Coping and Helping to Cope: Perspectives of Children of Palestinian Political Detainees

This qualitative study investigates how children of Palestinian political detainees in Israeli detention cope with their fathers' absences. Researchers conducted 16 semi‐structured interviews with children, mostly aged 15 and older in the West Bank. Three themes are discussed that emerged from the interview data: how children cope with their sadness; the children's perspectives on community support; and older children's support to siblings and parents. Practitioners can support children by providing counselling to mothers and organising interventions, which give children the opportunity to connect. It is important that the agency of the older children is taken into account and built upon.     

Bedbugs and Grasshoppers: Translation,Myth and the Becoming of the Nation‐State

How is literally, a nation translated? This paper looks at translation practices as historical process and practice rather than submitting them to causal explanations with respect to the constitution of the nation‐state. It takes as its starting point, two contemporary Malay words negeri (province, state) and negara (country, nation‐state) and how they once had opposing definitions. Working with over three hundred years of dictionaries and lexicons, mainly English‐Malay dictionaries, the words negeri and negara were translated and defined very differently from current dictionaries – nor are they clarified today. What then happened to these words and how were they understood and translated over time, and in what possible context within the language of post‐colonial nation‐state formation? What do the processes of translation offer or convey that disrupts the singularity of nations and nationalism? Writings on translation do not necessarily shed any further clarity but they offer a space in which we can think about translating practices and what they enact in the narrative of the nation.     

QRA Model‐Based Risk Impact Analysis of Traffic Flow in Urban Road Tunnels

Road tunnels are vital infrastructures providing underground vehicular passageways for commuters and motorists. Various quantitative risk assessment (QRA) models have recently been developed and employed to evaluate the safety levels of road tunnels in terms of societal risk (as measured by the F/N curve). For a particular road tunnel, traffic volume and proportion of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) are two adjustable parameters that may significantly affect the societal risk, and are thus very useful in implementing risk reduction solutions. To evaluate the impact the two contributing factors have on the risk, this article first presents an approach that employs a QRA model to generate societal risk for a series of possible combinations of the two factors. Some combinations may result in F/N curves that do not fulfill a predetermined safety target. This article thus proposes an “excess risk index” in order to quantify the road tunnel risk magnitudes that do not pass the safety target. The two‐factor impact analysis can be illustrated by a contour chart based on the excess risk. Finally, the methodology has been applied to Singapore's KPE road tunnel and the results show that in terms of meeting the test safety target for societal risk, the traffic capacity of the tunnel should be no more than 1,200 vehs/h/lane, with a maximum proportion of 18% HGVs.     

Strategies for urban conservation: A case example of George Town, Penang

George Town, Penang has more than 200 years of urban history and the largest collection of heritage shophouses in Southeast Asia. These heritage buildings have remained unchanged since the 1800s in spite of the lack of conservation legislation. The objective of this paper is to determine which public policy instruments have been effective in protecting the urban heritage of George Town. In particular, the role played by the Control of Rent Act, 1966, is evaluated. Upon examination of records on property transaction, rent-control records, development applications and demographic trends, no conclusive evidence was found that this Act was instrumental in protecting heritage buildings. Instead it was the unintentional effects of various development policies that saved George Town's urban heritage.