Frost Witches: The Spark of the Bamberg Witch Craze

This article explores the Bamburg Witch Craze from the point of view of the frost that devastated the wine harvest. The author uses the incident, which destroyed the crop that was vital to the local economy, to infer how this explainable natural disaster was interpreted to mean that the community had come under threat from super natural forces. The author finds that cases of witchcraft were more lethal depending on what type of community the accused lived in (i.e. urban vs. rural) and in what time period the trial occurred

Lifting the Veil of Violence: The October Crisis, 1970.

This work explores the uses of violence during the October Crisis of 1970 in Québec, Canada. The author questions the current state of historiographical approaches to the October Crisis and posits a new approach. Violence, seen as a language, permeates the events surrounding the kidnapping and later murder of Pierre Laporte. The reaction of the Québécois public at large is examine in response to the uses of violence by the belligerent parties. The work concludes that the FLQ did not possess the requisite capacity for violence to effectively compete with the Canadian Federal Government and other insights into the legacy of the Crisis itself

Special External Effects on Fluvial System Evolution

Rivers are an excellent witness of the dynamics affecting Earth’s surface due to their sedimentary products and morphological expression, which may be considered as fluvial archives. Until now, the focus has been on evaluating the general impact of individual external factors. However, the importance of the specific environmental characteristics of these factors has become increasingly recognized, as highlighted in recent case studies. For example, the effects of regional climate, differentiated topography and vegetation, and frozen ground appear to play an essential role in the evolution of the fluvial system. Integration of such environmental conditions in the processes that were active within the complex fluvial system will open new perspectives in our progressive understanding of the evolution of landscape form, ecology, sediment fluxes, and hydrology of the system within the framework of the external drivers such as tectonics, general climate, and human activity. This is an appealing challenge that we wish to address in the present Special Issue under the aegis of the Fluvial Archives Group (FLAG)

Teachers’ professional development for ICT integration: towards a reciprocal relationship between research and practice

Teachers in the 21st century are facing new challenges as a result of the expanding possibilities of ICT integration in every aspect of the school milieu. Studies have shown the potential of teacher professional development (TPD) that is tailored to local conditions as well as global components and takes advantage of mutual support among teachers, as well as modeling of effective practices. The goal of the paper is to consider the issue of TPD with reference to the usage of ICT as a lever for educational change in a systemic manner, based on the application of local as well as international research. This paper will synthesize some key issues and challenges for TPD in the ICT-saturated 21st century, illustrated in four cases presented herein, which synthesize elements of practice and theory. Based on the literature and the four case studies, we suggest a conceptual model for identifying and evaluating TPD practices using ICT as a lever for educational change and innovation, accompanied by research aimed to develop TPD models. We include suggestions for more effectively linking research to practice and will lay out possible research directions, as a means of facilitating evidence-based decisions and policies

Design of a robotic system for battery dismantling from tablets

Due to the rapid increase in sales of mobile electronic devices, the number of batteries ending up in waste electric and electronic equipment (WEEE) is also rapidly increasing. According to the EU legislation, all batteries need to be removed from WEEE, which is currently done manually for tablets, posing potential safety risks for workers and resulting in high processing costs due to the labour intensity of the required dismantling operations. Therefore, a robotic dismantling system is developed in this research to automatically remove both the back covers and batteries from a mixed waste stream of tablets of different models and brands. At the outset of the design process, a total of 47 randomly collected tablets were analyzed to define the location of the battery and the required manual dismantling time. Thereafter, a robotic bending method was tested for removing the back cover. Once the battery is exposed, two different methods are tested: using a heat gun to loosen the glue that fixes the battery to the rest of the tablet and a robotic scraping method with a spatula to mechanically extract the battery. Whereas the required time for only the heating showed to be more than 120s, the results with the bending and scraping tool show that the proposed robotic dismantling system is capable of removing the back cover and battery for 63% of the tested tablets in less than 90s. However, to increase the economic viability and robustness of the proposed method to be able to cope with the high variety in tablet model designs, future work is required to develop algorithms to recognize product models to enable to define and retrieve product specific toolpaths for dismantling.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Variety Metric Accounting for Unbalanced Idea Space Distributions

AbstractProving the effectiveness of an idea generation method is key to its acceptance in an industrial and academic environment. This necessitates the development of a set of widely accepted metrics covering the different aspects on which idea generation methods can be characterized. This paper gives an overview of the existing metrics, and demonstrates a number of shortcomings in the variety metric, such as not accounting for the fairness of the distribution of ideas over nodes on an abstraction level. A level-based, correctly normalized variety metric, based on the Shannon entropy, is proposed which is shown to resolve the identified issues

Exact Casimir Interaction Between Semitransparent Spheres and Cylinders

A multiple scattering formulation is used to calculate the force, arising from fluctuating scalar fields, between distinct bodies described by $\delta$-function potentials, so-called semitransparent bodies. (In the limit of strong coupling, a semitransparent boundary becomes a Dirichlet one.) We obtain expressions for the Casimir energies between disjoint parallel semitransparent cylinders and between disjoint semitransparent spheres. In the limit of weak coupling, we derive power series expansions for the energy, which can be exactly summed, so that explicit, very simple, closed-form expressions are obtained in both cases. The proximity force theorem holds when the objects are almost touching, but is subject to large corrections as the bodies are moved further apart.Comment: 5 pages, 4 eps figures; expanded discussion of previous work and additional references added, minor typos correcte

Casimir energy, dispersion, and the Lifshitz formula

Despite suggestions to the contrary, we show in this paper that the usual dispersive form of the electromagnetic energy must be used to derive the Lifshitz force between parallel dielectric media. This conclusion follows from the general form of the quantum vacuum energy, which is the basis of the multiple-scattering formalism. As an illustration, we explicitly derive the Lifshitz formula for the interaction between parallel dielectric semispaces, including dispersion, starting from the expression for the total energy of the system. The issues of constancy of the energy between parallel plates and of the observability of electrostrictive forces are briefly addressed.Comment: 11 pages, no figure

Tool Design for Electronic Product Dismantling

AbstractIn industrialized countries, waste electrical and electronic equipment is mostly processed in shredder-based processes, which are characterized by a low recovery of precious metals, rare earth elements and flame retardant plastics. To increase the recycling efficiency for these materials, a dismantling tool has been developed. The development process of the dismantling tool was guided by in-depth analysis of the required disassembly time for LCD TVs and laptops. The results of practical experiments demonstrate that the use of the dismantling tool enable to reduce the dismantling time for plastic housing components and PWBs with respectively 36% and 45% for LCD TVs