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Remembering the Vikings in Thirteenth-Century England and Denmark
No full textIn 1240, Matthew Paris recorded in the Chronica Majora that:
In the entry for 1241, Matthew returned to the subject of the Danes and their ambitions against England. Matthew had learned that the powerful king of Denmark, the elderly Valdemar II (r. 1202–41), had passed away that year:
Later, probably sometime before 1251, Matthew returned to this story and added further information at the bottom of the folio, concerning Valdemar's victories over the pagans in the eastern Baltic. He also corrected the claim that the son who had predeceased Valdemar II, the young Valdemar III, was his father's only heir. In fact, Valdemar had three other sons, the two oldest of whom, Erik IV ‘Ploughpenny’ (r. 1241–50) and Abel (r. 1250–2), were now at war with each other.
Although Valdemar II was dead and the rumoured invasion never took place, Matthew remained interested in the subject. He returned to it in the Historia Anglorum (c. 1250–5), an abbreviated version of the Chronica Majora, offering more details about the Danish claims and their preparations for the invasion of England. Allegedly, Valdemar II had, ‘in his last days gathered a fleet and an army for the invasion of England, which he claimed belonged to him by ancient right’. That Matthew retained the invasion story here is interesting, given that the Historia Anglorum otherwise significantly reduced the number of anecdotes relating to developments outside England
Are human drivers a liability or an asset?
Get PDFThis paper investigates the relationship between near misses and human error that leads to a collision. A Smart wheelchair that can detect obstacles is used as an example. Many collisions are the fault of the driver and could be avoided if a sensor system was allowed more control of the vehicle. Some claim that eliminating a human driver from a control loop could eliminate collisions caused by human error. Others caution that human error may not disappear completely with the elimination of the driver and that new incidents may occur because of it. Analysis suggests that a human driver is attributable to many errors but that at the same time a human is vital for avoiding many accidents. The volume of near misses in this analysis is of a sufficient quantity to make some generalized conclusions about the nature of the detection and mitigation of collisions. It would strengthen the analysis if near misses from other types of driving were available. Near misses are a source of information about potential collisions as if a person is having more near misses then they may be becoming tired or distracted. Near misses were analyzed in order to examine what role on-board human drivers play in the occurrence and detection of the initial stages of a collision
Identification of Critical Business Processes: A Proposed Novel Approach
No full textCritical Business Processes (CBPs) are processes that are crucial to the financial stability and operations of an organisation. This paper focuses on surveying the literature, while presenting a critical synthesis of the findings of previous studies on CBPs. The paper seeks to extensively and critically review the current literature to understand state-of-the-art methods and key research gap for CBP identification. While this paper targets the process of identifying the gap in literature, it helps in finding out what is needed for mitigating it, motivating the future researches in this area, and pushing the boundary between human and machine interaction in key strategic decisions for organisations along with security implications
An Analysis of the Perception Gap between the EU’s Connectivity Strategy and China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Get PDFUrbanization and economic complexity
Get PDFUrbanization plays a crucial role in the economic development of every country. The mutual relationship between the urbanization of any country and its economic productive structure is far from being understood. We analyzed the historical evolution of product exports for all countries using the World Trade Web with respect to patterns of urbanization from 1995 to 2010. Using the evolving framework of economic complexity, we reveal that a country's economic development in terms of its production and export of goods, is interwoven with the urbanization process during the early stages of its economic development and growth. Meanwhile in urbanized countries, the reciprocal relation between economic growth and urbanization fades away with respect to its later stages, becoming negligible for countries highly dependent on the export of resources where urbanization is not linked to any structural economic transformation
Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Get PDFMarx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, though often
mentioned, has received surprisingly little sustained scrutiny. As a result, the text has often been associated with catchphrases and slogans (in particular those involving the image of an ‘inversion’ of Hegel’s dialectic). These in turn have served to hide from view the complex argument that
Marx mounts. Although the argument can seem tangled, largely because it simultaneously seeks to operate at a high level of generality and to engage in the fine detail of Hegel’s exposition, it is both ambitious and consistent—if fragmentary. I focus on two fragments that Marx provides
us with. First, by means of a critique of Hegel’s defence of monarchy, Marx offers a fragment of political theory that amounts to an argument for radical democracy. Second, and connectedly, Marx offers a fragment of a more fundamental theoretical critique of Hegel’s procedure in Philosophy
of Right, which seeks to overturn Hegel’s Platonizing dialectic. Throughout, the complex argument that is revealed is one that gives the lie to the slogans. Once we start to spell out this argument, we see that Marx’s critique of Hegel is far more radical and far-reaching than the images of ‘inversion’ suggest
Topological limits to the parallel processing capability of network architectures
Get PDFThe ability to learn new tasks and generalize to others is a remarkable characteristic of both human brains and recent artificial
intelligence systems. The ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously is also a key characteristic of parallel architectures,
as is evident in the human brain and exploited in traditional parallel architectures. Here we show that these two characteristics
reflect a fundamental tradeoff between interactive parallelism, which supports learning and generalization, and independent
parallelism, which supports processing efficiency through concurrent multitasking. Although the maximum number of possible
parallel tasks grows linearly with network size, under realistic scenarios their expected number grows sublinearly. Hence, even
modest reliance on shared representations, which support learning and generalization, constrains the number of parallel tasks.
This has profound consequences for understanding the human brain’s mix of sequential and parallel capabilities, as well as for
the development of artificial intelligence systems that can optimally manage the tradeoff between learning and processing
efficiency
Optimal timing of one-shot interventions for epidemic control
Get PDFThe interventions and outcomes in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are highly varied. The disease and the interventions both impose costs and harm on society. Some interventions with particularly high costs may only be implemented briefly. The design of optimal policy requires consideration of many intervention scenarios. In this paper we investigate the optimal timing of interventions that are not sustainable for a long period. Specifically, we look at at the impact of a single short-term non-repeated intervention (a “one-shot intervention”) on an epidemic and consider the impact of the intervention’s timing. To minimize the total number infected, the intervention should start close to the peak so that there is minimal rebound once the intervention is stopped. To minimise the peak prevalence, it should start earlier, leading to initial reduction and then having a rebound to the same prevalence as the pre-intervention peak rather than one very large peak. To delay infections as much as possible (as might be appropriate if we expect improved interventions or treatments to be developed), earlier interventions have clear benefit. In populations with distinct subgroups, synchronized interventions are less effective than targeting the interventions in each subcommunity separately