culminate in action. For Wagner, the black vernacular tradition arises out of its interaction with this kind of legal thinking, and we'd be better served by understanding how black culture responded to police power rather than by misunderstanding "the voice's insistence for a positive property such as soulfulness" (21). Indeed, as Wagner states, [M]y aim is to specify the historical statement against which the black tradition has dramatized its own emergence. Whether it is abstracted in codes or embedded in cases, the law leaves a paper trail that can be used to reconstruct the historical coordinates that are invoked in the tradition's representative structures of self-address. (21) One of Wagner's most powerful examples is the history of Uncle Remus, the African American character created by Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta at the close of the nineteenth century. Probably many Americans think of Uncle Remus either as the storyteller featured in Harris's Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) or as the demeaning narrator featured in Disney's 1946 film, Song of the South. What Wagner reminds us of, however, is the seriousness with which folklorists took the Uncle Remus stories for their "scientific worth" (116). As Wagner details, Remus became structurally important both to the study of black folk culture and to the professionalization of that type of study. Remus, then, influenced folklorists' "theories of black tradition, in particular those theories that would describe the tradition as a cultural inheritance from Africa;" indeed, he "structured the archive through which the tradition has been imagined" (122). By reading through issues of the Atlanta Constitution, the newspaper that initially published Harris's Remus pieces, Wagner links the production of this character with the debate simultaneously...

Frederick Edward Smith: 1920–2012

Frederick Edward Smith: 1920–2012

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy

Electronic Discovery and the Adoption of Information Technology

After firms adopt electronic information and communication technologies, their decision-making leaves a trail of electronic information that may be more extensive and accessible than a paper trail. We ask how the expected costs of litigation affect decisions to adopt technologies, such as electronic medical records (EMRs), which leave more of an electronic trail. EMRs allow hospitals to document electronically both patient symptoms and health providers’ reactions to those symptoms and may improve the quality of care that makes the net impact of their adoption on expected litigation costs ambiguous. This article studies the impact of state rules that facilitate the use of electronic records in court. We find evidence that hospitals are one-third less likely to adopt EMRs after these rules are enacted. (JEL K41, O33, I12).

A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence

A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence

The Science of Freedom: Counterarchives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage

The history of American racial science shares an important genealogy with the history of performance. Throughout the antebellum period, the popular stage routinely doubled as a scientific laboratory, where theories of race were produced and disseminated to a mass audience. Operating in the same cultural milieu and in many cases, on the same performance circuits as race scientists, quack doctors, and scientific showmen with questionable credentials, black performers, musicians and lecturers regularly forged creative responses to the popular performance of race science. Following the bold leaps and experimental engagements with history that characterize the field of performance studies, this essay stitches together a counterarchive of racial science on the antebellum stage from what is a necessarily partial and elusive history. Following a paper trail of ticket stubs, newspaper announcements, broadsides, and other ephemera, I chronicle how a number of antislavery agents, including Henry “Box” Brown, Sarah Mapps Douglass, William Wells Brown, and a set of lesser-known figures, countered the widespread circulation of racist science in popular entertainment and print culture through dynamic performances of “fugitive science” in both the U. S. and Britain. Far from rejecting science as a whole, these figures sought to link “scientific revolution” to race revolution by incorporating phrenology, mesmerism, ethnology and other fields into their acts and lectures. The dynamic, restive movements of early black performance simultaneously refused race science’s attempt to “fix” nonwhite bodies within racist evolutionary taxonomies. Drawing on recent scholarship, the essay goes on to consider how the concept of fugitivity unsettles the history of empiricism, and turns our view to a broad field of experimentation traversing African American science, art, and expressivity while suggesting new transdisciplinary approaches to the study of black performance, the Black Atlantic, and the history of racial science.

Andean Activism and the Reformulation of Mestizo Agency and Identity in Early Colonial Peru

The article examines the activism that Peruvian mestizos undertook in order to rearticulate their agency and identity in a positive and polemical in late sixteenth-century colonial Peru. The research focuses on two related and little known documents from the 1580s, a 1584 memorial to King Philip II and a 1583 Latin letter to Pope Gregory XIII (English translation included in the Appendix). Part of a larger paper trail, these documents offer an important record of Andean activism before the church and the crown, set within the larger context of post-conquest struggles for the New World. The topic of mestizo agency is framed in terms of how colonial subjects actively engage in variable and adaptable strategies, through which they seek to reformulate their identity, place, and position within the Spanish colonial world.

Obliteration, Symbolic Adoption, and Other Finicky Challenges in Tracking Innovation Diffusion

Although diffusion is a central topic in innovation and entrepreneurship, its measurement remains difficult – particularly in cases where a complete and coherent paper trail around an innovation may not exist. In this paper, we develop four theoretical mechanisms that may bias diffusion markers by leading to the understatement and/or overstatement of diffusion at different points in time. Employing the case of “green chemistry,” we then explore how the use of keywords, database index terms, and practitioner assessments may result in different conclusions about the magnitude and timing of diffusion, organizational demography, journals, geographic patterns and collaboration. Building on these findings, we make a case for the integration of practitioners in construct measurement and for the use of multiple measures in diffusion studies.

Organizational Culture in an Academic Health Center

Implementing cultural change and aligning organizational cultures could enhance innovation, quality, safety, and job satisfaction. The authors conducted this mixed-methods study to assess academic physician-scientists' perceptions of the current and preferred future organizational culture at a university medical school and its partner health system. In October 2010, the authors surveyed academic physicians and scientists jointly employed by the University of Oxford and its local, major partner health system. The survey included the U.S. Veterans Affairs Administration's 14-item Competing Values Framework instrument and two extra items prompting respondents to identify their substantive employer and to provide any additional open-ended comments. Of 436 academic physicians and scientists, 170 (39%) responded. Of these, 69 (41%) provided open-ended comments. Dominant hierarchical culture, moderate rational and team cultures, and underdeveloped entrepreneurial culture characterized the health system culture profile. The university profile was more balanced, with strong rational and entrepreneurial cultures, and moderate-to-strong hierarchical and team cultures. The preferred future culture (within five years) would emphasize team and entrepreneurial cultures and-to a lesser degree-rational culture, and would deemphasize hierarchical culture. Whereas the university and the health system currently have distinct organizational cultures, academic physicians and scientists would prefer the same type of culture across the two organizations so that both could more successfully pursue the shared mission of academic medicine. Further research should explore strengthening the validity and reliability of the organizational culture instrument for academic medicine and building an evidence base of effective culture change strategies and interventions.

The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (review)

Reviewed by: The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences Shane Graham Peter McDonald . The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. xvi + 416 pp. Censorship has, of course, been much discussed in South African literary studies. But Peter McDonald's The Literature Police is a groundbreaking book in two ways: first, it is to my knowledge the first book to attempt a comprehensive historical overview of censorship in apartheid South Africa and its effects, not just on writers, but on publishers, literary journals, writers' organizations, and other key institutions. Second, it is the first text to look closely and methodically at the paper trail left behind by the Board of Censors to analyze precisely which texts were banned and the reasons given. The Literature Police is densely packed with important and original findings, and will surely be a study that scholars of South African literature will have to acquaint themselves with for years to come. The struggle between the writer and the censor is as old as writing itself; in the particular case of the censorship of literary works in South Africa, McDonald traces it to the "arrival" of literature itself, which his opening declaration sets at 1824—the year that Thomas Pringle and John Fairbairn launched the South African Journal, only to see it quickly suppressed by Governor Somerset: "Having arrived in March 1824, in other words, literature with all the significance Pringle and Fairbairn attached to it had by September effectively been closed down at the behest of the colonial state" (9). McDonald's point is that struggles over the definition and publication of literature began under British colonialism, which shaped later forms of state censorship under apartheid. McDonald begins chapter 1 by discussing the Publications Commission headed by Geoffrey Cronjé from 1954 to 1957. Many of the commission's draconian recommendations were implemented in the Publications and Entertainments Act of 1963, which created a new Board of Censors. For McDonald, a crucial development in this reconstitution of the board was that respected Afrikaans literary critic Gerrit Dekker was appointed to be its first chair. Under Dekker's leadership, the new board came to define its role not only as guardians of apartheid and of a Christian moral order, but also as guardians of the literary, and specifically of what McDonald calls the "volk avant-garde" (28). McDonald argues the most significant consequence of this concession to literary considerations "was that it put the question of literature—what is it and who decides?—at the centre of apartheid censorship" (39). [End Page 389] The censors' self-appointed role as guardians of the literary did little to mitigate the repression engendered by vigorous state censorship. Instead, it introduced an element of perversity into the proceedings, resulting in rulings that were all the more capricious, unpredictable, and indefensible for being based on supposedly literary criteria. McDonald summarizes the situation of literary authors working under the threat of censorship: "versions of their own anxieties, which centered on the inextricably tangled questions of literature, censorship, and the ethics of writing, were built into the system itself, as a consequence of the government's initial compromises with the volk avant-garde" (165). Literary publishers as well were "entangled in an absurdly high-minded, asymmetrical, and potentially devastating rivalry with the censors over the idea of literature itself, which brought with it real risks of financial loss, imprisonment, or both" (85). Because the censors' powers were so sweeping, and because so many texts were sent to them for review, The Literature Police by necessity becomes a history of South African literary production in the twentieth century. African-language publishing was so thoroughly co-opted in the service of Bantu Education that McDonald is able to dispense with that strand of the history fairly quickly. But his accounts of both Afrikaans and English literature in South Africa are expansive and deeply informed. Much of this is well-worn territory, but reading this history through the lens of censorship proves highly revealing. It sheds new light, for example, on such familiar narratives as the rise and decline of Drum magazine in the 1950s, and Nadine Gordimer's disagreement with...

A randomized control trial to evaluate the beyondblue depression training program: does it lead to better recognition of depression?

The aim of this study was to determine if a depression training program could assist aged care staff to better recognize depression among older people in residential care. The use of a "paper trail" for a screening tool and a study champion in combination with this training was evaluated to determine if this improved the level of detection of depression. The study took the form of a randomized control trial. A total of 107 professional carers from residential aged care services in Melbourne, Australia, participated in the study. Thirty-four carers were allocated to the training-only group and completed a six-session depression training program, 35 carers were allocated to the training-plus-screening protocol group, and 38 carers were assigned to a wait-list control group. In total, 216 residents were screened for depression. Carers in all conditions were asked to identify those residents who they perceived to be depressed. Residents were independently assessed with the SCID-I to determine their depression status. Trained staff were not found to be better in detecting depression than non-trained staff. Staff in the training-plus-screening condition correctly identified more residents as depressed, but also classified more non-depressed residents as depressed. The findings demonstrate the need for a greater focus on recognizing depression among carers working in aged care facilities. Protocols should be developed to assist carers to detect, refer, and monitor depression in residents.

‘It's good to talk' – auditing the effect of a consultant-led phone advice service within the emergency department

Introduction With increasing pressures on acute paediatric services, the need for providing more focussed, increasingly consultant delivered services is clear. The Children9s Emergency Department sees a significant year-on-year increase in attendances, many of which can be inappropriate or unnecessary, so can we alleviate some of this pressure whilst supporting our community-based colleagues? Methods/Design A one-month pilot study was undertaken between April and May of this year, looking at all phone referrals to the department. Either the Consultant or most experienced trainee in the department received the calls. The results were then re-audited in June of this year. Details documented included: Patient9s name, age and date of birth; Referrer; Brief history /examination findings; Advice given; Outcome; Results A total of 268 phone referrals were received: 85% from GPs, 2% from other hospitals; 9% from WIC; 4% from ‘others’. Calls taken were roughly evenly split between Consultants and Middle Grades. Following discussion, 74% were seen in ED, 19% given advice, 3% had escalated management and 4% were redirected to outpatients. A survey was also sent to GPs who had made referrals in this manner to gain their views and experiences of the service. For the month of June, results showed an increase in the number of calls (350) with 71% coming from GPs. This also showed a peak in the number of calls between 11-12 and at 1700 hours, reflecting the college recommendations that a consultant should be present at times of peak activity. Conclusion The system has so far proved worthwhile with almost a quarter of calls preventing attendance on the basis of management advice or a more appropriate disposal option. Feedback is needed from a greater number of health professionals, as is, assessing its sustainability. The system appears a positive clinical governance and medico legal measure, providing clear documentation and a paper trail that can be referred to should there be concerns. There is also potential, in the future, to charge for such a service, helping gain revenue for the department.

A Tale of Two Educational Leadership Program Redesigns: How Policy Influences Process

This article examines the redesign of two educational leadership programs at different institutions: a medium-sized public university and a small private university. Both were committed to principals of ethical leadership. Each program faced a state mandate to redesign. In one case, state policy focused on detailed accountability measures based on syllabi alignment to standards and a complex paper trail of documentation required for final approval. In the other case, accountability focused on a final portfolio, and programs were encouraged to be innovative. Policy differences combined with situational context to create two different approaches to the redesign work.

A Growing Niche in Corporate America

A Growing Niche in Corporate America