Veche and the terms “All Pskov” and “Pskov Men”: The Russian Medieval City Assembly as a Communal Structure

The article focuses on the collective political institution, the veche, of the Russian medieval city of Pskov. The author argues that the horizontal political ties within that city prevailed over the vertical ones in the period before its subjugation to the Muscovite State in 1510. Pskov is put into a broad comparative perspective which results in the conclusion by the author that the development of Pskov in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries very closely resembled that kind of urban synoecism which was practiced by Western European communes in their early stage of development (eleventh–twelfth centuries). It means, first, that the Russian Middle Ages repeated in some important features that which had occurred in Western Europe, and, second, that it happened not due to a borrowing of political institutions (as was the case with many East European countries) but independently because of similar conditions arising, albeit after a two-century delay.

Download Full-text

Preliminary Research on Computer-Assisted Transcription of Medieval Scripts in the Latin Alphabet using AI Computer Vision techniques and Machine Learning. A Romanian Exploratory Initiative

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Digitalia ◽

10.24193/subbdigitalia.2020.1.03 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 65 (1) ◽

pp. 37-52

Author(s):

Adinel C. Dincă ◽

Emil Ștețco

Keyword(s):

Computer Vision ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Early Stage ◽

Computer Assisted ◽

Stage Of Development ◽

Handwritten Text ◽

Experimental Project ◽

Software Engineers ◽

Automatic Transcription ◽

Text Images

"The objective of the present paper is to introduce to a wider audience, at a very early stage of development, the initial results of a Romanian joint initiative of AI software engineers and palaeographers in an experimental project aiming to assist and improve the transcription effort of medieval texts with AI software solutions, uniquely designed and trained for the task. Our description will start by summarizing the previous attempts and the mixed-results achieved in e-palaeography so far, a continuously growing field of combined scholarship at an international level. The second part of the study describes the specific project, developed by Zetta Cloud, with the aim of demonstrating that, by applying state of the art AI Computer Vision algorithms, it is possible to automatically binarize and segment text images with the final scope of intelligently extracting the content from a sample set of medieval handwritten text pages. Keywords: Middle Ages, Latin writing, palaeography, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, automatic transcription."

Download Full-text

Monocoque Construction

Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society ◽

10.1017/s0368393100107783 ◽

1937 ◽

Vol 41 (318) ◽

pp. 467-492

Author(s):

I. J. Gerard

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Early Stage ◽

Thin Metal ◽

General Idea ◽

Aircraft Wings ◽

Stage Of Development ◽

Single Shell ◽

The Middle Ages

The general idea of making aircraft of single-shell or monocoque construction is not new. In the middle ages, the great English philosopher and man of science, Roger Bacon, “conceived of a large hollow globe made of very thin metal and filled with ethereal air or liquid fire, which would float on the atmosphere like a ship on water,” and ever since the inception of the aeroplane, suggestions have been made to construct aircraft wings and fuselages in the form of shells like those of crabs, lobsters or other popular crustacea.There is at present, a marked trend in aeroplane construction towards the increasing use of metal covering both for wings and fuselages. The water loads on the hulls and floats of various aircraft have always necessitated the use of a robust skin, and although at first wood was commonly used, this was at an early stage of development, replaced by metal.

Download Full-text

States, Institutions, and Literacy Rates in Early-Modern Western Europe

Journal of Education and Learning ◽

10.5539/jel.v10n2p109 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 109

Author(s):

Tyrel C. Eskelson

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Political Institutions ◽

Western Europe ◽

Structural Changes ◽

Private Property ◽

Exchange Economy ◽

Market Exchange ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Per Capita

The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in Western European countries during the Middle Ages were below twenty percent of the population. For most countries, literacy rates did not experience significant increases until the Enlightenment and industrialization. Two early exceptions to this broad trend were the Netherlands and England, which had achieved literacy rates above fifty percent of their populations by the mid-seventeenth century. The explanations for these divergent trends are the structural changes in formal institutions that embodied capital markets, protected private property, and overall established the initial steps in developing modern political institutions. This created incentives to invest more in schools per capita as well as incentives for a middle class to invest more in literacy and numeracy skills for a market-exchange economy that was becoming more specialized in division of labor.

Download Full-text

Must Eastern Europe follow the Latin American way?

European Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1017/s0003975600006391 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 151-179 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Barbara A. Misztal

Keyword(s):

Latin American ◽

Political Institutions ◽

European Countries ◽

Eastern European ◽

Economic Policies ◽

Political Resistance ◽

East European ◽

Democratic Regimes ◽

Eastern European Countries ◽

The Impact

Almost a decade after the wave of transformations from authoritarian to democratic regimes started in Latin America, Eastern European countries, one after another, entered the path leading towards democracy. The end of 1989 and the first part of 1990 saw unheard of numbers of free elections in ten Latin American and all East European countries (with the exception of Poland, where freedom of the first election was limited). Moreover, all the newly elected rulers won office on a promise to liberalise their economies. However, many commentators and scholars fear the impact on populations of painful structural reform policies and predict that new democracies in both regions either will not stay democratic for long or will not carry out a full package of economic reforms. They predict that half-hearted efforts at stabilisation will be followed by overwhelming political resistance which will provoke a reversal of economic policies. Each failure will reduce the credibility of successive reform attempts, the ultimate consequence being not merely economic disarray but an almost total loss of faith in democratic political institutions.

Download Full-text

The Application of UX Research in New Energy Vehicle Innovation

Conference Proceedings of the Academy for Design Innovation Management ◽

10.33114/adim.2017.58 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Menghan TAO ◽

Ning XIAO ◽

Xingfu ZHAO ◽

Wenbin LIU

Keyword(s):

Early Stage ◽

Rapid Expansion ◽

The Other ◽

Innovative Product ◽

Stage Of Development ◽

New Energy ◽

New Energy Vehicle ◽

The One ◽

New Energy Vehicles ◽

Degree Of Innovation

New energy vehicles(NEV) as a new thing for sustainable development, in China, on the one hand has faced the rapid expansion of the market; the other hand, for the new NEV users, the current NEVs cannot keep up with the degree of innovation. This paper demonstrates the reasons for the existence of this systematic challenge, and puts forward the method of UX research which is different from the traditional petrol vehicles research in the early stage of development, which studies from the user's essence level, to form the innovative product programs which meet the needs of users and being real attractive.

Download Full-text

Reforms and transformation paths in comparative perspective: challenging comparative views on East European and Chinese reforms

Acta Oeconomica ◽

10.1556/aoecon.55.2005.2.3 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 171-199 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Mária Csanádi

Keyword(s):

Power Distribution ◽

State Power ◽

State Model ◽

Comparative Perspective ◽

Dynamic Background ◽

East European ◽

Structural Context ◽

Political Conditions ◽

Party State ◽

Chinese Reforms

Reforms, in view of a comparative party-state model, become the instruments of self-reproduction and self-destruction of party-state power. The specific patterns of power distribution imply different development and transformation paths through different instruments of self-reproduction. This approach also points to the structural and dynamic background of the differences in the location, sequence, speed and political conditions of reforms during the operation and transformation of party-states. In view of the model the paper points to the inconsistencies that emerge in the comparative reform literature concerning the evaluation and strategies of reforms disconnected from their systemic-structural context.

Download Full-text

Interpretation problem of the East European “antes antiquities” metal treasure of Early Middle ages

Connections, contacts and interactions between ancient cultures of Northern Eurasia and civilizations of the East during the Palaeometal period (IV–I mil. BC) ◽

10.31600/978-5-907053-35-9-67-69 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Оlga Shcheglova ◽

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Early Middle Ages ◽

East European ◽

Interpretation Problem

Download Full-text

POWER TECHNOLOGIES OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL OF FRENCH REGIONAL POLICY

Political Science Issues ◽

10.35775/psi.2019.31.1.009 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

M.L. LEBEDEVA

Keyword(s):

Political Institutions ◽

Regional Policy ◽

Political Process ◽

Research Topic ◽

The Political ◽

Theoretical Understanding ◽

Policy Model ◽

Stage Of Development ◽

Political Relations ◽

Comprehensive Study

The purpose of writing this article is to highlight the features of organization of the regional policy in France on the basis of the theoretical understanding of the concepts of regional policy, model of regional policy and policy analogy. The research topic is the content of the French policy of organizing a regional political space. The object of the research is the power technologies of regional policy. The systemstructural method, which considers political relations as an integral system of interconnections of phenomena and events of the political process, makes it possible to determine the main essential content of this research topic. Institutional approach involves the study of political institutions and their content. An analysis of Russian and foreign sources suggests that the main issue posed in the article is relevant at the present stage of development. The study is made possible on the basis of existing research. A comprehensive study of the conceptual theoretical characteristics of the regional policy as such allowed the author to identify the model and features of the political toolkit for the organization of thecenterregions relations in modern French Republic.

Download Full-text