The Female Experience of Epidemics in the Early Modern Low Countries

Recent literature has argued that women in parts of the early modern Low Countries experienced high levels of ‘agency’ and ‘independence’ – measured through ages and rates of marriage, participation in economic activities beyond the household, and the physical occupation of collective or public spaces. Epidemic disease outbreaks, however, also help bring into focus a number of female burdens and hardships in the early modern Low Countries, possibly born out of structural inequalities and vulnerabilities obscured from view in ‘normal times’, and which is supported by recent demographic research showing heightened adult female mortality compared to male during epidemics. For women, these included expectations of care both inside and outside the familial household, different forms of persecution, and social controls via authorities from above and internal regulation within communities from below – though these were also restrictions that women of course did not always passively accept, and sometimes violently rejected

Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema

Films illustrate 2 ways that epidemics can affect societies: fear leading to a breakdown in sociability and fear stimulating preservation of tightly held social norms. The first response is often informed by concern over perceived moral failings within society, the second response by the application of arbitrary or excessive controls from outside the community

Better Understanding Disasters by Better Using History

This paper argues that the understanding of causes and effects of hazards and shocks could be furthered by making more explicit and systematic use of the historical record, that is, by using ‘the past’ as a laboratory to test hypotheses in a careful way. History lends itself towards this end because of the opportunity it offers to identify distinct and divergent social structures existing very close to one another on a regional level and the possibility this creates of making comparisons between societal responses to shocks spatially and chronologically. Furthermore, the basic richness of the historical record itself enables us to make a long-term reconstruction of the social, economic and cultural impact of hazards and shocks simply not possible in contemporary disaster studies material

Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsider her Theoretical Framework for Explaining the Emergence of Institutions for the Collective Management of Resources

Tine De Moor has developed a bold and robust scholarly framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for 'corporate collective action' in her 'Silent Revolution' article of 2008; the significance of which may serve to be the foundation of a research agenda on the commons for years to come. However, as revealed in this review piece, there are some fundamental flaws in the framework, which need to be ironed out first. There remains a problem with causality – in particular, no logical connection in the framework between the 'conditions necessary to make collective action possible' and the 'reasons to opt for collective action'. In summary, this review suggests De Moor's framework is an important step forward for those researching the commons, though it needs to be modified to become more receptive to the socio-political configurations that gave each pre-industrial society its character

Die Besonderheiten und Komplikationen der erworbenen kindlichen Querschnittlähmung

In der Abteilung für Querschnittgelähmte der Werner-Wicker Kliniken in Bad Wildungen sind im Zeitraum von 1990 bis 2000 139 querschnittgelähmte Kinder behandelt worden. 118 von ihnen litten an einer erworbenen Querschnittlähmung, die sie sich vor Vollendung des 17. Lebensjahres zuzogen. Darunter befanden sich 74 Jungen und 44 Mädchen. Die Besonderheiten und Komplikationen der kindlichen Querschnittlähmung werden in der vorliegenden Arbeit durch eine retrospektive Analyse untersucht. Die durchschnittliche follow up-Zeit betrug 4,75 Jahre. 43 Kinder wurden über einen Zeitraum von mehr als fünf Jahren und 15 Kinder über einen Zeitraum von mehr als zehn Jahren beobachtet. Wir untersuchten hierzu unter anderem die Altersverteilung, Lähmungs- und Unfallursachen, Verteilung der Lähmungshöhen, Begleittraumen und die Akut- und Langzeitkomplikationen. Dabei wurden Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen der Lähmung des Erwachsenen und der des Kindes aufgezeigt. Es zeigte sich besonders deutlich, dass die Querschnittlähmung auch für die moderne Medizin ein schwerwiegendes Problem darstellt

On the orbital and physical parameters of the HDE 226868/Cygnus X-1 binary system

In this paper we explore the consequences of the recent determination of the mass m=(8.7 +/- 0.8)M_Sun of Cygnus X-1, obtained from the Quasi-Periodic Oscillation (QPO)-photon index correlation scaling, on the orbital and physical properties of the binary system HDE 226868/Cygnus X-1. By using such a result and the latest spectroscopic optical data of the HDE 226868 supergiant star we get M=(24 +/- 5)M_Sun for its mass. It turns out that deviations from the third Kepler law significant at more than 1-sigma level would occur if the inclination i of the system's orbital plane to the plane of the sky falls outside the range 41-56 deg: such deviations cannot be due to the first post-Newtonian (1PN) correction to the orbital period because of its smallness; interpreted in the framework of the Newtonian theory of gravitation as due to the stellar quadrupole mass moment Q, they are unphysical because Q would take unreasonably large values. By conservatively assuming that the third Kepler law is an adequate model for the orbital period we obtain i=(48 +/- 7) deg which yields for the relative semimajor axis a=(42 +/- 9)R_Sun. Our estimate for the Roche's lobe of HDE 226868 is r_M = (21 +/- 6)R_Sun.Comment: Latex2e, 7 pages, 1 table, 4 figures. To appear in ApSS (Astrophysics and Space Science

History and the Social Sciences

Since the turn of the Millennium, major changes in economic history practice such as the dominance of econometrics and the championing of “big data,” as well as changes in how research is funded, have created new pressures for medieval economic historians to confront. In this article, it is suggested that one way of strengthening the field further is to more explicitly link up with hypotheses posed in other social sciences. The historical record is one “laboratory” in which hypotheses developed by sociologists, economists, and even natural scientists can be explicitly tested, especially using dual forms of geographical and chronological comparison. As one example to demonstrate this, a case is made for the stimulating effect of “disaster studies.” Historians have failed to interact with ideas from disaster studies, not only because of the general drift away from the social sciences by the historical discipline, but also because of a twin conception that medieval disaster study bears no relation to the modern

Structural characterization of SiO2-Na2O-CaO-B2O3-MoO3 glasses

5 pagesNuclear spent fuel reprocessing generates high level radioactive waste with high Mo concentration that are currently immobilized in borosilicate glass matrices containing both alkali and alkaline-earth elements [1]. Because of its high field strength, Mo6+ ion has a limited solubility in silicate and borosilicate glasses and crystallization of alkali or alkaline-earth molybdates can be observed during melt cooling or heat treatment of glasses [2-4]. Glass composition changes can significantly modify the nature and the relative proportions of molybdate crystals that may form during natural cooling of the melt. For instance, in a previous work we showed that CaMoO4 crystallization tendency increased at the expenses of Na2MoO4 when B2O3 concentration increased in a SiO2-Na2O-CaO-MoO3 glass composition [4]. In this study, we present structural results on two series (Mx, By) of quenched glass samples belonging to this system using 29Si, 11B, 23Na MAS NMR and Raman spectroscopies. The effect of MoO3 on the glassy network structure is studied and its structural role is discussed (Mx series). The evolution of the distribution of Na+ ions within the borosilicate network is followed when B2O3 concentration increased (By series) and is discussed according to the evolution of the crystallization tendency of the melt. For all glasses, ESR was used to investigate the nature and the concentration of paramagnetic species

Analysis of Generalized Grover's Quantum Search Algorithms Using Recursion Equations

The recursion equation analysis of Grover's quantum search algorithm presented by Biham et al. [PRA 60, 2742 (1999)] is generalized. It is applied to the large class of Grover's type algorithms in which the Hadamard transform is replaced by any other unitary transformation and the phase inversion is replaced by a rotation by an arbitrary angle. The time evolution of the amplitudes of the marked and unmarked states, for any initial complex amplitude distribution is expressed using first order linear difference equations. These equations are solved exactly. The solution provides the number of iterations T after which the probability of finding a marked state upon measurement is the highest, as well as the value of this probability, P_max. Both T and P_max are found to depend on the averages and variances of the initial amplitude distributions of the marked and unmarked states, but not on higher moments.Comment: 8 pages, no figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.

The Female Mortality Advantage in the Seventeenth‐Century Rural Low Countries

Data from famines from the nineteenth century onward suggest that women hold a mortality advantage during times of acute malnutrition, while modern laboratory research suggests that women are more resilient to most pathogens causing epidemic diseases. There is, however, a paucity of sex‐disaggregated mortality data for the period prior to the Industrial Revolution to test this view across a broader span of history. We offer a newly compiled database of adult burial information for 293 rural localities and small towns in the seventeenth‐century Low Countries, explicitly comparing mortality crises against ‘normal’ years. In contrast to expected results, we find no clear female mortality advantage during mortality spikes and, more to the point, women tended to die more frequently than men when only taking into account those years with very severe raised mortality. Gender‐related differences in levels of protection, but also exposure to vectors and points of contagion, meant that some of these female advantages were ‘lost’ during food crises or epidemic disease outbreaks. Responses to mortality crises such as epidemics may shine new light on gender‐based inequalities perhaps hidden from view in ‘normal times’ – with relevance for recent work asserting ‘female agency’ in the early modern Low Countries context