Stochastic Quantification of Soil-Shallow Foundation-Structure Interaction

This article highlights soil-structure interaction (SSI) effects on the seismic structural response accounting for uncertainties in the model parameters and input ground motions. A probabilistic Monte Carlo methodology was used to conduct approximately six million dynamic time-history simulations using an established rheological soil-shallow foundation-structure model. Considering the results yields outcomes that contradict prevailing views of the always beneficial role of SSI. In other words, the likelihood of having amplification in structural response due to SSI is large enough that it cannot be readily ignored. This research provides a significant first step towards reliability-based seismic design procedures incorporating foundation flexibility.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

Proto-Israelite Mythopoeics. A Perspective from Neuroscience on the Book of Joshua

This article contends that the Deuteronomic‐1 legend of the book of Joshua was formed into its mythical cyclical form through a process of oral transmission. As the oral stories told about an original source event were transformed into a community story it began to take on a liturgical form. This article explains the neuropsychological aspects of this natural process and also highlights how the cultural shift in the 12th century B.C.E. preserved the form of the Deuteronomic‐1 legend.     

Champagne socialism: Luxury in Fourier's utopia

Fourier's vision of material gratification in works such as Le Nouveau Monde amoureux comprehensively overturns a suspicion of the destabilising effects of luxury inherent to classical European political theory. This article explores the basis upon which Fourier was able to achieve this revolution. It focuses on his theories of human psychology, his insistence on the positive effects of material inequality in a harmoniously regulated society, and his abolition of the social division between mental and physical labour on which earlier critiques of luxury had been based. Set against an investigation of attitudes towards luxury in early modern and Enlightenment political thought, it argues that Fourier's utopia is ultimately framed by the all-encompassing gaze of a thinker who eliminates potential tensions between individual gratification and social harmony through blunt assertion rather than theoretical engagement with his antecedents.     

Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns In St. Mary's County,Maryland, 1658–1777

Abstract. This article is the first systematic attempt to measure the existence and degree of dowry inflation in South Asia. The popular press and scholarly literature have assumed dowry inflation in South Asia for some time, and there are now a number of theoretical papers that have attempted to explain the rise of dowries in South Asia. Despite these advances, there has been no systematic study of dowry inflation. Using large-sample retrospective survey data from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, researchers assess the empirical evidence for dowry inflation. They find no evidence that real dowry amounts have systematically increased over time in South Asia.     

Ichnofacies of the Stairway Sandstone fish-fossil beds (Middle Ordovician,Northern Territory,Australia)

The Stairway Sandstone is a 30–560 m thick succession of Middle Ordovician siliciclastic sedimentary rocks within the Amadeus Basin of central Australia, deposited in the epeiric Larapintine Sea of northern peri-Gondwana. The Stairway Sandstone is significant as one of only two known Gondwanan successions to yield articulated arandaspid (pteraspidomorph agnathan) fish. Herein we use the ichnology of the Stairway Sandstone to reveal insights into the shallow marine habitat of these early vertebrates, and compare it with that of other known pteraspidomorph-bearing localities from across Gondwana. The Stairway Sandstone contains a diverse Ordovician ichnofauna including 22 ichnotaxa of Arenicolites, Arthrophycus, Asterosoma, Cruziana, Didymaulichnus, Diplichnites, Diplocraterion, ?Gordia, Lockeia, Monocraterion, Monomorphichnus, Phycodes, Planolites, Rusophycus, Skolithos and Uchirites. These ichnofauna provide a well-preserved example of a typical Ordovician epeiric sea assemblage, recording the diverse ethologies of tracemakers in a very shallow marine environment of flashy sediment accumulation and regularly shifting sandy substrates. New conodont data refine the age of the Stairway Sandstone to the early Darriwilian, with ichnostratigraphic implications for the Cruziana rugosa group and Arthrophycus alleghaniensis.     

The Creative Industries,Creative Occupations and Innovation in London

London is a global hub of the creative industries. These industries are seen as both innovative in themselves and an input in innovation processes in other sectors. Yet few studies have tested these relationships. This article investigates these issues using large-scale survey data for London. Using four measures of product and process innovation, we find no evidence that London's creative industries are more innovative than other sectors. Yet, individuals doing creative occupations in other sectors are a robust driver of product innovation in London's firms. The results suggest that occupations performed in London may be an important driver of product innovation in the city, and firms in other sectors may use creative occupations to develop new products in the capital. This finding is supportive of policies attempting to stimulate the creative industries by integrating creative occupations into firms across the whole economy.     

Examining the memorialscape of occupation and liberation: a case study from the Channel Islands

This paper introduces the concept of the ‘memorialscape’ as a tool for studying the inter-relationship of memorials within a single rural or urban environment or landscape. Using a case study of the British Channel Islands, where the number of memorials relating to the German occupation of 1940–1945 has increased greatly since 1985 (the 40th anniversary of liberation), I examine the active role these memorials have played in changing the occupation narrative of the islands. This paper will also explore the importance of memorial marginality and centrality; memorial inter-visibility; the difference between the memorialscape of the capital towns of Guernsey and Jersey and the groups they commemorate; and the narrative that the resulting memorialscape produces.