The social networks of the Buckinghamshire gentry in the thirteenth century

This empirical study offers a contribution to a continuing debate about the county community and the significance of feudal ties by analysing the contacts of twenty small and middling knightly families. It explores their geographical range and the relative significance of horizontal and vertical ties. The evidence indicates a world dominated by local connections, stretching five to ten miles from a family manor. Nonetheless, the gentry were not necessarily restricted by county boundaries in their connections, as patterns of monastic patronage show. Nor were their social networks always limited to their neighbourhood. The search for good marriages mobilised wider networks, while financial pressures led families to look to towns like Oxford and London for credit. Ties with feudal superiors were rare, except for tenants of the honor of Wallingford, who had links with the earls of Cornwall. Horizontal ties with other gentry families and family members significantly outnumbered those with any other groups, and this applied both to supportive relationships and conflictual ones. Placing this study in the context of other gentry studies, I conclude by emphasising the prevalence of local ties mainly with those on the same social level or below. Although there is evidence to suggest that wealthier families with several manors had wider ranging connections, the everyday world of these men was apparently a fairly parochial one.     

Sustainability of Highway Bridge Networks Under Seismic Hazard

In order to evaluate the seismic risk of transportation networks, it is necessary to develop a methodology that integrates the probabilities of occurrence of seismic events in a region, the vulnerability of the civil infrastructure, and the consequences of the seismic hazard to the society, environment, and economy. In this article, a framework for the time-variant seismic sustainability and risk assessment of highway bridge networks is presented. The sustainability of the network is quantified in terms of its social, environmental, and economic metrics. These include the expected downtime, expected energy waste and carbon dioxide emissions, and the expected loss. The methodology considers the probability of occurrence of a set of seismic scenarios that reflect the seismic activity of the region. The performance of network links is quantified based on individual bridge performance evaluated through fragility analyses. The sustainability and risk depend on the damage states of both the links and the bridges within the network following an earthquake scenario. The time-variation of the sustainability metrics and risk due to structural deterioration is identified. The approach is illustrated on a transportation network located in Alameda County, California.     

The social networks of the Buckinghamshire gentry in the thirteenth century

This empirical study offers a contribution to a continuing debate about the county community and the significance of feudal ties by analysing the contacts of twenty small and middling knightly families. It explores their geographical range and the relative significance of horizontal and vertical ties. The evidence indicates a world dominated by local connections, stretching five to ten miles from a family manor. Nonetheless, the gentry were not necessarily restricted by county boundaries in their connections, as patterns of monastic patronage show. Nor were their social networks always limited to their neighbourhood. The search for good marriages mobilised wider networks, while financial pressures led families to look to towns like Oxford and London for credit. Ties with feudal superiors were rare, except for tenants of the honor of Wallingford, who had links with the earls of Cornwall. Horizontal ties with other gentry families and family members significantly outnumbered those with any other groups, and this applied both to supportive relationships and conflictual ones. Placing this study in the context of other gentry studies, I conclude by emphasising the prevalence of local ties mainly with those on the same social level or below. Although there is evidence to suggest that wealthier families with several manors had wider ranging connections, the everyday world of these men was apparently a fairly parochial one.     

Real-time Seismic Damage Detection of Concrete Shear Walls Using Artificial Neural Networks

Concrete shear walls are widely employed in buildings as a main resistance system against lateral loads. Early identification of seismic damage to concrete shear walls is vital for deciding post-earthquake occupancy in these structures. In this article, a method based on artificial neural networks for real-time identification of seismic damage to concrete shear walls was proposed. Inter-story drifts and plastic hinge rotation of concrete walls were used as the inputs and outputs of a MLP neural network. Modal Pushover Analysis was employed to prepare well-distributed data sets for training the neural network. The proposed method was applied to a five-story concrete shear wall building. The results from the network were compared with those obtained from Nonlinear Time History Analysis. It was observed that the trained neural network successfully detected damage to concrete shear walls and accurately estimated the severity of seismic-induced damage.     

France enters the information age: A political history of minitel

National communication systems--while they serve a universal human need--do not follow a universal logic of development. Instead, networks emerge from the interaction of ideas, culture, and politics within specific national contexts. This article develops a culturally and politically grounded analysis of technology via an exploration of the videotex saga in France; the only large advanced industrialized state where videotex succeeded. Particular attention is given to the way in which the French government designed videotex as a public strategy not only to modernize the telecommunications network, but also to bolster French economic and national security in relation to the United States. The article concludes that French videotex provides strong support for the thesis that communications technologies resolve and reflect unique cultural and political dilemmas, in addition to fulfilling their more technocratic function as scientific/engineering projects.     

‘My Freind who Writes for Me’: Scribes and Scribal Relationships in the Letters of Seamen, 1793–1815

This article examines the use of scribes in letters of one group of men during a specific period: British Royal Navy servicemen below the rank of commissioned officer during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815. The letters of one such seaman in particular, Richard Greenhalgh, are unusual in that he himself could write, but preferred to have someone to write for him, as is shown by many references to ‘his freind who writes for me’. Contrasts between the scribe’s style of writing and that of Greenhalgh are noticeable, especially after Greenhalgh and his scribe were parted by being sent to serve on different ships. The letters also reveal the relationship between writer and scribe, and the writer’s family and his scribe. The letters contain messages to be passed between a network of family and friends on board ship and on shore, strengthening ties between them, vital in wartime to the morale of the seamen and for the reassurance of those at home. References found in other surviving letters demonstrate the use of scribes by different seamen, also seamen acting as scribes for shipmates, adding to knowledge of scribal culture among this social group.     

In Search of the Good Life: Life‐History of a Kenyan Indian Settler. A Sartrean Approach to Biography and History

This article recounts how a young Shi’a Muslim Indian born in north‐west India migrated to Kenya in the early twentieth century in the context of the evolving trade linking the two continents, and rose to become a successful merchant and respected member of the community. It portrays the struggles that he undertook with fellow Kenyan Indians against British colonial policies of racial discrimination and political marginalization, and shows some of the unintended consequences of these actions for the group in the post‐colonial period. Through the application of Jean‐Paul’s Sartre’s concepts of project, situation, seriality and dialectical totalization, the article attempts to capture some of the historical processes that took place during the period at four interconnected levels: individual; communal; regional; and global.     

人工神经网络：一种新的旅游市场需求预测系统

本探究了人工神经网络(ANN)作为一种新型的预测系统在旅游市场需求研究中的重要性,并指出：在对旅游需求进行预测时,人工神经网络较之多元回归分析方法适用范围更广,显性更强。     

Ecosystemic politics: Analyzing the consequences of speaking for adjacent nature on the global stage

This article introduces a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the broader or unintended effects of cooperation anchored in border-crossing ecosystems. The importance of addressing this lacuna in our scholarship on such sub-global cooperation is underscored by research in political geography that has demonstrated how the creation of scale is an important expression of power relations and how interaction with the materiality of different kinds of spaces necessitates distinct political technologies (and thus may have distinct effects). The article introduces three key analytical angles central to policy field studies in international sociology and demonstrates their utility through a case of the Arctic/Arctic Council. These analytical angles – networks (what are the relationships shaping the field?), hierarchies (who leads and how does leadership work?), and norms for political behavior – capture key consequences and dynamics of ecosystemic politics in a concise fashion that lends itself to cross-case comparison. The Arctic case focuses on the changing network positions and roles of non-Arctic actors over time, as an initial exploration of the broader ordering effects of such forms of cooperation. The findings suggest that most non-Arctic actors have experienced a decline in their centrality in Arctic cooperation, even as the Arctic has received intensified global interest and the number of participants in Arctic Council work has increased. Further comparative work along these lines would leave us better equipped to assess whether states speaking for their own immediate environs is better – and if so, in which ways – than seeking common solutions to global challenges.     

Networks,context, and the use of spatially weighted survey metrics

Social context is a vitally important concept to political geographers, but one that suffers from measurement problems and ambiguities of definition, particularly at the most localized levels of measurement. In this paper, we argue that unique insights about context can be gained by combining the tools of survey research with the geographic tools of spatial analysis. By spatially interpolating indicators of neighborhood-level political discussion from egocentric network batteries, we capture meaningful variation in micro-level political environments. Focusing on three activist-driven measures of the political environment, we demonstrate that these measures pass key validity tests and improve model fit compared to unit-invariant measures of social context. We conclude by discussing the practical considerations and challenges associated with this measurement strategy and discuss other, more general dimensions of social context that might be captured utilizing this methodology.