Real History Research Articles

A Letter from Daniel DE FOE to the Author of Gulliver’s Travels

Sir, I Dayly hear Myths and Rumours circulating among the high Spheres in London and I thought it my Duty to inform you: They insult you in a most Scandalous and Criminal Way, claiming that your imaginary Account of Lemuel Gulliver’s Travels -- it is now universally known that you are the Author of that Fiction -- might be a plagiarized Copy of the real History of Robinson Crusoe which I edited seven Years ago. Yes, I own this Work now. I did not sign it because I was afraid it might be assim...

A Study on Customer Purchase Behavior Analysis Based on Hidden Topic Markov Models

Along with recent developments of Internet society, purchasing actions on E-commerce (hereinafter called “EC”) sites have become common for many consumers. On the other hand, it is known that the conversion rate (hereinafter called “CVR”) on EC sites is usually several percent at most. Therefore, many EC sites desire effective measures to improve CVR. In general, a user browses several pages on an EC site before he/she decide to purchase an item and it is considered that users’ intentions are reflected in their page transition tendency on an EC site. If a model analyzing the page transition data can extract users’ purchasing intentions, it enables to utilize the information for making a good promotion measure. Here, it is sometimes better to assume latent classes behind the users’ page transitions to understand their purchase intentions, because there are usually not only several user groups with different preferences but also plural states of purchasing intentions. However, previous models either assume the same latent topic on each page in the same session or assume a latent topic for each page every time. These models cannot handle situations where users’ intentions may change during browsing but not change frequently from page to page. In this study, we propose a purchasing behavior analysis model based on Hidden Topic Markov Models (HTMM). The proposed method can divide users’ browsing sequence into multiple subsequences with the same statistical characteristics according to latent topics estimated from page transitions. Then, the purchase probability of each latent topic can be obtained by using the purchase results obtained from the actual browsing history data together. By the proposed model, the purchase probabilities become possible to estimate the purchase intention of the users in real time and the information is effective for considering marketing measures. In this study, an experiment using real browsing history data is carried out and the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated.

A Data Fusion Approach for Interpurchase Timing Models Using Incomplete Purchase Histories

Interpurchase timing models are important for understanding the effects of marketing variables. However, a company's database cannot record purchase histories in competing stores.Its database records only the sum of durations for its own and competing stores. Moreover, it is difficult for companies to know the number of purchases in competing stores between two purchases observed in their own stores. Therefore, a simple application of interpurchase timing models would be incorrect and generate biased results. In this study, we construct a model that predicts the missing number of purchases in competing stores and a gamma proportional hazard model in which parameters are estimated from the sum of the durations. It is difficult to predict the missing number of purchases in competing stores and estimate parameters suitably from the summed durations. Therefore, we propose a Bayesian data fusion approach that combines two datasets and incorporates macro-level information in the model. We show the performance of the proposed method through a simulation study and application using a real purchase history dataset. The results show that the proposed method can correctly estimate the effects of the marketing variables, while the sign of the estimated parameter is reversed in the simple analysis.

Fibre Optic FBG Sensors for Monitoring of the Temperature of the Building Envelope.

Standard sensors for the measurement and monitoring of temperature in civil structures are liable to mechanical damage and electromagnetic interference. A system of purpose-designed fibre optic FBG sensors offers a more suitable and reliable solution—the sensors can be directly integrated with the load-bearing structure during construction, it is possible to create a network of fibre optic sensors to ensure not only temperature measurements but also measurements of strain and of the moisture content in the building envelope. The paper describes the results of temperature measurements of a building 2-layer wall using optical fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors and of a three-layer wall using equivalent classical temperature sensors. The testing results can be transmitted remotely. In the first stage, the sensors were tested in a climatic test chamber to determine their characteristics. The paper describes test results of temperature measurements carried out in the winter season for two multilayer external walls of a building in relation to the environmental conditions recorded at that time, i.e., outdoor temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed. Cases are considered with the biggest difference in the level of the relative humidity of air recorded in the observation period. It is found that there is greater convergence between the theoretical and the real temperature distribution in the wall for high levels (~84%) of the outdoor air relative humidity, whereas at the humidity level of ~49%, the difference between theoretical and real temperature histories is substantial and totals up to 20%. A correction factor is proposed for the theoretical temperature distribution.

First report of HHV-8 viral load and seroprevalence of major blood-borne viruses in Iranian patients with systemic sclerosis

BackgroundSystemic sclerosis (SSc) is characterized by autoimmune manifestations, and viral infections may have a key role in the development and progression of it. This study aimed to investigate the seroprevalence of major blood-borne viruses and HHV-8 viral load in Iranian SSc patients. MethodsIn this cross-sectional study, 90 patients with a confirmed history of SSc and 90 healthy blood donors were enrolled. The frequency of HHV-8, CMV, EBV, HIV, HBV, and HCV antibodies and HHV-8 viral load were evaluated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and real-time PCR assay, respectively. ResultsHHV-8 IgG antibody was diagnosed in 61 (67.8%) patients and 3 (3.3%) healthy individuals (p<0.0001), but its genomic DNA was not detected in the patients or healthy blood donors. CMV and EBV antibodies were detected in 100% and 88.9% of SSc patients without any significant difference with healthy population (p>0.05). None of the patients or healthy population was positive for HBsAg and HIVAb; however, HCVAb was detected in two patients. ConclusionAccording to the results, HHV-8 antibody was uniquely increased in SSc population while its frequency in healthy population was very low. Since none of the SSc patients were positive for HHV-8 genomic DNA, the high prevalence of HHV-8 antibody in this group was not related to the real history of infection. Therefore, antibody-mediated epitope mimicry can play a role to get the high rate of seropositivity and lead to pathogeneses of SSc. Besides, CMV and EBV viral load monitoring in SSc patients can help the physician to prescribe the viral drugs to suppress the viral replication and avoid the crucial effect of reactivation.

Development and Application of an Intelligent Evaluation and Control Platform for Tunnel Smooth Blasting

Many tunnels around the world are still being constructed by drilling and blasting because these methods have an unmatched degree of flexibility relative to machine excavations using tunnel boring machines. At present, a large gap exists between evaluation theory and the control application of tunnel smooth blasting (TSB) quality. In this study, a handheld mobile platform that is based on the Android system and is written in the Java language is proposed to evaluate and control the performance of TSB. The function of this handheld mobile platform mainly includes data input, data modification, data deletion, weight setting for smooth blasting evaluation, smooth blasting quality assessment, and smooth blasting quality control. Using the proposed mobile platform, end users can evaluate and control TSB quality after each blast. The proposed handheld mobile platform is also applied to the real case history of line 6 in Guangzhou, China.

Analytical technique for stability analyses of the rock slope subjected to slide head toppling failure mechanisms considering groundwater and stabilization effects

The contributions of the current analytical models on the prediction of the stability of the slope subjected to slide head toppling failure mechanisms, have always focused on the idealized geometry comprising regular blocks dipping into the slope face. Besides, the influence of groundwater and stabilizations from the lowermost block of the slope have been overlooked in the available literature. In this article, the analytical solutions that incorporates the kinematic mechanisms of the jointed rock slope under the influence of groundwater and stabilizing the lowermost block subjected to slide head toppling are derived based on the limit equilibrium. Furthermore, a real slide head toppling failure case history was studied to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented analytical solutions. The investigation results indicate that the presence of groundwater in the jointed rock slope, lowers the distributions of the normal and shear forces thereby inducing slide head toppling. Reinforcing the lowermost block of the slope, enhances the distributions of the normal and shear forces thus improving the stability of the jointed rock slope. The study results depict that the presented analytical solutions can provide an accurate and efficient stability analyses of the jointed rock slope subjected to slide head toppling failure mechanisms considering the presence of groundwater and stabilization effects.

Response Statistics of U-Oscillating Water Column Energy Harvesters Exposed to Extreme Storms: Application to the Case Study of Roccella Jonica (Italy)

Abstract This article deals with the case study of a marina located in Roccella Jonica (Italy), where a wave energy harvester belonging to the family of U-oscillating water columns (U-OWC) is going to be installed. U-OWCs are wave energy harvesters composed of a water column exposed to the action of random sea waves and an air pocket connected to the atmosphere by a power take—off (PTO) system. In Roccella Jonica, this device is going to be embedded in a vertical breakwater expanding the main layout of the infrastructure. For ensuring the structural safety of the system, to characterize statistically its response peaks in severe environmental conditions is important. In this context, one of the main difficulties is utilizing appropriate environmental conditions representing real extreme events at the installation site. This article proposes to adopt the DNV trapezoidal storm model for representing the time history of an extreme event in conjunction with a nonlinear U-OWC model. Relevant Monte Carlo simulations show that the DNV storm model provides peak distributions that are rather close to the ones obtained by processing real storm time histories. Thus, it can be adopted for checking the performance of the system in extreme conditions.

Reckoning with Enslavement

For over seventy years, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. In this excerpt from A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2020), William G. Thomas introduces a major theme of his book: the nation's present-day need to confront the legacy of slavery and to reckon with "real histories, with real families whose descendants live among us." Excerpted from the prologue with permission from Yale University Press.

Actors’ Annotations and Paradoxical Editions of Shakespeare’s Texts

Theatre makes its backstage texts – including the playwright’s script – disappear, subsumed into a seemingly real history or tragedy or comedy, or at least into an evening of shared imaginative play between actor and audience. And yet not so, for with a text ‘twas made. My goal is to undo this vanishing act, to make visible and to study the theatrical texts that are obscured by performance. They constitute our only archive of the process of interpreting Shakespeare. Backstage theatrical documents, from early modern to present-day, represent not the polished production, but living, working theatre, captured mid-creation. Considering how thoroughly backstage documents are hidden from the staged performance and from the textual and even the theatrical history of Shakespeare’s plays, it might be surprising how extensive they are – and, unfortunately, how few of them survive in archives. Actors’ marginalia, in particular, capture uniquely creative minds meeting uniquely challenging roles, at a unique moment in time, and textualizing that meeting. I argue here for their value, for their preservation, and for a new idea of their use for scholars: as the basis for an approach to editing more reflective of modern theatrical practice and more engaging for readers.

An Attempt at Systematic Presentation of the History of Political Doctrines in Boris N. Chicherin’s Major Work

ABSTRACT This article examines the classification of political doctrines proposed by Boris N. Chicherin in his major work on the history of political thought. Chicherin uses two forms of systematization for political doctrines: in one, he draws attention to the main element used in explaining society (power, personal freedom, law, or the ideal goal of development); in the other, he refers to the initial level of explanation (rational principles, empirical facts, or a synthesis of the two). This article shows that, despite the great significance of Chicherin’s work in Russian philosophy, his proposed model does not correlate well with the real history of political thought and fails to provide an understanding of the general developmental logic of political ideas. The author demonstrates how a more accurate classification of types of political doctrines took shape in mainstream Russian philosophy, expressed in its final form by Semyon L. Frank in his book The Spiritual Foundations of Society. There are two false understandings of society: “singularism,” in which society is seen as an external combination of ontologically separate persons, and “universalism,” in which individuals are completely subordinated to a single national or universal spirit. Frank calls the accurate approach the “organic theory of society,” where the primary ontological unity of individuals is dialectically combined with their secondary, relative autonomy. This article shows that Chicherin’s main error in his philosophical analysis of society lies in rejecting this ontological unity of individuals as the basis of public life.

The Beauty of History

The Beauty of History Grace Elizabeth Hale (bio) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman W. W. Norton & Company https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357622 464 Pages; Cloth, $28.95 Like anyone familiar with Saidiya Hartman's work, I expected theory and history and rigor when I sat down to read Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I expected brilliance. What I did not expect was so much beauty: beautiful characters, beautiful prose, and beauty as an idea and a practice of mattering. Hartman takes on the task of resurrecting people mostly left out of the chronicles of past value we call history, working-class Black girls on the cusp of adulthood and the young women they become, trying to make free lives at the turn of the twentieth century. Called wayward girls and surplus women by their critics in New York City and Philadelphia, the cities that are Hartman's focus, these rebels use everything they have, their looks and their gestures, their bodies and their minds, to escape the practices created to contain them in lives of servility and drudgery. In defiance of law and reason and what passes for common sense, they insist on their right to pleasure and to beauty. Often, individually, they lose. But collectively, they create new ways of imagining gender and sex and freedom and desire, characteristics that will come to define the modern world. Like other scholars before her, Hartman confronts the limits of the archives, the way her subjects mostly appear in historical documents created by an army of reformers, social workers, law enforcement officials, journalists, scholars, and doctors who understood Black girls and women as a problem. She reads the traces of her subjects that appear in surviving notebooks, case files, reports, surveys, and photographs "against the grain" to try tease out their lives. And she acknowledges that this by now well-established mode of analysis cannot fully counter the absence at the heart of the archive and the way the documents often perpetuate the erasure of Black girls and Black women's full humanity. Not content to rest with a state that perpetuates the original violence against her subjects, she does something bold and radical and rather unprecedented. She employs theory and empathy "to speculate, listen intently, read between the lines, attend to the disorder and mess of the archive." Rather than simply "breaking open" historical accounts and exposing their limits, she "narrates" the missing stories. Deeply informed by her own and others' research, she imagines the interior lives of her subjects, their mostly unrecorded feelings and pleasures. She conjures their dreams. To recover her subjects' real histories, their lives as human beings rather than as problems, Hartman creates her own beautiful experiment. She leaves history as most scholars understand it behind and creates an assemblage that uses historic documents as a foundation for the informed speculation she calls "critical fabulation," "a dream book for existing otherwise" in which young Black women are "social visionaries and innovators." In the process, she expands our sense of what has been and is possible and illuminates the connections between words and world-making. At the center of Hartman's text is a chorus. This chorus is theatrical, a group of unnamed Black girls and women who comment on the action produced by the assorted do-gooders and law enforcement officials who attempt to understand, control, and "reform" them. This chorus is also a musical structure, the part that repeats after the verses offer up specific lives. The message of this refrain is simple: categories invented by others who "could only ever recognize her as a problem" do not tell us much about the intimate histories of Black girls. Hartman's chorus is also a collective voice, the author and her characters singing the blues, pleasures and sorrows and desires, meanings made of melody and rhythm and mood. Both this chorus and Hartman's named characters convey what she calls "the beauty of the black ordinary, the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise." "Beauty is not a luxury," Hartman insists...

«ТАЙНАЯ ИСТОРИЯ НАСТОЯЩИХ ИНТРИГ ДВОРА КАРАМАНИИ» Э. ХЕЙВУД

The article examines the works of E. Haywood, as the author of novels, the publisher of three women's magazines that laid the groundwork for the culture of women's creativity in English literature of the XVIII century. Her name is called among the first authors of a women's novel, which is still interpreted from a gender perspective in modern science as a sociocultural phenomenon that represents the world through the eyes of women. Nevertheless, the authors of the article note the serious influence of men's literature on the work of the writer who was passionate about politics and social reforms. Special attention is paid to such genre modification of the novel as "secret histories", the predecessor of "the novel with the key". It is noted that what is new in "secret histories" is the shift in the angle of perception of the text itself, filled with facts about certain historical events and people, which were taken from various kinds of insinuations, as a rule, it had nothing to do with the real history, but attracted the reader with their variations in the relationships of the characters. Slander becomes the subject of the depiction, and its possessors represent heroes (antiheroes) through the prism of the certain moral values, including the state ones. For the first time in Russian literary criticism, the authors acquaint the reader to the "secret histories" of E. Haywood, novels “The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania”(1726), “Memories of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia” (1725 – 26), “The Advantures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijavea; a preAdamitical History” (1736) in the context of women's prose in England in the XVIII century. The analysis of the novel “The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania” as the most vivid example of the "secret histories" by E. Haywood is offered. The material of the article will be of interest to the specialists, as well as to those who are interested in the development of the female genre of the novel in the literature of England during the Enlightenment.

What Lives in the Woods by Lindsay Currie

Reviewed by: What Lives in the Woods by Lindsay Currie Quinita Balderson Currie, Lindsay What Lives in the Woods. Sourcebooks, 2021 [320p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781728209753 $16.99 Paper ed. ISBN 9781728245720 $7.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781728209760 $7.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-6 Twelve-year-old Ginny and her family move to Saugatuck, Michigan so her dad can restore rundown Woodmoor Manor. Already spooked by the legend of the Hitchhikers, mutant creatures roaming the woods surrounding the manor, Ginny’s additionally unnerved by hearing the distant, ominous tick-tocking of a clock from everywhere in the house, getting trapped in the dark with a faceless mannequin that seems to move, and seeing the ghostly face of a woman in the mirror—not to mention the appearance of a typewriter with a note that says GET OUT. New friend Will, who has a connection to the manor, warns Ginny of an even more sinister threat than the Hitchhikers: the Shadow People. Currie (Scritch Scratch, BCCB 9/20) returns with another chilling outing informed by real history. Agatha Christie superfan and future mystery writer Ginny revels in the spotlight, and the eerie atmosphere without overly gruesome imagery makes this a perfect middle-grade horror selection. Though there are hints of a possible followup, they may just be clever misdirection that will tickle Christie fans, and the novel holds its own as a shivery standalone. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

ЖАНРОВАЯ ПОЭТИКА КНИГИ А. С. БАЙЕТТ «ПАВЛИН И ВИНОГРАДНАЯ ЛОЗА»

The article deals with the last book of the well-known English writer A. S. Byatt Peacock &amp; Vine (2016) in the context of her oeuvre (novels, stories, essays). It is proved that the controversial reviews by British critics are caused by the character of the genre and the author’s mythology. The book combines biographies of two artists and an essay on design of the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. It is concluded that A. S. Byatt uses her particular method of analogy at different levels of poetics. She juxtaposes biographies and oeuvres of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny with the help of such universals as the North and the South, which acquire a complicated character due to their being represented through national (or more specifically, cultural) images and symbols. The emphasis is not so much on the life as on the oeuvre of the designers – first and foremost, their houses and fabrics as seen by Byatt herself and through her biography and oeuvre. Her main principle lies in conceiving something of her own through something of the other’s, and vice versa. While the figure of Morris in Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book (2009) was fitted in the social, political, and psychoanalytical contexts of the epoch, the book Peacock &amp; Vine ‘illuminates’ the artist’s life both with his own works and Fortuny’s experiments with colors and light. The main evaluation criteria are color (light) and proportion (contexture), distinctive for both the artists’ design and Byatt’s style. However, in verbal interpretation of floral and animalistic ornaments (vines and pomegranates, peacocks and phoenixes, lions and dragons), one can see a comprehensive dialogue between paganism and Christianity, past days and modernity, a man and a woman, two famous designers, ars nouveau and ars deco. Illustrations (photographs, drawings, reproductions) together with the verbal text of the biographical essay make an organic whole of the book, which emphasizes a special role of paratext in Byatt’s works. Searching for words to represent visual images is a special task for an author of a biographical essay that she was conscious about in her works. In the book Peacock &amp; Vine, Byatt acquires the accuracy and clarity of the language she was dreaming of when working over the novel Still Life (1985). At the same time, simplicity and complexity of her style have become an integral part of her own mythology. The Englishman Morris, being passionate about the Middle Ages and the North, travelled to Iceland and conceived of the Scandinavian saga as a real history. In the Byatt’s book he is compared with the Spaniard Fortuny, who had a penchant for Classical Antiquity and the Mediterranean world, lived in Paris and Venice, and conceived of the Scandinavian saga only through the prism of the Wagner Theatre. As to the Byatt’s love to Scandinavian mythology, it goes back to her war-time childhood, which is reflected in her book Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011).

Modal History versus Counterfactual History: History as Intention

The distinction of whether real or counterfactual history makes sense only post factum. However, modal history is to be defined only as ones’ intention and thus, ex-ante. Modal history is probable history, and its probability is subjective. One needs phenomenological “epoche” in relation to its reality (respectively, counterfactuality). Thus, modal history describes historical “phenomena” in Husserl’s sense and would need a specific application of phenomenological reduction, which can be called historical reduction. Modal history doubles history just as the recorded history of historiography does it. That doubling is a necessary condition of historical objectivity including one’s subjectivity: whether actors’, ex-ante or historians’, post factum. The objectivity doubled by ones’ subjectivity constitute “hermeneutical circle”.

Development of the adventure genre in Ukrainian cinema in the second half of the twenties of the twentieth century

Our research is based on a wide range of little-known publications in the Ukrainian and Russian periodicals 1922–1930. In this article we analyze the development of the adventure genre in Ukrainian cinema in the second half of the twenties of the twentieth century. Winners define history. The making of adventure films about the Civil War (Soviet-Ukrainian war (1917–1921)) in Ukraine by specialists of the All-Ukrainian Cinema and Photo Administration was associated with the persistent attempts of the Soviet government to rewrite the real history of the struggle of the Ukrainian people for the desired independence and their own statehood in 1917–1921 into a falsified "film history". However, these films were made mainly according to the simplified scheme of the popular at that time "kinoagitka" (propaganda films), where there were schematic "white", "red", "green", Makhnovists, white rear, red underground, struggle and victory.

Love's Shadow, or Shadow-Boxing?

Love's Shadow, or Shadow-Boxing? Robert L. Caserio (bio) What in Paul Bové's Love's Shadow should one be most grateful for? For its attack on a practice of professionalism that he judges to be deadly for "English studies"; for its claim that allegorical thought and melancholy emotion in literary criticism have caused a disciplinary decadence; or for its defense of literature as the supreme exemplar of humanity's "grand capacity of imagination" (113)? Bové's arraignment of professional practice identifies it as an academic version of "official culture," whereby leading lights of literary study are accorded canonical status, with scarcely an intellectual debate; and whereby their followers, borrowing prestige from their leaders, exhaustively (and exhaustingly) repeat what their leaders say. The result is not only an elevation of the authorized critics, but also an elevation of criticism itself, and of criticism's "official" themes; and a relegation of literature to a subordinate status. My precis of Bové's formulations is inferior to his expressions; especially to those about rote repetition and about the intermediate agents of "official" exchange. "Variation on a concept, achieved by its application and repetition," he says bitingly, "adds nothing to thought, even as it adds to an index of illuminated familiarities" (171). Bite also informs "It is the nature of [academic] official culture that the mediating figure can get a false authority by screening the original from careful study. Most important, the heirs burdened by their reduced inheritance neither curate the significant effort of its creation nor match its originality and specificity" (4). Among the "indexed familiarities" Bové counts "the social contextualization of art as the defining method for its study" (52) and "the rhetoric of resistance" (335). Of the first he judges that "social contextualization" "can be inherently limiting and antagonistic to art's work" (52). Of the second he says that "official culture" rewards the rhetoric of resistance, but does "not come to works of art ready to be driven from approved positions" by those works (335). The rhetoric apparently operates only one way: the critics resist the art, the art does not resist the critics. That Bové addresses a common mode of "doing" scholarship is undeniable. His tackling of the matter is, at the very least, appreciable as a bold grappling with a custom whose entrenchment is worth a shake-up. The [End Page 573] shake-up targets no less a figure than Fredric Jameson, whom Bové arraigns as a model of what he opposes. In doing so, however, Bové crosses over from an attack on a professional structure ("Jameson's first struggle is for predominance in the academy" [9]; "the Jameson figure, once so popular in the MLA" [143]) to the structure's reliance on what Bové proposes is a totalizing critical ideology: an "official" theme inaugurated by Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1979). Jameson's theme—that critics should read texts as if they are unwittingly alienated emblems of historical conflicts—made the critic's job become, Bové complains, an obligatory allegoresis, a "machinery of explanation" (175), based on an assumption that real history matters more than fictive imaginations. But the history at issue is a shrunken version, Bové is at pains to point out: history characterized as a sequence of human failures that culminates in "a ruined and unjust present" (12), which the critic-allegorizer is made melancholy by, and feels a responsibility to redeem. The redemptive path is utopian speculation, of the kind Jameson has written about in Archeologies of the Future (2005) and elsewhere. The problem for Bové with this future-oriented aim, which he identifies as the allegorist's self-appointed messianic hope for human betterment, is that it ignores history for what history—and literature—rightly might claim to be "achievement rather than ruination" (23). As for the melancholy in the critic's ideological constitution, Bové judges it to be an intellectual and emotional debility bar none. But where, readers might wonder, does Bové derive a charge against melancholy in a challenge to Jameson confined mainly to six pages (7-13) of an introductory chapter, and centered on Jameson's utopianism? Bové extrapolates melancholy from Jameson's conviction of the oppressive, irreversible thrust...

Parametric study of twin tunnel under seismic loads for Cairo Metro Line No. 4

ABSTRACT The damage of tunnel induced by intense earthquake is obviously important. Thus, more attention has been paid to the tunnel destruction induced by earthquake. So far, there are few studies conducted on the influence of earthquake dynamic loads on horizontal twin tunnels. In this research, a systematic analysis of horizontal twin tunnels of Cairo Metro Line No. 4 was performed using finite element model by the commercial software PLAXIS 2D and under static and earthquake dynamic loads using the Dahsour Earthquake 1992 time real history. Both static and dynamic analyses in this research have taken into account the effect of the soil structure interaction on the static and dynamic performance of horizontal twin tunnels. Also, a parametric study had been performed on the horizontal twin tunnels of Cairo Metro Line No. 4 under different parameters, which included the tunnel’s depth (d), the distance between twin tunnels (S), and the surrounding soil stiffness (E). Results showed that both static and dynamic analysis are expected to be governed by soil structure interaction. Also, the studied parameters are very important in tunnel design under static and dynamic loads, especially the distance between twin tunnel, where these types of twin tunnels were excavated by TBM machine.

Phylogenomic inference of species and subspecies diversity in the Palearctic salamander genus Salamandra

The salamander genus Salamandra is widespread across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East and is renowned for its conspicuous and polymorphic colouration and diversity of reproductive modes. The phylogenetic relationships within the genus, and especially in the highly polymorphic species S. salamandra, have been very challenging to elucidate, leaving its real evolutionary history and classification at species and subspecies levels a topic of debate and contention. However, the distribution of diversity and species delimitation within the genus are critically important for identifying evolutionarily significant units for conservation and management, especially in light of threats posed by the pathogenic chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans that is causing massive declines of S. salamandra populations in central Europe. Here, we conducted a phylogenomic analysis from across the taxonomic and geographic breadth of the genus Salamandra in its entire range. Bayesian, maximum likelihood and network-based phylogenetic analyses of up to 4905 ddRADseq-loci (294,300 nucleotides of sequence) supported the distinctiveness of all currently recognised species (Salamandra algira, S. atra, S. corsica, S. infraimmaculata, S. lanzai, and S. salamandra), and all five species for which we have multiple exemplars were confirmed as monophyletic. Within S. salamandra, two main clades can be distinguished: one clade with the Apenninic subspecies S. s. gigliolii nested within the Iberian S. s. bernardezi/fastuosa; and a second clade comprising all other Iberian, Central and East European subspecies. Our analyses revealed that some of the currently recognized subspecies of S. salamandra are paraphyletic and may require taxonomic revision, with the Central- and Eastern-European subspecies all being poorly differentiated at the analysed genomic markers. Salamandra s. longirostris – sometimes considered a separate species – was nested within S. salamandra, consistent with its subspecies status. The relationships identified within and between Salamandra species provide valuable context for future systematic and biogeographic studies, and help elucidate critical evolutionary units for conservation and taxonomy.