What stories should historians be telling at the dawn of the Anthropocene?

This chapter discusses the ways in which history can contribute to coping with the current planetary crisis. It argues that historians should engage more in interdisciplinary exchange across the humanities-natural sciences divide. Thus they will be able to create historical narratives fitting for the Anthropocene—both in terms of explaining it and shaping our responses to it, in particular to the acute planetary crisis that marks its advent. At the same time, history should not give up its drive to critically dissect and analyse socio-political, economic, cultural and ecological change, contributing to developing balanced and resilient public policy

The School of Nisibis: an ancient religious community?

For the first modern scholars, the School of Nisibis constituted a primitive form of what they believe to be an early university. For this reason the School became known as a “theological academy” and many people still think that the community at Nisibis should be understood as a school similar to our modern institutions of advanced education, The trouble with this view is its anachronism. It can be very deceptive to reduce past cultural phaenomena to what we know from our own times. The aim of this paper is to place the School of Nisibis in the context of similar ancient institutions and thus properly understand its idea of education and the spiritual formation it offered to its disciples.For the first modern scholars, the School of Nisibis constituted a primitive form of what they believe to be an early university. For this reason the School became known as a “theological academy” and many people still think that the community at Nisibis should be understood as a school similar to our modern institutions of advanced education, The trouble with this view is its anachronism. It can be very deceptive to reduce past cultural phaenomena to what we know from our own times. The aim of this paper is to place the School of Nisibis in the context of similar ancient institutions and thus properly understand its idea of education and the spiritual formation it offered to its disciples

Improved Quantum Boosting

Boosting is a general method to convert a weak learner (which generates hypotheses that are just slightly better than random) into a strong learner (which generates hypotheses that are much better than random). Recently, Arunachalam and Maity [5] gave the first quantum improvement for boosting, by combining Freund and Schapire’s AdaBoost algorithm with a quantum algorithm for approximate counting. Their booster is faster than classical boosting as a function of the VC-dimension of the weak learner’s hypothesis class, but worse as a function of the quality of the weak learner. In this paper we give a substantially faster and simpler quantum boosting algorithm, based on Servedio’s SmoothBoost algorithm [22]

Wahania warunków klimatycznych jako katalizator zmiany społecznej w społeczeństwach historycznych

Impacts of climatic changes on the course of history do not occur along simple trajectories. Past climatic fluctuations occurred at different temporal and spatial scales, while at the same time the societies that experienced them were undergoing parallel ecological, economic, political and cultural pressures. For this reason, it is not legitimate to treat climate as the only isolated agent of societal change, but it should rather be regarded as one of several historical factors in a complex natural-social network. In this way, climatic changes are rightly seen as catalysts of societal change or factors that modify their scale, scope, or direction, rather than the main causative agent, coming from the external world. The article discusses this theoretical challenge using a number of examples from the ancient and medieval Mediterranean.Wahania warunków klimatycznych w przeszłości, charakteryzujące się różną skalą przestrzenną i czasową, oddziaływały na społeczeństwa poddane różnorodnym presjom ekologicznym, gospodarczym, politycznym i kulturowym. Z tego względu nie należy traktować klimatu jako izolowanego czynnika bezpośrednio wywołującego określone skutki dziejowe, lecz raczej jako jednego z aktorów w złożonej sieci społeczno-przyrodniczej. Przyjmując ten punkt widzenia, należy stwierdzić, że rola wahań warunków klimatycznych w dziejach sprowadza się raczej do katalizowania zmian społecznych bądź ich modyfikowania, nie jest zaś główną siłą sprawczą. Niniejszy artykuł ilustruje ten problem wybranymi przykładami z historii świata śródziemnomorskiego w starożytności i średniowieczu

Introduction: what sort of past does our future need?

In this short introduction we set out the aims of the volume, which represents the fruits of two seminars held in the autumn of 2020. The chapters respond to one big thematic issue: how to research and understand historical societal resilience; and one big question: what sort of past does the future need? They attempt to address these through three linked themes: can history be made more relevant to modern policy in respect of environmental and climate challenges? To what extent do our various sources indicate awareness and management of risk and/or the implementation of mitigating strategies in the past? And how can we identify ‘resilience’ in the social praxis of historical agents

On the Use of Palynological Data in Economic History: New Methods and an Application to Agricultural Output in Central Europe, 0–2000 AD

In this paper we introduce a new source of data to economic history: palynological data, i.e. information about pollen grains which are preserved in bottom sediments of various water basins. We discuss how this data is collected and how it should be interpreted; develop new methods for aggregating this information into regional trends in agricultural output; construct an extensive data set with a large number of pollen sites from Central Europe; and use our methods to study the economic history of Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Bohemia, Brandenburg, and Lower Saxony since the first century AD

On the Use of Palynological Data in Economic History: New Methods and an Application to Agricultural Output in Central Europe, 0–2000 AD

In this paper we introduce a new source of data to economic history: palynological data, i.e. information about pollen grains which are preserved in bottom sediments of various water basins. We discuss how this data is collected and how it should be interpreted; develop new methods for aggregating this information into regional trends in agricultural output; construct an extensive data set with a large number of pollen sites from Central Europe; and use our methods to study the economic history of Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Bohemia, Brandenburg, and Lower Saxony since the first century AD