Murder in Manassas: Mental Illness and Psychological Trauma After the Civil War

Following the American Civil War, the small railroad junction of Manassas, Virginia grew into one of the most prominent towns in the region with the help of town founder William S. Fewell and his family. In 1872, the youngest daughter of the prominent Fewell family was seduced and abducted by Prince Williams County’s Commonwealth Attorney and most prominent orator, James F. Clark without warning. Having just come home from three years of military service in the Civil War, witnessing the death of his twin brother as well as suffering for a year in Elmira Prison as a prisoner of war, Lucien N. Fewell walked into Clark’s jail and murdered his younger sister’s abductor. Acquitted of murder on the terms of mental illness, Lucien Fewell continued to live a life of violence caused by his traumatic experiences during the Civil War. Like many soldiers who came home from the Civil War, Lucien Fewell gives historians an insight into those who came home with combat-induced mental illnesses, as he came back from his military services a changed and violent man

Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments

Copyright @ 2010 The Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies. This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below.In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyses how bodies in two intensely designed urban spaces–the shopping centre of Milton Keynes, a 1960s new town, and Bedford’s recently redeveloped historic town centre–are affected by elements of the built environment. ’Affected’ is a term borrowed from Latour (2004),and the paper works with, and elaborates, some of his and others’ work on how bodies are effectuated by other entities. Such Latourian work pays a great deal of attention to how bodies are affected by both human and non-human entities of many kinds, and we examine how certain aspects of the built environment in these two towns affect bodies in specific ways. However, we also emphasise the variability in this process, in particular that bodies seem unaware–or ambivalently aware–of many entities’ affordances.Economic and Social Research Counci

Becoming the Gothic Archive: From Digital Collection to Digital Humanities

The Gothic Archive is the flagship digital humanities project for the Marquette University library. The project was birthed from a simple digital collection, and through the partnership of faculty and librarians, was transformed into something more. The core tenets of digital collection creation were adhered to in order to create a solid foundation upon which to build the Archive. The expertise of both groups and communication were key in the evolution of the collection, and in discovering and highlighting the relationships between the objects. This case study reviews the steps Marquette took in creating the collection and taking it to the level of digital humanities project

Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisations practices and the experience economy

Computer generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasize the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that CGIs are far from ‘just’ glossy representations but are a new form of visualising the urban that captures and markets particular embodied sensations. Drawing on a two year qualitative study of architects’ practices that worked on the Msheireb project, a large scale redevelopment project in Doha (Qatar), we examine how digital visualisation technology enables the virtual engineering of sensory experiences using a wide range of graphic effects. We show how these CGIs are laboriously materialised in order to depict and present specific sensory, embodied regimes and affective experiences to appeal to clients and consumers. Such development has two key implications. Firstly, we demonstrate the importance of digital technologies in framing the ‘expressive infrastructure’ (Thrift 2012) of the experience economy. Secondly, we argue that although the Msheireb CGIs open up a field of negotiation between producers and the Qatari client, and work quite hard at being culturally specific, they ultimately draw “on a Westnocentric literary and sensory palette” (Tolia-Kelly 2006) that highlights the continuing influence of colonial sensibilities in supposedly postcolonial urban processes.This research was funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-0223)

Leak test system

System for quantitative determination of leak rates in large pressurized compartments is described. Method uses pressure reference cylinder placed in thermal contact with internal environment of compartment. Construction of equipment and details of operational procedure are reported. Illustration of equipment is included

Image recognition with an adiabatic quantum computer I. Mapping to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization

Many artificial intelligence (AI) problems naturally map to NP-hard optimization problems. This has the interesting consequence that enabling human-level capability in machines often requires systems that can handle formally intractable problems. This issue can sometimes (but possibly not always) be resolved by building special-purpose heuristic algorithms, tailored to the problem in question. Because of the continued difficulties in automating certain tasks that are natural for humans, there remains a strong motivation for AI researchers to investigate and apply new algorithms and techniques to hard AI problems. Recently a novel class of relevant algorithms that require quantum mechanical hardware have been proposed. These algorithms, referred to as quantum adiabatic algorithms, represent a new approach to designing both complete and heuristic solvers for NP-hard optimization problems. In this work we describe how to formulate image recognition, which is a canonical NP-hard AI problem, as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem. The QUBO format corresponds to the input format required for D-Wave superconducting adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) processors.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure