In 1909, the book Reinforced Concrete in Europe by Albert Ladd Colby (1860–1924) was pub-lished with the aim of disseminating in the USA the advances in reinforced concrete made in each of the European countries at that time. Besides introducing the main systems, types of reinforcement bars and their applications, the work describes an intermediate phase of a para-digm shift in…
Women present a historic and worrying gap in science and technology-related disciplines, generally knowns as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,and Mathematics), except in the case of health professions. A holistic approach isneeded to support policymakers worldwide in bridging the gender gap in STEM, inwhich higher education institutions have a crucial role. Promoting this active impli-cat…
‘All right, so here we are in front of the elephants.’ This is the opening sentence of the first video ever uploaded to YouTube.1 What started in 2005 as an online platform for the upload of ‘homemade videos’ and the sharing of ‘ordinary people’s lives’ quickly became the nucleus of an intricate web of audiovisual interactions that reached through and beyond cyberspace. The year 2…
Currently, complexity is derived from reports provided by the controllers andpilots involved in the incidents, from which the mid-air collision risk is estimated.These incidents are extremely rare events, which make them infeasible to deriveany reliable statistics. Furthermore, not all incidents are reported, making it diffi-cult to infer how many true incidents have really occurred. Finally, t…
The termhate speechrecognises a wide range of harmful social practices anddiscourses. Let us take, for instance, Islamophobic blogs, cross burnings, racialepithets, or dehumanising pictures of Jews. If all these social activities fallunder hate speech, they must have certain elements or features in common. Itmight therefore be reasonable to think that a definition of hate speech shouldcomprise …
These observations by François-Xavier Fauvelle appear in the introduction to his history of medieval Africa, The Golden Rhinoceros. He notes that one of the challenges of writing such a history is the lack of any such continuity of memory among many of the great cities of sub-Saharan Africa in the period. An example of this is the extraordinary remains of the city known as Great Zim…