Geology of the Northern Llano Uplift, Junction to Llano, Texas

This year\u27s Texas Academy of Science Geology Field Trip will visit nine interesting locations in two different areas in the Texas Hill Country (Figure 1). In the first area we will look at the Cretaceous stratigraphy around Junction, Texas (Figures 1, 2, 3, and 4). The expedition will then travel to the northern part of the Llano uplift and study Cambrian and Precambrian stratigraphy and structure of the northern Llano Uplift (Figures 4 and 5). Stop 9 will be at Cooper’s BBQ for lunch

Autonomous Fault Detection in Self-Healing Systems using Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Autonomously detecting and recovering from faults is one approach for reducing the operational complexity and costs associated with managing computing environments. We present a novel methodology for autonomously generating investigation leads that help identify systems faults, and extends our previous work in this area by leveraging Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and contrastive divergence learning to analyse changes in historical feature data. This allows us to heuristically identify the root cause of a fault, and demonstrate an improvement to the state of the art by showing feature data can be predicted heuristically beyond a single instance to include entire sequences of information.Comment: Published and presented in the 11th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Engineering of Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (EASe 2014

How the failure of two political parties helped lead to Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump

The UK’s recent vote to leave the European Union has been seen by many commentators as mirroring the rise in popularity of Donald Trump on the other side of the Atlantic. Chris Barker writes that the popularity of Trump and Brexit can be traced at least in part to a growing divide between the metropolitan upper classes and non-privileged households in both the US and the UK. He also argues that both the UK Labour and Conservative parties and the Republican Party in the US were unable to “create” political opinions that were against Brexit and Trump, meaning that they are now very much on the back foot

An American view on the Brexit vote: an opportunity not worth seizing

This Thursday the UK goes to the polls to decide whether the country should leave or remain in the European Union. Chris Barker sees parallels between the UK Conservative Party’s internal debate over the referendum, and the current fracturing of the Republican Party in the US. He warns that those who see Brexit as a way for the left and right movements in the UK to reinvigorate themselves may end up facing years of work sorting out the country’s EU-exit instead

Writing space, living space: time, agency and place relations in Herodotus’s Histories

This chapter examines lived space in Herodotus’s Histories’ and explores how the picture that emerges differs from abstract depictions of space. Such overly schematic representations we see articulated by the Persians at the very beginning of the Histories, or explicitly challenged by Herodotus when he ‘laughs at’ the maps produced by his Ionian contemporaries that similarly divide the world into two regions of equal size (4.36.2), or more subtly undercut when Aristagoras turns up with just such a map and puts it to service an argument in favour of conquest. In particular, we want to challenge conventional readings of a polarised world of East versus West, which, while grounded in Herodotus’s concern to show how ‘Greeks and barbarians came into conflict with each other’ (1.1), fail to take into account either Herodotus’s implicit rejection of the Persian model of an Asia-Europe divide in favour of an inquiry that recognises that places change over time, or the extent to which Herodotus or his historical agents relate those places to each other. Using key features of lived space—time, agency and relation—, we sketch out the beginnings of a network analysis of book 5, backed up by a close textual study of the book’s opening episode. Both methods help to unpack the idea of the Histories’ lived space that underpins and greatly complicates the historical agents’ own understanding of the world around them

Men, Buddhism and the discontents of western modernity

Late-Modernity involves a loss of personal meaningfulness leading to rising levels of depression and addiction. This paper explores the emotional life stories of a group of western men whose experiences have led them to embrace a globalized Buddhism for answers. Buddhism offers men emotional self-awareness, mindfulness, self-discipline, community, increased calmness of mind and a sense of self-worth. In that context the discourses of Buddhism provide a narrative of hope and a transformed masculinity. There is now a growing body of western scientific evidence showing that meditation and mindfulness have positive psychotherapeutic value. These issues are explored through a range of men’s stories including: David, an emotionally balanced former Buddhist monk; Frank, once a disturbed psychiatric patient; Charles, whose meditation practices were prompted by his depression; Jon and Steve, whose normal unhappiness was eased by their Buddhism

Mechanical Reproduction in an Age of High Art

This paper reopens the question of the place of high art in the period identified by Walter Benjamin as the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, Bruno Latour, and Adam Lowe are wrong to think that mechanical reproduction has transformed the concept of art, destroying the aura of art or transmitting that aura from original to copy. The concept of art cannot be redefined by the modern change in the capacity to reproduce art unless art was initially defined primarily by its uniqueness/nonreproducibility. Photographic reproduction has caused major changes in the visual arts and in the way we consume art, but reproductive techniques have a long, continuous history that includes the production and reproduction of exact, artistic copies

Mapping an ancient historian in a digital age: the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA)

HESTIA (the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive) employs the latest digital technology to develop an innovative methodology to the study of spatial data in Herodotus' Histories. Using a digital text of Herodotus, freely available from the Perseus on-line library, to capture all the place-names mentioned in the narrative, we construct a database to house that information and represent it in a series of mapping applications, such as GIS, GoogleEarth and GoogleMap Timeline. As a collaboration of academics from the disciplines of Classics, Geography, and Archaeological Computing, HESTIA has the twin aim of investigating the ways geography is represented in the Histories and of bringing Herodotus' world into people's homes

Lockdown is nothing like being in jail. But it should change the way we think about imprisonment.

For many, COVID-19 related lockdowns have evoked – largely inaccurate – comparisons with incarceration in prison. Chris Barker writes that while the analogy is limited, such thinking should encourage us to examine our own attitudes to punishment in America and what custodial sentences seek to achieve

Extracting, investigating and representing geographical concepts in Herodotus: the case of the Black Sea

In a short break from his preparations for the invasion of Scythia, Darius stops off where the Bosporus was bridged and sails to the Dark Rocks, apparently retracing the steps of the Argonauts.1 ‘There’, Herodotus reports, ‘he sat on the headland and viewed the Pontus, a wonderful sight’ (έζόμενος δέ έπί ρίω έθηεĩτο τόν Πόντον έόντα άξιοθέητον 4. 85. 1).2 In this paper, we aim to bring that wonderful sight to life using the latest digital technology, and to set out some of the ways in which the world that Herodotus describes can now be represented. At the same time, however, we will be concerned to show the potential of digital technologies for opening up new lines of enquiry, in particular the investigation of the ‘deep’ topological structures that underpin the Histories. After all, the Persian king is not the only figure to take an interest in the Pontus as a geographical concept: the historian too shows an interest in the Black Sea by extensively mapping the region and its place in the world, both before and after this episode (4. 37-45; 4. 99-101). The way that Herodotus articulates this space himself, which frames, and to a certain extent pre-empts, Darius’ invasion of Scythia, will be the concern of this paper