Roman History

2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-133
Author(s):  
B. M. Levick

A quality not much considered here in the past, how often a work is likely be taken from the shelf, prompts me to put Saskia's Hin'sThe Demography of Roman Italyin first position. For that depends in turn on how reliable, clear, and broad of outlook the chapters are, and where they lead the reader. Though dry and plain it might seem (for all the developing technologies), the subject moves directly towards a hot, polarized topic – ‘the Roman economy’ and its development – with oscillation between extreme positions. It is a particular merit, then, to put forward a fresh view (though previously adumbrated elsewhere) that is not extreme and must be taken seriously. That is where Hin will take historians. But the book is structured in three sections: economic and ecological parameters, demographic parameters (morality, fertility, and migration), and population size. The separate chapters are well supported from a variety of evidence, judiciously treated and well written up. That on climate, with a mildly positive conclusion, needed no apology. If I have a complaint is it about the index: dive into a passage involving ‘Brass modelling’ and you will have to rummage back in the text (111) for hope of identifying it.

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-339
Author(s):  
Daniel Herda

Citizens’ tendency to overestimate the size of immigrant populations has been the subject of several studies over the past three decades. While we have learned a great deal about the extent, causes, and potential consequences of this population innumeracy, our understanding remains static. The current letter offers the first longitudinal consideration of immigrant population size misperceptions with an analysis across a nine-year span in the U.S. This study considers: 1) whether misperceptions have changed over time; 2) how these changes compare to the growth of the actual foreign-born population size; and 3) whether these changes are related to demographic and ideological factors. Results indicate that misperceptions have grown rapidly in the U.S, far outpacing the modest, actual increases across the period. Pooled cross-sectional analyses indicate that demographic factors do not explain the growth in misperceptions. However, the overestimates of politically conservative Americans have grown increasingly extreme over time.


Genetics ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 157 (2) ◽  
pp. 911-925
Author(s):  
Renaud Vitalis ◽  
Denis Couvet

Abstract Standard methods for inferring demographic parameters from genetic data are based mainly on one-locus theory. However, the association of genes at different loci (e.g., two-locus identity disequilibrium) may also contain some information about demographic parameters of populations. In this article, we define one- and two-locus parameters of population structure as functions of one- and two-locus probabilities for the identity in state of genes. Since these parameters are known functions of demographic parameters in an infinite island model, we develop moment-based estimators of effective population size and immigration rate from one- and two-locus parameters. We evaluate this method through simulation. Although variance and bias may be quite large, increasing the number of loci on which the estimates are derived improves the method. We simulate an infinite allele model and a K allele model of mutation. Bias and variance are smaller with increasing numbers of alleles per locus. This is, to our knowledge, the first attempt of a joint estimation of local effective population size and immigration rate.


1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4I) ◽  
pp. 321-331
Author(s):  
Sarfraz Khan Qureshi

It is an honour for me as President of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists to welcome you to the 13th Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Society. I consider it a great privilege to do so as this Meeting coincides with the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the state of Pakistan, a state which emerged on the map of the postwar world as a result of the Muslim freedom movement in the Indian Subcontinent. Fifty years to the date, we have been jubilant about it, and both as citizens of Pakistan and professionals in the social sciences we have also been thoughtful about it. We are trying to see what development has meant in Pakistan in the past half century. As there are so many dimensions that the subject has now come to have since its rather simplistic beginnings, we thought the Golden Jubilee of Pakistan to be an appropriate occasion for such stock-taking.


Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-149

Yogesh Sharma, ed., Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre-Modern India Debojyoti DasJason Lim, A Slow Ride into the Past: The Chinese Trishaw Industry in Singapore 1942–1983 Margaret MasonXiang Biao, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Mika Toyota, eds., Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia Gopalan BalachandranAjaya Kumar Sahoo and Johannes G. de Kruijf, eds., Indian Transnationalism Online: New Perspectives on Diaspora Anouck CarsignolKieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora Yuk Wah ChanChristine B.N. Chin, Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City Lilly Yu and Kimberly Kay HoangDavid Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, eds., Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century Daniel OakmanValeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 Vincent LagendijkBieke Cattoor and Bruno De Meulder, Figures Infrastructures: An Atlas of Roads and Railways Maik HoemkeKlaus Benesch, ed., Culture and Mobility Rudi Volti


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


No other talent process has been the subject of such great debate and emotion as performance management (PM). For decades, different strategies have been tried to improve PM processes, yielding an endless cycle of reform to capture the next “flavor-of-the-day” PM trend. The past 5 years, however, have brought novel thinking that is different from past trends. Companies are reducing their formal processes, driving performance-based cultures, and embedding effective PM behavior into daily work rather than relying on annual reviews to drive these. Through case studies provided from leading organizations, this book illustrates the range of PM processes that companies are using today. These show a shift away from adopting someone else’s best practice; instead, companies are designing bespoke PM processes that fit their specific strategy, climate, and needs. Leading PM thought leaders offer their views about the state of PM today, what we have learned and where we need to focus future efforts, including provocative new research that shows what matters most in driving high performance. This book is a call to action for talent management professionals to go beyond traditional best practice and provide thought leadership in designing PM processes and systems that will enhance both individual and organizational performance.


Investment in capital, both physical and financial, and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpins of modern economic growth, while credit and credit markets now seem to determine the wealth—as well as the fate—of nations. This book asks whether it always thus, and whether the Roman economy—large, complex, and sophisticated as it was— looked anything like today’s economies in terms of its structural properties. Through consideration of the allocation and uses of capital and credit and the role of innovation in the Roman world, the contributors to this volume go to the heart of the matter. How was capital in its various forms generated, allocated, and employed in the Roman economy? Did the Romans have markets for capital goods and credit? Did investment in capital lead to innovation and productivity growth? The authors consider multiple aspects of capital use in agriculture, water management, trade, and urban production, and of credit provision, finance, and human capital in different periods of Roman history, in Italy and elsewhere in the Roman world. Using many different types of written and archaeological evidence, and employing a range of modern theoretical perspectives and methodologies, the contributors, an international team of historians and archaeologists, have produced the first book-length contribution to focus exclusively on (physical and financial) capital in the Roman world, a volume that is aimed at experts in the field as well as at economic historians and archaeologists specializing in other periods and places.


Urban Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Till Koglin ◽  
Lucas Glasare

This paper evaluates the history and cycling accessibility of Nova, a shopping centre established in Lund, Sweden, in 2002. The current situation was also analysed through observation and a literature review. Moreover, the study conducted a closer analysis of the history and role of the municipality based on further literature study and interviews with officials. The conclusion of the analysis indicates poor and unsafe bikeways caused by conflicts of interest between politicians, officials, landowners and the general public. It also depicts a situation in which the municipality’s master plan has been ignored, and, in contrast to the local goals, cycling accessibility at Nova has seen no significant improvement since the shopping centre was first established. The reasons for this, arguably, are a relatively low budget for bikeway improvements in the municipality, as well as a situation in which decision-makers have stopped approaching the subject, as a result of the long and often boisterous conflicts it has created in the past. Lastly, it must be noted that it is easy to regard the whole process of Nova, from its establishment to the current situation, as being symptomatic of the power structures between drivers and cyclists that still affect decision-makers at all levels.


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Cristina Lazzeroni ◽  
Sandra Malvezzi ◽  
Andrea Quadri

The rapid changes in science and technology witnessed in recent decades have significantly contributed to the arousal of the awareness by decision-makers and the public as a whole of the need to strengthen the connection between outreach activities of universities and research institutes and the activities of educational institutions, with a central role played by schools. While the relevance of the problem is nowadays unquestioned, no unique and fully satisfactory solution has been identified. In the present paper we would like to contribute to the discussion on the subject by reporting on an ongoing project aimed to teach Particle Physics in primary schools. We will start from the past and currently planned activities in this project in order to establish a broader framework to describe the conditions for the fruitful interplay between researchers and teachers. We will also emphasize some aspects related to the dissemination of outreach materials by research institutions, in order to promote the access and distribution of scientific information in a way suited to the different age of the target students.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Léon E Dijkman

Abstract Germany is one of few jurisdictions with a bifurcated patent system, under which infringement and validity of a patent are established in separate proceedings. Because validity proceedings normally take longer to conclude, it can occur that remedies for infringement are imposed before a decision on the patent’s validity is available. This phenomenon is colloquially known as the ‘injunction gap’ and has been the subject of increasing criticism over the past years. In this article, I examine the injunction gap from the perspective of the right to a fair trial enshrined in Art. 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. I find that the case law of the European Court of Human Rights interpreting this provision supports criticism of the injunction gap, because imposing infringement remedies with potentially far-reaching consequences before the validity of a patent has been established by a court of law arguably violates defendants’ right to be heard. Such reliance on the patent office’s grant decision is no longer warranted in the light of contemporary invalidation rates. I conclude that the proliferation of the injunction gap should be curbed by an approach to a stay of proceedings which is in line with the test for stays as formulated by Germany’s Federal Supreme Court. Under this test, courts should stay infringement proceedings until the Federal Patent Court or the EPO’s Board of Appeal have ruled on the validity of a patent whenever it is more likely than not that it will be invalidated.


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