scholarly journals The Biomimetic Evolution of Composite Materials: From Straw Bricks to Engineering Structures and Nanocomposites

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Gad Marom

Advanced polymer-based composite materials have revolutionized the structural material arena since their appearance some 60 years ago. Yet, despite their relatively short existence, they seem to be taken for granted as if they have always been there. One of the reasons for this state of affairs is that composite materials of various types have accompanied human history for thousands years, and their emergence in the modern era could be considered a natural evolutionary process. Nevertheless, the continuous line that leads from early days of composites in human history to current structural materials has exhibited a number of notable steps, each generating an abrupt advance toward the contemporary new science of composite materials. In this paper, I review and discuss the history of composites with emphasis on the main steps of their development.

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-43
Author(s):  
Charles Gardner Geyh

Chapter 2 places the current state of affairs in context, with a short history of judicial selection in the United States, touching on the five distinct methods of judicial selection that have evolved over time. It begins by discussing colonial rule and gubernatorial appointments, then moves to early statehood and legislative appointments. The Age of Jackson is then examined, in particular Jacksonian democracy and its aftermath, which saw the rise of partisan judicial elections. The chapter then discusses how the Populist-Progressive era ushered in the advent of nonpartisan and recall elections. Finally, it describes the merit selection movement in the twentieth century before concluding that in the modern era, the American judiciary has undergone a political transformation that has placed increasing emphasis on constraining independence and enhancing political control.


Nordlit ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Pippin Aspaas

<p>This article, which is the author’s trial lecture for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor, offers a brief history of the use of Latin among men of learning. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the periods of Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, respectively. In the same timespan the Republic of Letters flourished, a word which connoted a kind of ‘imagined community’ (in Benedict Anderson’s words) which bound together the supporters of the new science. In transgressing confessional, civil, and ideological boundaries Latin offered a peculiar kind of assistance. A text in Latin would signify not merely erudition, but also some sort of neutrality. However much the active use and the passive ability to understand various vernacular languages rose internationally, neither Italian, French, English, or German was received without mixed feelings. Escaping the famous definition of a language as ‘a dialect with an army and a navy’, Latinity proved capable of persisting by means of ‘soft power’ alone. The processes which led to the end of this state of affairs were not one and the same. Italian, which Galilei and the academicians of Florence used, achieved national or regional, rather than international, success. English, cultivated by the Royal Society of London, was undoubtedly comprehensible to many learned, but it was used rarely abroad nevertheless. French, having the Académie Royale des Sciences and the encyclopédistes among its supporters, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century seemed poised to take over the Republic of Letters. German, read by many men of learning in Nordic and Eastern parts of Europe, reeked of vulgarity or even barbarism. That Latin, the victim of nationalism, democratisation, and secularisation, in brief, of European modernity, also served as a vehicle and a midwife for that very same modernity is a lesson well worth bearing in mind.</p>


2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-770
Author(s):  
Csaba Pléh

Danziger, Kurt: Marking the mind. A history of memory . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008Farkas, Katalin: The subject’s point of view. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008MosoninéFriedJudités TolnaiMárton(szerk.): Tudomány és politika. Typotex, Budapest, 2008Iacobini, Marco: Mirroring people. The new science of how we connect with others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Du vrai, du beau, du bien.Une nouvelle approche neuronale. Odile Jacob, PárizsGazzaniga_n


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


Author(s):  
К.А. Панченко

Abstract The article examines the conquest of the County of Tripoli by the Mamelukes in 1289, and the reaction of various Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups to this event. Along with the Monophysite perspective (the Syriac chronicle of Bar Hebraeus’ Continuator and the work of the Coptic historian Mufaddal ibn Abi-l-Fadail), and the propagandist texts of Muslim Arabic panegyric poets, we will pay special attention to the historical memory of the Orthodox (Melkite) and Maronite communities of northern Lebanon. The contemporary of these events — the Orthodox author Suleiman al-Ashluhi, a native of one of the villages of the Akkar Plateau — laments the fall of Tripoli in his rhymed eulogy. It is noteworthy that this author belongs to the rural Melkite subculture, which — in spite of its conservative character — was capable of producing original literature. Suleiman al-Ashluhi’s work was forsaken by the following generations of Melkites; his poem was only preserved in Maronite manuscripts. Maronite historical memory is just as fragmented. The father of the Modern Era Maronite historiography — Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî († 1516) only had fragmentary information on the history of his people in the 13th century: local chronicles and the heroic epos that glorified the Maronite struggle against the Muslim lords that tried to conquer Mount Lebanon. Gabriel’s depiction of the past is not only biased and subject to aims of religious polemics, but also factually inaccurate. Nevertheless, the texts of Suleiman al-Ashluhi and Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî give us the opportunity to draw conclusions on the worldview, educational level, political orientation and peculiar traits of the historical memory of various Christian communities of Mount Lebanon.


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...


Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay

`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-257
Author(s):  
Jan Greitens

AbstractIn the history of economic thought, monetary theories in the Germanspeaking world of the early modern era are considered backward compared to the approaches in other European countries. This backwardness can be illustrated by two authors from the mid-18th century who were not only contemporaries but also successively in the service of Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia. The first is Johann Philipp Graumann, one of the 'projectors' of the 18th century. As master of the mints in Prussia, he developed a coin project, where he tried to implement a new monetary standard to promote trade, generate seigniorage income and implement the Prussian coins as a kind of a reserve currency. In his writings, he developed a typical mercantilistic monetary theory with a clear understanding of the mechanism in the balance of payments. But even when he tried to include credit instruments, he did not take banks or broader financial markets into account. The second thinker is Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, who took the opposite position concerning the coin project as well as in his theory. He defended a strictly metalistic monetary approach where the value of money is only based on the metal's value. While Graumann rejected the English coin system, Justi recommended its laws for countries without their own mines, because the sovereign should not misuse his right of coinage. For him, the monetary system had tobe reliable and stable to serve trade and economic development.


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