THE 9 JULY 551 AD BEIRUT EARTHQUAKE,EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN REGION

Analysis of the Byzantine primary and secondary sources for identifying the historical earthquakes in Syria and Lebanon reveals that a large earthquake (M _s =7.2) occurred in July 9, 551 AD along the Lebanese littoral and was felt over a very large area in the eastern Mediterranean region. It was a shallow-focus earthquake, associated with a regional tsunami along the Lebanese coast, a local landslide near Al-Batron town, and a large fire in Beirut. It caused heavy destruction with great loss of lives to several Lebanese cities, mainly Beirut, with a maximum intensity between IX-X (EMS-92). The proposed epicentre of the event is offshore of Beirut at about 34.00°N, 35.50° E, indicating that the earthquake appears to be the result of movement along the strike-slip left-lateral Roum fault in southern Lebanon.     

DIGITALIZING HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

What is a “historical” video game, let alone a successful one? It is difficult to answer this question because all our definitions of history have been constructed in a linear‐narrative cultural context that is currently being challenged and in large part displaced by digital media, especially video games. I therefore consider this question from the point of view of historical semantics and in relation to the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the historiographical operation, from the establishment of digital archives, to the production of e‐texts, to the digital remediation of visual modes of historical representation. Seen from this dual perspective, video games appear to participate in a process of spatialization and virtualization of historical semantics. In the first place, video games have begun to detach the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real—“what essentially happened”—that it had acquired at the end of the eighteenth century. Second, they also challenge the semiotic production of “historic events” that has characterized the construction of modern historical consciousness. Historical video games, in other words, replace representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historic events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence. Although digital reworkings of historical semantics have not produced any grammatical transformation of the signifier, history—nor does this essay propose one—I do argue that the impact of video games on our contemporary historic(al) culture is of paradigmatic proportions similar to those described by Reinhart Koselleck for the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on one of the most successful contemporary video games, Sid Meier's Civilization, I show how the remediation of cinematic genres by video games is pushing the processes of de‐temporalization and de‐referentialization of history toward the formation of a new notion of the historical that may be conceptualized as the inversion of the classic Aristotelian paradigm: history has replaced poetry and philosophy as the realm of the possible.     

DUCTILITY AND LOAD CARRYING CAPACITY PREDICTION OF STEEL BEAM-TO-COLUMN CONNECTIONS UNDER CYCLIC REVERSAL LOADING

Abstract

The economy and reliability of steel-framed buildings in seismic areas depend basically on the hysteretic behaviour of its individual components, such as members and joints. With reference to the latter, despite the recent semi-continuous frame approach (which appears generally very convenient for the design of low- and medium-rise steel buildings), the present state of knowledge does not allow for a complete understanding of the behaviour and the low-cycle fatigue life of beam-to-column connections under dynamic loads.

This paper presents a criterion for the definition of the low-cycle fatigue strength of steel connections, and proposes two approaches for the design of steel frames in seismic zones via the assessment of the fatigue damage, which is evaluated alternatively on the basis of either the ductility or of the load carrying capacity.