Foreword

This file includes eight articles stemming from contributions presented during a workshop organized in July 2011 within the framework of a cooperation established between the French Institute of the Near East and the Al-Hussein Bin Talal University in Jordan. The collaboration comes within the scope of a scientific program codirected by W. Abu-Azizeh and M. B. Tarawneh, combining the study of two desert areas (the sector of Al-Thulaythuwat to the south of Al-Jafr Basin and the Eastern Wadi Ba..

Subsistence of Early Pastoral Nomadism in the Southern Levant: New Data from Eastern Bayir

À partir du Néolithique récent-début du Chalcolithique, le pastoralisme nomade spécialisé s’est imposé comme le mode de subsistence privilégié dans les régions désertiques du Levant Sud, bien qu’il semble peu représenté dans le nord-est de la Jordanie et le sud-est de la Syrie. Une des raisons permettant d’expliquer ces disparités tient à la nature des territoires concernés. Les périphéries désertiques du centre-est et du sud-est jordanien constituent en effet un environnement favorable au développement du mode de subsistance pastoral. La demande accrue pour les matières premières et les biens produits dans le désert, en particulier les racloirs tabulaires, a participé au développement de ces régions. La fabrication des racloirs tabulaires s’est intégrée dans un réseau d’échanges et dans les itinéraires de transhumance saisonniers couvrant le sud du Levant et le nord de l’Arabie. Les nouvelles recherches entreprises dans la région orientale du Wadi Bayir, aussi désignée sous le nom de Ardh as-Suwwan (le territoire du silex), ont permis de démontrer, grâce aux datations radiocarbone, une augmentation significative du nombre d’établissements de pasteurs nomades au cours du Néolithique récent/début du Chalcolithique. L’étude de cette ccupation pastorale nomade soulève la question de l’interaction avec les populations des régions voisines et en particulier avec les sociétés agricoles pratiquant d’autres formes d’élevage à proximité des agglomérations sédentaires. Un nomadisme pastoral enclavé est aussi possible dans les zones proches des villages agricoles, mais très peu de villages ont été trouvés dans le Levant Sud.By the Late Neolithic-Early Chalcolithic period, specialized pastoral-nomadism became the dominant way of life in the desert regions of the southern Levant, but it was almost absent from north-eastern Jordan and south-eastern Syria. This shift from the north-eastern steppe to the central-eastern and south-eastern steppe/desert may be because the marginal landscapes of Jordan were more suitable for a predominantly pastoral lifestyle, and that the increasing demand for raw materials and goods produced in the desert, particularly tabular scarpers, made exploiting these areas viable. The production of tabular scrapers became an integral part of pastoral nomads' trade networks and seasonal movements between different regions in the southern Levant and northern Arabia. New investigations in the eastern Bayir region, also called Ardh-as-Suwwan (land of the flint), has proved, through carbon dating, that there are an increasing number of Late Neolithic-Early Chalcolithic sites in this area which were occupied by pastoral nomads. Studying the pastoral nomads raises the question of what kind of relationships they had with other regions, particularly with farmers who were also practicing herding near their villages. Dependant pastoral nomadism is also possible in the areas close to the farming villages, but very few villages sites were found in the southern Levant.اصبحت البداوة الخالصة منذ نهاية العصر الحجري الحديث وبداية العصر الحجري النحاسي هي النمط السائد في منطقة جنوبشرق بلاد الشام بينما لم يعثر على أدلة على وجود هذا النمط في المنطقة الشمالية الشرقية من الأردن وجنوب شرق سوريا. هذا التحول من المنطقة الشمالية الشرقية الى المنطقة الوسطى والجنوبية الشرقية ربما يعود الى الاختلاف البيئي بين المنطقتين حيث تعتبر المنطقة الجنوبية اكثر ملائمة لهذا النمط المعيشي وكذلك توفر المواد الخام لصناعة السلع المهمة في منطقة البادية خاصة المكاشط المسطحة. ويبدوا أن تصنيع المكشاط المسطحة قد لعب دورا كبيراً في حياة البدو وكذلك طرق التجارة والتنقل الموسمي بين المناطق المختلفة في جنوب بلاد الشام وشمال الجزيرة العربية. وتشير نتائج تحليل الكربون المشع من منطقة باير (ارض الصوان) الى الإستيطان البدوي منذ الفترة المتأخرة من العصر الحجري الحديث وبداية العصر الحجري النحاسي. وتثير دراسة البداوة خلال هذا الفترة السؤال عن طبيعة العلاقة بين البدو الرحل وسكان المناطق الأخرى خاصة الفلاحين الذين مارسوا الرعي ايضا بالقرب من قراهم. ومن المحتمل أنه كان هناك تخييم للبدو الرحل بالقرب من قرى الفلاحين الزراعية, لكن عدد هذه القرى قليل جدا في منطقة جنوب بلاد الشام

Analysis of Flux-Base Fins for Estimation of Heat Transfer Coefficient

Exact solutions are given for the transient temperature in flux-base fins with the method of Green’s functions (GF) in the form of infinite series for three different tip conditions. The speed of convergence is improved by replacing the steady part by a closed-form steady solution. For the insulated-tip case, a quasi-steady solution is presented. Numerical values are presented and the conditions under which the quasi-steady solution is accurate are determined. An experimental example is given for estimation of the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) on a non-rotating roller bearing, in which the outer bearing race is treated as a transient fin

Avant-propos

Ce dossier regroupe huit articles issus des communications données lors d’une table ronde organisée en juillet 2011, dans le cadre d’une coopération instaurée entre l’Institut français du Proche-Orient et l’Université al-Hussein Bin Talal. Cette collaboration s’inscrit dans un programme scientifique codirigé par W. Abu-Azizeh et M. B. Tarawneh, réunissant l’étude de deux secteurs désertiques (le secteur de al-Thulaythuwat au sud du bassin d’al-Jafr et le secteur oriental du Wadi Bayir) dans u..

Avant-propos

Ce dossier regroupe huit articles issus des communications données lors d’une table ronde organisée en juillet 2011, dans le cadre d’une coopération instaurée entre l’Institut français du Proche-Orient et l’Université al-Hussein Bin Talal. Cette collaboration s’inscrit dans un programme scientifique codirigé par W. Abu-Azizeh et M. B. Tarawneh, réunissant l’étude de deux secteurs désertiques (le secteur de al-Thulaythuwat au sud du bassin d’al-Jafr et le secteur oriental du Wadi Bayir) dans u..

Foreword

This file includes eight articles stemming from contributions presented during a workshop organized in July 2011 within the framework of a cooperation established between the French Institute of the Near East and the Al-Hussein Bin Talal University in Jordan. The collaboration comes within the scope of a scientific program codirected by W. Abu-Azizeh and M. B. Tarawneh, combining the study of two desert areas (the sector of Al-Thulaythuwat to the south of Al-Jafr Basin and the Eastern Wadi Ba..

A Pilot Comparative Study of Different Deep Features for Palmprint Identification in Low-Quality Images

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widespread, efficient tools of visual recognition. In this paper, we present a comparative study of three popular pre-trained CNN models: AlexNet, VGG-16 and VGG-19. We address the problem of palmprint identification in low-quality imagery and apply Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with all of the compared models. For the comparison, we use the MOHI palmprint image database whose images are characterized by low contrast, shadows, and varying illumination, scale, translation and rotation. Another, high-quality database called COEP is also considered to study the recognition gap between high-quality and low-quality imagery. Our experiments show that the deeper pre-trained CNN models, e.g., VGG-16 and VGG-19, tend to extract highly distinguishable features that recognize low-quality palmprints more efficiently than the less deep networks such as AlexNet. Furthermore, our experiments on the two databases using various models demonstrate that the features extracted from lower-level fully connected layers provide higher recognition rates than higher-layer features. Our results indicate that different pre-trained models can be efficiently used in touchless identification systems with low-quality palmprint images.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, Ninth Hungarian Conference on Computer Graphics and Geometry, Budapest, 201