East India Company and Bank of England Shareholders during the South Sea Bubble: Partitions, Components and Connectivity in a Dynamic Trading Network

A new dataset, in the form of a network graph, is used to study inventory and trading behaviour amongst owners of East India Company (EIC) and Bank of England (BoE)stock around the South Sea Bubble. There was a decline in market intermediation in which the goldsmith bankers were dominant in 1720, but foreigners and Jews to some extent restored intermediation services after the Bubble. Company directors temporarily helped to sustain intermediation in 1720 itself. Whereas before and during the Bubble intermediation was largely in the form of brokerage, after the Bubble dealership noticeably began to displace brokerage.South Sea Company; Financial Revolution; social networks, financial intermediation, inventories.

From John Street to Union

I have been making paintings constructed loosely from my experience of walking about one mile each morning from my apartment in Fox Point to my studio in downtown Providence, and of walking back each night. My goal is to rediscover the feeling of these outdoor places—their lights, atmospheres, colors, and topographies—through the process of painting inside the studio. As such, the visual representations of these paintings are not straight-forward and objective, but oblique and affective. I hope that these works draw one’s attention to the idiosyncrasies of natural life and to the particularities of weather. I want the paintings to engage the mysteries of glimpsing, remembering, and reprocessing—of recording a series of moments that, once experienced, begin immediately and inexorably to slip from one’s grasp. The paintings often incorporate people, who are also ideated. I think of these figures and faces, in part, as metaphors for painting itself. When we look at paintings, we “face” them. In some way they mirror our own faces and look back at us. My figures often look at one another and hail one another. Sometimes they seem to think or speak silently, doing so not through words, but through a kind of abstract paint-language of colored marks. In staging these exchanges and thought processes along the picture’s surface, I think I am asking: is real contact possible, whether through language or through paint

Modeling the Impact of Baryons on Subhalo Populations with Machine Learning

We identify subhalos in dark matter-only (DMO) zoom-in simulations that are likely to be disrupted due to baryonic effects by using a random forest classifier trained on two hydrodynamic simulations of Milky Way (MW)-mass host halos from the Latte suite of the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. We train our classifier using five properties of each disrupted and surviving subhalo: pericentric distance and scale factor at first pericentric passage after accretion, and scale factor, virial mass, and maximum circular velocity at accretion. Our five-property classifier identifies disrupted subhalos in the FIRE simulations with an $85\%$ out-of-bag classification score. We predict surviving subhalo populations in DMO simulations of the FIRE host halos, finding excellent agreement with the hydrodynamic results; in particular, our classifier outperforms DMO zoom-in simulations that include the gravitational potential of the central galactic disk in each hydrodynamic simulation, indicating that it captures both the dynamical effects of a central disk and additional baryonic physics. We also predict surviving subhalo populations for a suite of DMO zoom-in simulations of MW-mass host halos, finding that baryons impact each system consistently and that the predicted amount of subhalo disruption is larger than the host-to-host scatter among the subhalo populations. Although the small size and specific baryonic physics prescription of our training set limits the generality of our results, our work suggests that machine-learning classification algorithms trained on hydrodynamic zoom-in simulations can efficiently predict realistic subhalo populations.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures. Updated to published version. Code available at https://github.com/ollienad/subhalo_randomfores

Evaluation of the thermal performance of an innovative prefabricated natural plant fibre building system

Energy efficient new and retrofit building construction relies heavily on the use of thermal insulation. A focus on the environmental performance of current construction materials with regards to both embodied energy and energy in-use has resulted in a growing interest in the use of natural fibre insulation materials. The results of heat flow meter thermal conductivity tests on a range of straw samples of different densities are presented. The innovative use of straw in the development of a prefabricated straw-bale panel and the results of guarded hot-box testing are presented. In common with most building materials, there is a degree of uncertainty in the thermal conductivity due to the influences of temperature, moisture content and density; however, from evaluation of a range of the literature and experimental data, a value of 0.064 W/m·K is proposed as a representative design value for straw bales at the densities used in building construction. Computer simulation and experimental testing suggest that the overall heat transfer coefficient ( U-value) for the complete prefabricated panel is approximately 0.178 W/m2·K. This article also briefly discusses the use of this innovative unit in a highly instrumented test building constructed at the University of Bath. Practical application: Knowledge of the thermal properties of building materials is necessary for evaluation of energy performance of the building envelope and appraisal of retrofit fabric improvements. The presentation of robust data for the thermal properties of straw will be of interest to designers developing projects employing this natural fibre insulation material. </jats:p