Know all men by these presents: bonds, localism and politics in early Republican Mississippi

This article examines local politics in Mississippi during the early to mid-nineteenth century, by examining the bonds that officeholders were required to post to hold their positions in county government. The article argues that while states like Mississippi remain at the forefront of the history of American mass democracy, the existence of this election ritual paints a complicated picture of political practice. By requiring officeholders to post hundreds and even thousands of dollars to hold office, and by requiring that political friends vouch for them with their money and their reputations, bonds dampened democratic elections at every turn. In so doing, bonds suggest just some of the ways in which Americans practiced a much more complex politics than current paradigms allow

The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi

The reasons are not hard to understand. The centrifugal force in Civil War historiography remains the question of why the United States succeeded while the Confederacy collapsed. What Jarret Ruminski argues in this rich, complicated book, is that we ought to view the question of loyalty and disloyalty in the Confederacy not as a binary choice, but as an overlapping set of forces that pulled at individuals in several different directions and at different times. The contribution that Ruminski’s book makes is to emphasize loyalty’s complexity. By uncoupling it from the question of why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Ruminski points to the messy, inconclusive, fragmentary experience of common people, where little was certain, and destruction was everywher

Analysis of binarization techniques and Tsetlin machine architectures targeting image classification

Master's thesis in Information- and communication technology (IKT590)The Tsetlin Machine is a constantly evolving and developing machine learning technique with ever-increasing success. However, for every success, the Tsetlin Machine achieves, a new set of challenges are put ahead. To sufficiently bring the Tsetlin Machine to a broadly used standard, these challenges must be completed. This thesis focuses on the challenge of doing color image classification and will provide an introductory description of how this is possible through the usage of an older technique, namely binarization. A comparison with the various Tsetlin Machine adaptations made public in recent times is also present after the achieved color image classification. The results of both the initial color image classification experiment and the comparison between the varying adaptations show that the Tsetlin Machine, with a little extra work, can achieve high accuracy color image classification without image augmentation or pre-training

The academic literature on intermodal freight transport

AbstractIt is widely accepted that non-road freight transport is less energy intensive than freight transport by road. The use of other transport modes than truck for long haul freight transport can therefore contribute to more energy efficient transportation systems. As a result, the successful promotion of intermodal transport, using rail or sea on the long haul part, has been identified as the most critical action to achieve a sustainable transport sector. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we examine the historical development of academic research on intermodal freight transport. Second, we identify the seminal works on the topic. In our analysis we identify and classify the academic literature on intermodal freight transport. This approach has also previously been used to aggregate knowledge about particular fields of research and it aims to be as unbiased as possible by being auditable and repeatable. A timeline on the evolution of the academic literature on intermodal freight transport is presented and the development in publication frequency and topics are commented on in relation to keywords, journals, author affiliations and countries. Publishing frequencies are measured, and reported, both in terms of absolute and relative values. Finally, what is likely the most important and influential papers on intermodal freight transport are identified, using citation frequency

Factors facilitating intermodal transport of perishable goods – Transport purchasers viewpoint

The aim of this article is to identify factors that facilitate increased use of intermodal transport for perishable products based on a survey of firms exporting fresh fish from Norway to Continental Europe. The experiences in the Norwegian aquaculture industry indicate that intermodal transport solutions must be expanded and that the long haul by rail must run all the way to a central hub in Europe. This can only be achieved with a balanced flow of goods and if processors coordinate transport to deliver sufficiently large volumes to fill trains at an acceptable frequency