'A woman like any other' : female sodomy, hermaphroditism and witchcraft in seventeenth-century Bruges

This article discusses the official and popular responses to a particular sodomy trial held at Bruges in 1618 during which two women, Mayken and Magdaleene, were accused of several sexual and moral transgressions. The interrogation records of the accused female sodomites illustrate the remarkable self-consciousness of early modern women with same-sex desires. Their attitudes collided, however, with popular mentalities towards female sodomy, which local testimonies explained away as a physical abnormality or an act of diabolical witchcraft. This article offers an in-depth analysis of these discourses in order to gain a fuller understanding of the perception of female sodomy in early modern urban society

Towards the Design of a Business Architecture Simulation Technique

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Identifying influencers in a social network : the value of real referral data

Individuals influence each other through social interactions and marketers aim to leverage this interpersonal influence to attract new customers. It still remains a challenge to identify those customers in a social network that have the most influence on their social connections. A common approach to the influence maximization problem is to simulate influence cascades through the network based on the existence of links in the network using diffusion models. Our study contributes to the literature by evaluating these principles using real-life referral behaviour data. A new ranking metric, called Referral Rank, is introduced that builds on the game theoretic concept of the Shapley value for assigning each individual in the network a value that reflects the likelihood of referring new customers. We also explore whether these methods can be further improved by looking beyond the one-hop neighbourhood of the influencers. Experiments on a large telecommunication data set and referral data set demonstrate that using traditional simulation based methods to identify influencers in a social network can lead to suboptimal decisions as the results overestimate actual referral cascades. We also find that looking at the influence of the two-hop neighbours of the customers improves the influence spread and product adoption. Our findings suggest that companies can take two actions to improve their decision support system for identifying influential customers: (1) improve the data by incorporating data that reflects the actual referral behaviour of the customers or (2) extend the method by looking at the influence of the connections in the two-hop neighbourhood of the customers

Detailed comparison of injection-seeded and self-seeded performance of a 1060nm gain-switched Fabry-Perot laser diode

We investigate and compare the performance of a gain-switched picosecond Fabry-Perot laser diode operated at 1.06 µm under both injection- and self-seeded conditions. Our experiments show that comparable performance can be obtained for both modes of operation, with the self-seeding arrangement offering overall benefits in terms of reduced system complexity and cost, providing the associated quantization of available pulse repetition rate can be tolerated

'If I have only two children and they die. who will take care of me?' : a qualitative study exploring knowledge, attitudes and practices about family planning among Mozambican female and male adults

Background: By focusing upon family planning counselling services, the Mozambican government has significantly enhanced the general health of female and male clients. However, little is known about the experiences of family planning by female and male adults. This article focuses on knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding contraceptive methods and fertility intentions. Methods: An in-depth qualitative study of female and male clients was conducted in two settings in Maputo province - Ndlavela and Boane. A total of sixteen in-depth interviews, four informal conversations, and observations were equally divided between both study sites. The analysis followed a constructionist approach. Three steps were considered in the analysis: examining commonalities, differences and relationships. Results: Although there was a high level of family planning knowledge, there were discrepancies in clients' everyday practices. Male and female clients are confronted with a variety of expectations concerning fertility intentions and family size, and are under pressure in numerous ways. Social pressures include traditional expectations and meanings connected to having children, as well as religious factors. Short interaction time between clients and health workers is a problem. Additionally, imposed contraceptive methods, and typically brief conversations about birth control between couples only adds to the burden. Because family planning is largely viewed as a woman's concern, most clients have never attended counselling sessions with their partners. Attitudes towards responsibility for contraceptive use and risk-taking are strongly gendered. Conclusions: Female and male clients have differing expectations about contraceptive use and fertility intentions. They participate differently in family planning programs leading to their inconsistent and ambivalent practices as well as vague perceptions of risk-taking. Therefore, policymakers must address the reasons behind ambivalence and inconsistency regarding contraceptives and family planning

High quality 5ps pulse generation at 10 Gbit/s using a fibre Bragg grating compensated gain-switched laser diode

A fibre Bragg grating is designed to spectrally filter and perfectly compensate the chirped pulses from a gain-switched laser diode. This design is based on the exact characterisation of the intensity and phase profiles using an electro-optic pulse characterisation technique. This results in a compact pulse source that should produce high quality 5 ps duration pulses with a 50 dB pedestal suppression

Statistical study on the link between real energy use, official energy performance and inhabitants of low energy houses

Energy performance regulations are becoming increasingly strict and governments supply simplified calculation tools to assess whether new buildings fulfil the requirements. However, one can wonder what the accuracy of those tools is for assessing the next generation of houses, that will have to fulfil the upcoming energy requirements. In order to investigate the discrepancy between predicted and real energy use in low energy houses, 537 dwellings were analysed. Data on building characteristics and theoretical energy use from the Flemish EPBD-database was complemented with data from the energy utilities and a survey of the inhabiting households, providing information about the households, their user behaviour and real energy use. While an undeniable correlation was found between theoretical and real energy use, the EPBD-method overestimated the heating energy use for most of the cases. Two building related parameters and two user related parameters proved to have a significant impact on that gap: the use of default values for the air tightness of the envelop and for the efficiency of the gas boiler, the heating profiles of the master bedrooms and the amount of baths and showers taken by the inhabitants. However, two comments must be made. First, the dataset consists of early adopters who could afford such energy performance years before it would be imposed and are therefore not representative of the average household. In addition, the analysis showed significant correlations between household characteristics on the one hand and building characteristics and performance on the other. These last two points question the possibility to extrapolate findings from samples of existing forerunners towards prognoses on future, entire building stock level