Houses of cards

2001 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 56-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Bergmann

We have reached an important moment in the study of the Roman house. The past 20 years have been extremely active, with scholars approaching domestic space down different disciplinary and methodological avenues. Since the important essay on Campanian houses by A. Wallace-Hadrill in 1988, new excavations and scores of books and articles have changed the picture of Pompeii and, with it, that of the Roman house. Theoretical archaeologists have taken the lead, approaching Pompeii as an "archaeological laboratory" in which, armed with the interpretative tools of spatial and statistical analysis, they attempt to recover ancient behavioral patterns. The interdisciplinary picture that emerges is complex and inevitably contradictory. There is so much new information and such a tangle of perspectives that it is time to consider what we have learned and what kinds of interpretative tools we might best employ. Without doubt this is an exciting time in Roman studies. But two overviews of recent scholarship to appear this year, the present one by R. Tybout and another by P. Allison (AJA 105.2 [2001]), express considerable frustration and resort to ad hominem recriminations that signal a heated backlash, at least among some.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 468-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lape

AbstractThis paper reviews the use of archaeological and documentary sources in the understanding of the past in Island Southeast Asia. The relationship between these two sources of data (and data sources that cross the boundaries of these categories) has varied over time, depending on the availability of data, changing interpretive strategies and scholarly trends and influences. The wealth of documentary sources relevant to Island Southeast Asia's past, and the increasing availability of detailed archaeological data have increased the potential to understand the past in this region from a variety of points of view. While this potential has not yet been fully realized, in part due to an unsophisticated use of these separate lines of evidence, recent scholarship has pushed the boundaries and revealed new information and insights into this history. Cet article passe en revue l'utilisation de sources documentaires et archéologiques dans la connaissance du passé des îles du Sud-Est asiatique. La relation entre ces deux sources d'information (et les sources qui dépassent les limites de ces deux catégories) a évolué au fil du temps en fonction de la disponibilité des données, des changements dans les stratégies d'interprétation et des tendances et influences académiques. La richesse des sources documentaires utiles dans l'étude du passé des îles du Sud-Est asiatique, et la disponibilité croissante de données archéologiques détaillées ont permis, à plusieurs niveaux, de faciliter la compréhension du passé de cette région. Bien que ce potentiel n'ait pas encore été complètement exploité, en partie à cause d'une utilisation peu raffinée de ces distinctes catégories de preuves, des études universitaires récentes ont repoussé ces limites et ont dévoilé de nouveaux indices, permettant ainsi de mieux pénétrer l'histoire des îles du Sud-Est asiatique.


2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjule Anne Drury

The past two decades have seen an efflorescence of works exploring cultural anti-Catholicism in a variety of national contexts. But so far, historians have engaged in little comparative analysis. This article is a first step, examining recent historical literature on modern British and American anti-Catholicism, in order to trace the similarities and distinctiveness of the turn-of-the-century German case. Historians are most likely to be acquainted with American nativism, the German Kulturkampf, continental anticlericalism, and the problems of Catholic Emancipation and the Irish Question in Britain. Many of the themes and functions of anti-Catholic discourse in the West transcended national and temporal boundaries. In each case, the conceptualization of a Catholic ‘other’ is a testament to the tenacity of confessionalism in an age formerly characterized as one of inexorable secularization. Contemporary observers often agreed that religious culture—like history, race, ethnicity, geography, and local custom—played a role in the self-evident distinctiveness of peoples and nations, in their political forms, economic performance, and intellectual and artistic contributions. We will see how confessionalism remained a lens through which intellectuals and ordinary citizens, whether attached or estranged from religious commitments, viewed political, economic, and cultural change.


Author(s):  
Jeff Smith

Over the past fifteen years, processing fluency has become an increasingly important research topic in mapping the contours of aesthetic experience. It refers to the ease with which our minds assimilate new information, and it plays an important priming function in the pleasure or enjoyment experienced during film viewing. Fluency occurs as the result of both stimulus features and contextual factors, which include, among other things, the exposure effect, repetition, dishabituation, and spontaneous recovery. It can also play a vital role in cinematic listening, predisposing auditors toward positive judgments of films based on the ways in which they trigger efficient recall of music’s formal patterns. Processing fluency, thus, figures as an important dimension of film and music cross-promotion, either by leveraging consumer interest in music ancillaries or by enabling spectators to re-experience films through their soundtrack albums.


1941 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kuznets

This paper deals with the relation between statistical analysis as applied in economic inquiry and history as written or interpreted by economic historians. Although both these branches of economic study derive from the same body of raw materials of inquiry—the recordable past and present of economic society—each has developed in comparative isolation from the other. Statistical economists have failed to utilize adequately the contributions that economic historians have made to our knowledge of the past; and historians have rarely employed either the analytical tools or the basic theoretical hypotheses of statistical research. It is the thesis of this essay that such failure to effect a close interrelation between historical approach and statistical analysis needs to be corrected in the light of the final goal of economic study.


The Forum ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel Elder ◽  
Steven Greene

AbstractOver the past several decades the major parties in the US have not only politicized parenthood, but have come to offer increasingly polarized views of the ideal American family. This study builds on recent scholarship exploring the political impact of parenthood (e.g. Elder, Laurel, and Steven Greene. 2012a.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Saunders

Freshwater and estuarine shellfish began to be exploited in the southeastern United States between 9000 and 7000 b.p. Shortly thereafter, shell mounds appeared in the mid-South Shell Mound Archaic, along the St. Johns River in peninsular Florida, and, somewhat later, in the Stallings Island area along the middle Savannah River. On the lower Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, shell rings arose. Until recently, all these mounds were considered middens—the accumulations of the remains of simple meals of mobile peoples who visited the same areas for hundreds or thousands of years. More recent scholarship indicates that these mounds were deliberate constructions—some of the first sculpted landscapes created by Archaic peoples to memorialize the past, celebrate the present, and provide for the future. In this chapter, recent research on shell sites in these four areas is discussed. The emphasis is on changing perspectives about the peoples who built them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Gutman

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (3) ◽  
pp. 170-190
Author(s):  
Archita Agarwal ◽  
Maurice Herlihy ◽  
Seny Kamara ◽  
Tarik Moataz

Abstract The problem of privatizing statistical databases is a well-studied topic that has culminated with the notion of differential privacy. The complementary problem of securing these differentially private databases, however, has—as far as we know—not been considered in the past. While the security of private databases is in theory orthogonal to the problem of private statistical analysis (e.g., in the central model of differential privacy the curator is trusted) the recent real-world deployments of differentially-private systems suggest that it will become a problem of increasing importance. In this work, we consider the problem of designing encrypted databases (EDB) that support differentially-private statistical queries. More precisely, these EDBs should support a set of encrypted operations with which a curator can securely query and manage its data, and a set of private operations with which an analyst can privately analyze the data. Using such an EDB, a curator can securely outsource its database to an untrusted server (e.g., on-premise or in the cloud) while still allowing an analyst to privately query it. We show how to design an EDB that supports private histogram queries. As a building block, we introduce a differentially-private encrypted counter based on the binary mechanism of Chan et al. (ICALP, 2010). We then carefully combine multiple instances of this counter with a standard encrypted database scheme to support differentially-private histogram queries.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arkadiusz Wójcik

The dynamic epistemic logic for actual knowledge models the phenomenon of actual knowledge change when new information is received. In contrast to the systems of dynamic epistemic logic which have been discussed in the past literature, our system is not burdened with the problem of logical omniscience, that is, an idealized assumption that the agent explicitly knows all classical tautologies and all logical consequences of his or her knowledge. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization for this logic.


1988 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 25-27

We have discussed the use of naftidrofuryl oxalate (Praxilene - Lipha) in peripheral vascular disease, senile dementia and acute cerebrovascular disease several times over the past 16 years. On each occasion we concluded that the evidence that naftidrofuryl gave clinical benefit was at best equivocal, and further trials were needed. We now review recent trials and other new information about the drug.


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