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Al-Maqrهizهi's al-ùHabar 'an al-baésar. Volume V, sections 1-2, The Arab thieves
\"In The Arab Thieves, Peter Webb critically explores the classic tales of pre-Islamic Arabian outlaws in Arabic literature. A group of Arabian camel-rustlers became celebrated figures in Muslim memories of pre-Islam, and much poetry ascribed to them and stories about their escapades grew into an outlaw tradition cited across Arabic literature. The ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi arranged biographies of ten outlaws into a chapter on 'Arab Thieves' in his wide-ranging history of the world before Muhammad. This volume presents the first critical edition of al-Maqrizi's text with a fully annotated English translation, alongside a detailed study that interrogates the outlaw lore to uncover the ways in which Arabic writers constructed outlaw identities and how al-Maqrizi used the tales to communicate his vision of pre-Islam. Via an exhaustive survey of early Arabic sources about the outlaws and comparative readings with outlaw traditions in other world literatures, The Arab Thieves reveals how Arabic literature crafted lurid narratives about criminality and employed them to tell ancient Arab history\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Imagining the Arabs
Investigating the core questions about Arab identity and history, this book tackles the time-honoured stereotypes that depict Arabs as ancient Arabian Bedouin, and reveals the stories to be a myth: tales told by Muslims to recreate the past to explain the meaning of Islam and its origins.
eBook
The Visual Vaccine Debate on Twitter: A Social Network Analysis
Pro- and anti-vaccination users use social media outlets, such as Twitter, to join conversations about vaccines, disseminate information or misinformation about immunization, and advocate in favour or against vaccinations. These users not only share textual content, but also images to emphasise their messages and influence their audiences. Though previous studies investigated the content of vaccine images, there is little research on how these visuals are distributed in digital environments. Therefore, this study explored how images related to vaccination are shared on Twitter to gain insight into the communities and networks formed around their dissemination. Moreover, this research also investigated who influences the distribution of vaccine images, and could be potential gatekeepers of vaccination information. We conducted a social network analysis on samples of tweets with images collected in June, September and October 2016. In each dataset, pro- and anti-vaccination users formed two polarised networks that hardly interacted with each other, and disseminated images among their members differently. The anti-vaccination users frequently retweeted each other, strengthening their relationships, making the information redundant within their community, and confirming their beliefs against immunisation. The pro-vaccine users, instead, formed a fragmented network, with loose but strategic connections that facilitated networking and the distribution of new vaccine information. Moreover, while the pro-vaccine gatekeepers were non-governmental organisations or health professionals, the anti-vaccine ones were activists and/or parents. Activists and parents could potentially be considered as alternative but trustworthy sources of information enabling them to disseminate misinformation about vaccinations.
Journal Article
Return to the Ross Ice Shelf Project (RISP), Site J-9 (1977–1979): perspectives of West Antarctic Ice Sheet history from Miocene and Holocene benthic foraminifera
In 1977–1978 and 1978–1979, the Ross Ice Shelf Project (RISP) recovered sediments from beneath the largest ice shelf in Antarctica at Site J-9 (∼82° S, 168° W), ∼450 km from open marine waters at the calving front of the Ross Ice Shelf and 890 km from the South Pole, one of the southernmost sites for marine sediment recovery in Antarctica. One important finding was the discovery of an active macrofauna, including crustaceans and fish, sustained below the ice shelf far from open waters. The sediment has a thin, unconsolidated upper unit (up to 20 cm thick) and a texturally similar but compacted lower unit (>1 m thick) containing reworked early, middle, and late Miocene diatom and calcareous benthic foraminiferal assemblages. A probable post-Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) disconformity separates the upper unit containing a dominantly agglutinated foraminiferal assemblage, from the lower unit consisting mostly of reworked Miocene calcareous benthic species, including Trifarina fluens, Elphidium magellanicum, Globocassidulina subglobosa, Gyroidina sp., and Nonionella spp. The presence of the polar planktic foraminiferal species Neogloboquadrina pachyderma and the endemic Antarcticella antarctica supports the late Miocene diatom age for the matrix of the lower unit. The microfossil assemblages indicate periods of ice sheet collapse and open-water conditions south of Site J-9 during warm intervals of the early, middle, and late Miocene, including the Miocene Climatic Optimum (∼17–14.7 Ma), demonstrating the dynamic nature of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and Ross Ice Shelf during the Neogene. The foraminiferal assemblage of the upper unit is unique to the Ross Sea and suggests the influence of a sub-ice-shelf water mass proximal to the retreating post-LGM grounding zone. This unique assemblage is strongly dominated by the bathyal, cold-water agglutinated genus Cyclammina.
Journal Article
A Numerical Study of the Behavior of Micropile Foundations under Cyclic Thermal Loading
Micropiles are small-diameter foundation elements that are widely used in building refurbishment to reinforce existing foundations or provide new foundations where access for construction is difficult. Thermally-activated (TA) micropiles could be useful as an efficient means of providing cost-effective ground-coupling when shallow geothermal energy systems are considered in building rehabilitation. It is well-established that thermal activation of pile foundations results in thermo-mechanical interactions between the pile and the surrounding soil. These thermally-induced effects need to be examined to ensure that they do not adversely impact the load transfer function of the micropile. Numerical analysis is able to produce reliable predictions of thermo-mechanical behavior of TA piles, and this study applied this technique to examine the cyclic thermal behavior of micropiles, isolated and in groups. For the situations considered in this study, it is shown that during cyclic thermal activation, irrecoverable movements are unlikely to be significant in design terms, if the initial mobilization of the shaft resistance is low. Though stable, cyclic thermal movement amplitudes are large enough that they should be considered in design. The study highlights that large changes in thermal stress can develop and be locked-in to the response of long flexible piles, and that these should be verified in design. Further, as pile spacing reduces, thermal interference results in a loss of heat exchange capacity per pile, which has to be considered in the design of large groups of TA micropiles. Therefore, TA micropiles can offer an efficient and secure means of providing ground coupling in shallow geothermal energy systems.
Journal Article
Optimized in-solution enrichment of over a million ancient human SNPs
Background
In-solution hybridization enrichment of genetic markers is a method of choice in paleogenomic studies, where the DNA of interest is generally heavily fragmented and contaminated with environmental DNA, and where the retrieval of genetic data comparable between individuals is challenging. Here, we benchmark the commercial “Twist Ancient DNA” reagent from Twist Biosciences using sequencing libraries from ancient human samples of diverse demographic origin with low to high endogenous DNA content (0.1–44%). For each library, we tested one and two rounds of enrichment and assessed performance compared to deep shotgun sequencing.
Results
We find that the “Twist Ancient DNA” assay provides robust enrichment of approximately 1.2M target SNPs without introducing allelic bias that may interfere with downstream population genetics analyses. Additionally, we show that pooling up to 4 sequencing libraries and performing two rounds of enrichment is both reliable and cost-effective for libraries with less than 27% endogenous DNA content. Above 38% endogenous content, a maximum of one round of enrichment is recommended for cost-effectiveness and to preserve library complexity.
Conclusions
In conclusion, we provide researchers in the field of human paleogenomics with a comprehensive understanding of the strengths and limitations of different sequencing and enrichment strategies, and our results offer practical guidance for optimizing experimental protocols.
Journal Article
Hybridization of Heat Pump Systems With Natural Ventilation To Improve Energy Efficiency in Cooling Dominated Buildings
Building foundation piles can be used as heat exchangers in ground-source heat pump (GSHP) systems to provide highly efficient renewable heating and cooling (H&C). Unbalanced H&C loads lead to heat build-up in the ground, decreasing the system's overall performance. In this study, the introduction of natural ventilation (NV) has been examined to decrease cooling load imbalance in cooling-dominated buildings to improve system efficiency. Building energy simulations estimated the H&C loads for an office building in three Portuguese cities: Lisbon, Porto and Faro, yielding heating loads of 0.2–3.6 MWh/year and cooling loads of 260–450 MWh/year. Four renewable H&C technology scenarios were used to assess energy performance: (1) an air-source heat pump (ASHP) system; (2) a GSHP system utilizing energy piles; (3) hybrid ASHP-NV and (4) hybrid GSHP-NV. Over 50 years of operation, in Scenario (1) COP values of 2.45–2.55 (heating) and 3.62–4.15 (cooling) were obtained. In (2), COP values increased to 4.15–4.34 (heating) but fell to 3.36–3.79 (cooling), which increased annual final energy needs by 7–8%. Unbalanced cooling loads increased the ground temperature by 21–24 °C, which is unlikely to be acceptable. Compared to (1), introducing NV reduced cooling loads by 65–90% in Scenarios (3) and (4), with the final energy needs decreasing by 59–80% and 62–88%, respectively. A further benefit of the GSHP-NV hybrid is that the ground temperature increase was limited to 8‑12 °C. For cooling, the COP in (3) decreased compared to (1) (3.14–3.69), while in (4), COP improved to 3.45–6.10. This study concludes that hybrid GSHP-NV systems should be considered in some cooling-dominated scenarios.
Journal Article