Mohenjo-daro's Small Public Structures: Heterarchy, Collective Action, and a Re-visitation of Old Interpretations with GIS and 3D Modelling

Together, the concepts of heterarchy and collective action offer potential explanations for how early state societies may have established high degrees of civic coordination and sophisticated craft industries in absence of exclusionary political strategies or dominant centralised political hierarchies. The Indus civilisation (c.2600-1900 B.C.) appears to have been heterarchical, which raises critical questions about how its infrastructure facilitated collective action. Digital re-visitation of early excavation reports provides a powerful means of re-examining the nuances of the resulting datasets and the old interpretations offered to explain them. In an early report on excavations at Mohenjo-daro, the Indus civilisation’s largest city, Ernest Mackay described a pair of small non-residential structures at a major street intersection as a “hostel” and “office” for the “city fathers.” In this article, Mackay’s interpretation that these structures had a public orientation is tested using a geographical information systems approach (GIS) and 3D models derived from plans and descriptions in his report. In addition to supporting aspects of Mackay’s interpretation, the resulting analysis indicates that Mohenjo-daro’s architecture changed through time, increasingly favouring smaller houses and public structures. Close examination of these small public structures also suggests that they may have at times been part of a single complex

Youth Justice and Education: A Typology of Educational Approaches to the Resocialisation of Young Offenders in Spain

The Young Offenders Act that entered Spanish law in 2000 represents a significant attempt to place personalised educational programmes for young people with social/criminal problems at the centre of policy and practice. This paper examines the teams and educational programmes designed to manage and implement the goal of ?re-socialisation? enshrined in the Act. This paper focuses on an analytical typology of the educational styles used at young offenders institutions in Spain. The analysis highlights the differences between styles in relation to the key underlying objectives of social reorientation and citizen empowerment. The wide range of models experimented with in different Spanish regions has great relevance to youth justice systems in other countries. For example, the typology we put forward has concrete implications for recent developments in England, in the light of moves towards establishing a national network of ?Secure Colleges? for convicted young people

Architectures for vibration-driven micropower generators

Published versio

Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

AbstractThe cities of the Indus civilization were expansive and planned with large-scale architecture and sophisticated Bronze Age technologies. Despite these hallmarks of social complexity, the Indus lacks clear evidence for elaborate tombs, individual-aggrandizing monuments, large temples, and palaces. Its first excavators suggested that the Indus civilization was far more egalitarian than other early complex societies, and after nearly a century of investigation, clear evidence for a ruling class of managerial elites has yet to materialize. The conspicuous lack of political and economic inequality noted by Mohenjo-daro’s initial excavators was basically correct. This is not because the Indus civilization was not a complex society, rather, it is because there are common assumptions about distributions of wealth, hierarchies of power, specialization, and urbanism in the past that are simply incorrect. The Indus civilization reveals that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity.</jats:p

Nonlinear Waves in Rocks

We are interested in the nonlinear interaction of frequency components in large amplitude acoustic waves in rocks. As compared to other, more ordered solids, rocks are elastically highly nonlinear. The ratio of third order elastic constants to second order elastic constants in a typical rock is orders of magnitude greater than in solids such as iron [1]. This high degree of nonlinearity means that frequency components mix and elastic energy is transferred from the fundamentals to sum and difference frequencies. There are at least three reasons for our interest in these effects in rocks. 1) Accurate models of explosion and earthquake sources may depend on understanding nonlinear elastic effects. 2) Efficient frequency mixing in a highly nonlinear elastic material could lead to a low frequency seismic source generated from two high frequency input waves. 3) Accurate measurement of nonlinear coefficients in rock would provide a sensitive probe of physical characteristics such as consolidation and saturation

Energy harvesting from human and machine motion for wireless electronic devices

Published versio

Micro-machined variable capacitors for power generation

Accepted versio

Landscapes of Urbanisation and De-urbanisation: Integrating Site Location Datasets from Northwest India to Investigate Changes in the Indus Civilisation’s Settlement Distribution

Archaeological survey data plays a fundamental role in studies of long-term socio-cultural change, particularly those that examine the emergence of social complexity and urbanism. Re-evaluating survey datasets reveals lacunae in survey coverage, encourages the reconsideration of existing interpretations, and makes it possible to integrate the results of multiple projects into large scale analyses that address a broad range of research questions. This paper re-evaluates settlement site location reports that relate to the major phases of the Indus civilisation, whose Mature Harappan period (c. 2600-1900 B.C.) is characterised by numerous village settlements and a small number of larger urban centres. By the end of the Mature Harappan period, people appear to have left these cities, and a de-nucleated pattern of settlement is evident in the subsequent Late Harappan period. Survey data from the plains of northwest India are key to understanding this process of de-urbanisation, as it has been argued that there was an increase in the region’s settlement density as the cities declined. Assembling site locations from multiple surveys into an integrated relational database makes it possible to conduct geographical information systems (GIS)-based analyses at larger scales. This paper finds that the number of settlements on the plains of northwest India increased between c.1900 and 700 B.C., and that some settings within this region were favoured for settlement, resulting in new landscapes of de-urbanisation. These results lay the foundation for future research that will ask whether this shift in settlement location occurred at the expense of alternative social processes, such as movement to highland areas, fortification of nodes of long distance exchange, and political consolidation. More broadly, investigating the Indus civilisation’s landscapes has the potential to reshape models of social complexity by revealing how it emerged and transformed across extensive and varied environmental settings

Generating reversible circuits from higher-order functional programs

Boolean reversible circuits are boolean circuits made of reversible elementary gates. Despite their constrained form, they can simulate any boolean function. The synthesis and validation of a reversible circuit simulating a given function is a difficult problem. In 1973, Bennett proposed to generate reversible circuits from traces of execution of Turing machines. In this paper, we propose a novel presentation of this approach, adapted to higher-order programs. Starting with a PCF-like language, we use a monadic representation of the trace of execution to turn a regular boolean program into a circuit-generating code. We show that a circuit traced out of a program computes the same boolean function as the original program. This technique has been successfully applied to generate large oracles with the quantum programming language Quipper.Comment: 21 pages. A shorter preprint has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of Reversible Computation 2016. The final publication is available at http://link.springer.co

Thermodynamic Properties of the Piecewise Uniform String

The thermodynamic free energy F is calculated for a gas whose particles are the quantum excitations of a piecewise uniform bosonic string. The string consists of two parts of length L_I and L_II, endowed with different tensions and mass densities, adjusted in such a way that the velocity of sound always equals the velocity of light. The explicit calculation is done under the restrictive condition that the tension ratio x = T_I/T_II approaches zero. Also, the length ratio s = L_II/L_I is assumed to be an integer. The expression for F is given on an integral form, in which s is present as a parameter. For large values of s, the Hagedorn temperature becomes proportional to the square root of s.Comment: 32 pages, latex, no figure