Beyond Scattered Applications

As a decentralised digital ledger, blockchain has become a buzzword in the recent years, due to its advantageous characteristics. The application of blockchain has been associated with different implications, ranging from trust generator to increased efficiency. Recently, blockchain application has gained momentum by being implemented by different governments and public bodies, as a solution for tackling different issues, with the intent of providing more efficient public policies. Different blockchain-based systems and platforms have been increasingly introduced as a more secure and orderly alternative of delivering various public functions and services. Given the expansion of use cases in different countries and the scattered information in this regard, this chapter develops a taxonomy of blockchain outcomes in the public domain by identifying the emerging patterns and subcategories. The proposed taxonomy can support decision makers and researchers to better identify the various blockchain applications, alongside their benefits, implications, and possible associated risks.

Proposal for a Pivot-Based Vehicle Trajectory Clustering Method

Given the large volume of georeferenced information generated and stored by many types of devices, the study and improvement of techniques capable of operating with these data is an area of great interest. The analysis of vehicular trajectories with the aim of forming clusters and identifying emerging patterns is very useful for characterizing and analyzing transportation flows in cities. This paper presents a new trajectory clustering method capable of identifying clusters of vehicular sub-trajectories in various sectors of a city. The proposed method is based on the use of an auxiliary structure to determine the correct location of the centroid of each group or set of sub-trajectories along the adaptive process. The proposed method was applied on three real databases, as well as being compared with other relevant methods, achieving satisfactory results and showing good cluster quality according to the Silhouette index.

New Data on Plant Use in the Eastern Sahara: The Macro-Remain Assemblage from Sheikh el-Obeiyid Villages and Bir el-Obeiyid Playa, Farafra Oasis, Egyptian Western Desert

This article discusses archaeobotanical evidence from two Sheikh el-Obeiyid villages and the Bir el-Obeiyid playa, which are located along the course of the Wadi el-Obeiyid and on the top and escarpment of the Northern Plateau, at the northern edge of the Farafra Oasis, Egypt. The villages and playa are both part of a settlement system which developed from the top of the plateau, through its various erosion surfaces, down to the bottom of the wadi. The villages in particular can be considered as seasonal base camps, populated by semi-sedentary groups who engaged in intensive exploitation of the resources available in the surrounding environment during the early and mid-Holocene. These sites can be compared to the better-known Hidden Valley village site located only 20 km to the east, the remains from which were analysed during the early 2000s by Ahmed G. Fahmy. At all the sites investigated to date in Farafra there is clear evidence for gathering and use of sorghum and other species of small-seeded wild grasses, fitting the emerging patterns of intense wild grass exploitation in attractive ecological zones for the eastern Sahara during the 9th–6th millennia BP.

Publications Produced by the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics

In 1907, Karl Pearson created the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics at University College, University of London. His ambitions emphasised both discipline building and the assertion of primacy for university research in eugenics over political activism. An academic entrepreneur, Pearson operated the ‘Eugenics Laboratory’ as a publishing house or imprint. It published five series. Because titles in each series were printed as ad hoc private separates for much of their duration, current bibliographic records show considerable variation and error while historical studies of the Eugenics Laboratory tend toward fragmentation. This paper presents a comprehensive inventory for each series associated with the Eugenics Laboratory, and it offers brief analysis of emerging patterns. The series inventoried are: (1) Eugenics Laboratory Lectures, (2) Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, (3) The Treasury of Human Inheritance, (4) Questions of the Day and of the Fray, and (5) Studies in National Deterioration.

Critical Thinking Ability of German Literature Departement’s Students of Universitas Negeri Malang in Writing Thesis

This article is a research result which aims to uncover the critical thinking skills of students of German Literature Department, Universitas Negeri Malang (UM) in writing thesis. The method used is qualitative content analysis with a coding sheet as an instrument. The data is taken from some chapters in German thesis, to be particular the background, the discussion, and the conclusion sections. The collected data is reduced, grouped, then the emerging patterns are analyzed and conclusions are drawn. Students' critical thinking skills in writing thesis were analyzed from four cognitive abilities (analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and argumentation) and nine cognitive standards (clarity, clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and fairness). The results showed that students' critical thinking skills were good in the aspects of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. However, from the argumentation aspect, students’ critical ability is still considered weak, because they produced errors in ethos, logos and pathos arguments, still made incomplete structures, and did not meet the criteria for critical thinking/cognitive standards of breadth and depth.

A Grammar of Authority?

Directive Speech Acts (dsas) are a major feature of historical pragmatics, specifically in research on historical (im)politeness. However, for Classical French, there is a lack of research on related phenomena. In our contribution, we present two recently constructed corpora covering the period of Classical French, sermo and apwcf. We present these corpora in terms of their genre characteristics on a communicative–functional and socio-pragmatic level. Based on the observation that, both in sermo and apwcf, dsas frequently occur together with terms of address, we analyse and manually code a sample based on this co-occurrence, and we compare the results with regard to special features in the individual corpora. The emerging patterns show a clear correspondence between socio-pragmatic factors and the linguistic means used to realise dsas. We propose that these results can be interpreted as signs of an underlying “grammar of authority”.