Merchants on the Margins: Fifteenth-Century Bruges and the Informal Market

During the late medieval period, the Flemish city of Bruges acted as the prime hub of international trade in Northwestern Europe, with the town of Sluys as its outport. Trade along the Zwin, the waterway connecting the city to the sea, was subject to a series of tolls and a set of stringent and comprehensive staple restrictions, stipulating that all goods imported had to be sold on the Bruges market. The concentration of commercial activities which these rules resulted in, allowed merchants with the necessary capital to trade more cheaply than elsewhere. For those with more modest means and ambitions, the trip along tollbooths to the heavily regulated and institutionalized staple market only jeopardized the profitability of their endeavours. During the whole fifteenth century, local traders, international shipping and commercial staff and professional smugglers have cut transaction costs by evading the staple restrictions and commercial taxation in Sluys. This article discusses the size of this informal market on the margins of Bruges' jurisdiction, analyzes the backgrounds and motivations of its visitors and reconstructs the strategies they used to escape punishment

Experimental study on the use of positive pressure ventilation for fire service interventions in buildings with staircases

During fire service interventions, positive pressure ventilation (PPV) systems with mobile fans are often used to try and make (or keep) a staircase smoke free and to remove smoke from the fire rooms. The positioning (distance from the door opening) and inclination angle of the fan determine the effect of the PPV fans in the staircase. In the present paper results are discussed of an experimental study, performed at full-scale. Based on different sets of cold experiments, the impact is quantified of: the distance between the fan and the door; the inclination angle of a single fan; and the use of multiple fans. The closer the single fan is put to the door opening, the more effective the PPV becomes. Obviously, there is a trade-off with effectiveness of the fire service intervention, since the fan must not block the door opening. With respect to inclination, it is best to apply an inclination angle of 75A degrees (i.e., an upward tilting of the fan axis by 15A degrees, which is the maximum value tested) for ventilation at ground level with the fan tested. This ensures safety in the case of fire at ground level due to full coverage of the entry door opening, while only a relatively limited loss in PPV effectiveness is observed compared to a horizontal fan (in some cases, the PPV effectiveness is even higher with inclined fan). When the fire room is at a higher floor, an inclination angle of 90A degrees (i.e. horizontal fan axis) can generate a higher average flow velocity, depending on the staircase configuration inside the building. If two fans are used, V-shape positioning is shown to be more effective than a set-up in series or in parallel. A V-shape with inner angle of 60A degrees between the fan axes is more effective than an angle of 90A degrees. If three fans are available, still higher average flow velocities are measured. Positioning two fans outside in V-shape and one fan inside at the bottom of the staircase is more effective than putting the three fans outside, On the other hand, the latter set-up may be required for firefighting tactics

Energy efficiency analysis of next-generation passive optical network (NG-PON) technologies in a major city network

Ever-increasing bandwidth demands associated with mobile backhaul, content-rich services and the convergence of residential and business access will drive the need for next-generation passive optical networks (NG-PONs) in the long term. At the same time, there is a growing interest in reducing the energy consumption and the associated cost of the access network. In this paper, we consider a deployment scenario in a major city to assess the energy efficiency of various PON solutions from a telecom operator's perspective. We compare five next-generation technologies to a baseline GPON deployment offering similar bandwidths and Quality of Service (QoS) for best-effort high speed connectivity services. We follow two approaches:first, we consider a fixed split ratio (1:64) in an existing Optical Distribution Network (ODN); next, we consider an upgraded ODN with an optimized split ratio for the specific bandwidth and QoS values. For medium bandwidth demands, our results show that legacy PONs can be upgraded to 10G PON without any ODN modification. For future applications that may require access rates up to 1 Gb/s, NG-PON2 technologies with higher split ratios and increased reach become more interesting systems, offering the potential for both increased energy efficiency and node consolidation

Friendly Foreigners: International Warfare, Resident Aliens and the Early History of Denization in England, c.1250–c.1400

The search for the origins of the process of denization in England has traditionally focused on the needs of merchants and the context of international trade, and no credible explanation has been given for why denization emerged as a recognisable Chancery form in the 1380s and 1390s. A new consideration of wartime treatment of aliens demonstrates the slow emergence, between c.1250 and c.1400, of an official policy towards lay foreigners that sought to minimise the disruptions arising in moments of national emergency and to accord rights of denizen equivalence to foreigners whose presence was profitable to the realm. In certain exceptional conditions during the 1270s and 1340s, alien residents with good connections at court could secure more developed statements of their rights as denizens. However, it was a series of events set off by the announcement of an intention to expel all French residents in 1377–78 that generated letters of protection containing specific reference to a change of allegiance, and thus established the principle that the recipient should renounce his former commitment and became a subject of the English Crown. Applied to other nationalities and outside the immediate context of war, these developments would give rise to the form known as letters of denization during the decades that followed