No description available.

The open fields of England describes the system of agriculture that operated in medieval England before the establishment of present-day hedged farms surrounded by hedges or walls. The volume encompasses a wide range of primary data not previously assembled, to which are added the results of new research based upon a fifty-year study of open-field remains and their related documents. The whole of England is examined, describing eight different kinds of field-systems that have been identified and relating them to their associated land-use and settlement. Details of field structure are explained such as the demesne, the lord’s land, and the tenants’ holdings, as well as tenurial arrangements and farming methods. Previous explanations of open-field origins and possible antecedents to medieval fields are discussed. Various types of archaeological and historical evidence relevant to Saxon-period settlements and fields are presented, followed by the development of a new theory to explain the lay-out and planned nature of many field systems found in the central belt of England. A summary and suggestions for future research conclude the text. The numerous maps and photographs illustrate the contrasting complexities of different field systems. Of particular interest is the Gazetteer, which is organized by historic counties. Each county has a summary of its fields, including tabulated data and sources for future research, touching on the demesne, yardland size, work-service, assarts, and the physical remains of ridge and furrow. The Gazetteer acts as a national hand-list of field systems, opening the subject up to further research, and will prove essential to scholars of medieval agriculture.

Computing has evolved from isolated machines, providing calculative support of applications, toward communication networks that provide functional support to groups of people and embedded systems. Perhaps, one of the most compelling feature and benefit of computers is their overwhelming computing efficiency. Today, we conceive distributed computational systems of an ever-increasing sophistication, which we then apply in various settings – critical support functions of our society just to name one important application area. The spread and impact of computing, in terms of so-called information society technologies, has obviously gained a very high momentum over the years and today it delivers a technology that our societies have come to depend on. To this end, concerns related to our acceptance of qualities of computing, e.g., dependability, are increasingly emphasized by users as well as vendors. An indication of this increased focus on dependability is found in contemporary efforts of mitigating the effects from systemic failures in critical infrastructures, e.g., energy distribution, resource logistics, and financial transactions. As such, the dependable function of these infrastructures is governed by means of more or less autonomic computing systems that interact with cognitive human agents. However, due to intricate system dependencies as well as being situated in our physical environment, even the slightest – unanticipated – perturbation in one of these embedded systems can result in degradations or catastrophic failures of our society. We argue that this contemporary problem of computing mainly is due to our own difficulties in modeling and engineering the involved system complexities in an understandable manner. Consequently, we have to provide support for dependable computing systems by means of new methodologies of systems engineering. From a historical perspective, computing has evolved, from being supportive of quite well defined and understood tasks of algorithmic computations, into a disruptive technology that enables and forces change upon organizations as well as our society at large. In effect, a major challenge of contemporary computing is to understand, predict, and harness the involved systems’ increasing complexity in terms of constituents, dependencies, and interactions – turning them into dependable systems. In this thesis, we therefore introduce a model of open computational systems, as the means to convey these systems’ factual behavior in realistic situations, but also in order to facilitate our own understanding of how to monitor and control their complex interdependencies. Moreover, since the critical variables that govern these complex systems’ qualitative behavior can be of a very elusive nature, we also introduce a method of online engineering, whereby cognitive agents – human and software – can instrument these open computational systems according to their own subjective and temporal understanding of some complex situation at hand.

Presented at 2014 Arizona Library Association Annual Conference, Scottsdale, AZ / Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to use, customize, and share. There’s a goldmine of OER online, but locating them is like trying to herd cattle (or cats). It takes persistence and a knack for tracking down things that are scattered all over. OER range from digital textbooks, lesson plans, and games to assignments, videos, and lab notes. Learn about the benefits of OER, potential barriers, where to find high-quality OER, and how to increase customers’ awareness of them. The target audience for this presentation is anyone who works with K-12 classes, college students, instructors, and lifelong learners.

published_or_final_version / Urban Design / Master / Master of Urban Design

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.