The presence of a blind adjacent to a window affects the natural convective air flow over the window and natural convective heat transfer from the window to the room. Most numerical studies of convective heat transfer between a window-blind system and a room are based on the assumption that the flow remains laminar. However, in the case of larger windows it is to be expected that transition to turbulent flow will occur in the flow over the window. The aim of the present study was to numerically determine the effect of Venetian blind on laminar-to-turbulent transition in the flow over a simple recessed window and on the convective heat transfer from the window. An approximate model of a recessed window that is covered by a venetian blind has been considered. The fluid properties have been assumed constant except for the density change with temperature that gives rise to the buoyancy forces, this being dealt with using the Boussinesq approach. Radiant and conductive heat transfer effects have been neglected. However in the present study the case where there is a constant heat generation rate in the blind slats, as the result of solar radiation absorbed by the slats of the blind, has been considered. The k-epsilon turbulence model with the full effects of the buoyancy forces being accounted for has been used in obtaining the solution. The turbulent, steady and two dimensional governing equations have been solved using the commercial finite-volume based CFD code FLUENT. Results are generated for different blind slat angles, for different distances of the pivot point of the slats from the window and for different constant heat generation rates in the slats. The results show that over a wide range of Rayleigh number, the distance of the blind to the window has a stronger effect on the convective heat transfer from the window and also on the laminar to turbulent transition in the flow over the window than the blind slat angle. Heat generation in the slats increases the Mean Nusselt number and this effect increases as the Rayleigh number decreases. / Thesis (Master, Mechanical and Materials Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-22 21:17:31.777

This thesis investigates the significant role that the Venetian humanist Vettor Fausto (1490-1546), professor of Greek at the School of Saint Mark, played during the first half of the 16th century in Venetian naval architecture. Early in the 16th century, the maritime power of Venice was seriously threatened by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman II in the East and by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the West. In order to regain its naval power in the Mediterranean, the Republic of Venice strongly encouraged Venetian shipwrights to submit new designs for war galleys. The undisputed founder and champion of this naval program was not a skilled shipwright but a young professor of Greek in the School of Saint Mark named Vettor Fausto, who in the heat of this renewal programme, proposed “marine architecture” as a new scientia. In 1529, Vettor Fausto built a quinqueremis whose design, he claimed, was based upon the quinquereme “used by the Romans during their wars” and that he had derived the shipbuilding proportions “from the most ancient Greek manuscripts.” The recovery of Classical traditions resulted in major changes in many fields. It included shipbuilding practices as well, especially after Fausto introduced in the Venetian Arsenal a new scientia, that of “marine architecture”, in opposition to the fabrilis peritia, the empirical shipbuilding practice. This work examines several Renaissance sources and archival material in order to illuminate the technical features and the design of Fausto’s quinquereme. Based on the study of the anonymous 16th-century Venetian manuscript Misure di vascelli etc. di…proto dell’Arsenale di Venetia from the State Archive of Venice, this thesis presents a general overview of Fausto’s life and his cultural background in order to better understand the humanistic foundations that led him to propose the construction of the quinquereme. Also presented in this thesis is a theoretical reconstruction of Fausto’s quinquereme and the suggestion that the shipbuilding instructions contained in the anonymous manuscript are connected to the work of Fausto in the Venetian Arsenal.

No description available.

This study focuses primarily on donor portraits of families found in Cypriot wall paintings and icons created during the Lusignan and Venetian periods. Although donor portraiture is a mode of expression that dates to antiquity, in the medieval period an increasingly prosperous upper middle class used this genre more frequently. My concern is with the addition of children to these portraits and the ways in which this affects the family portrayal on Cyprus. These portraits are intriguing because they provide a rare glimpse into the culture and people of this island as constructed within the medium of portraiture. They provide visual evidence of the donors' ideals of family in these lasting monuments to their memory. There are noticeable changes in these portraits through time that indicate the shifting foreign rulership faced by the population. Part of the Byzantine Empire until captured by Richard the Lionheart in 1191, Cyprus came under Frankish domain when it was transferred in 1192 to Guy de Lusignan, the dispossessed King of Jerusalem. For years Cyprus had been a stopping place for pilgrims and, later, crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. By the time Cyprus came under Venetian rule, it had grown as a stopping place for merchants as part of their trade route to the East. This exposure to cross cultural trade, migrations, and differing reigning powers makes Cyprus a complex study in social history. These layers of mixed social identities across ethnic, religious and political boundaries are documented in the island's donor portraits. Part of this analysis is an attempt to discern in these constructed identities what is indigenous, what is foreign and what is part of the changing times. A close examination of these images uncovers this mingling of identities and certain conventions in the way these donor portraits become expressions of the family. The strategy used to examine these donor portraits is to look at them by employing some of the characteristic functions of portraiture, in this case as outlined by Shearer West in her introduction to portraiture. After an introductory chapter that details some background on donor portraiture and the art of Cyprus, each of the following chapters uses two main images for comparison to explore the ways in which they might reveal aspects of the family. This comparative method is used in the successive chapters with the one constant image of the Zacharia family, painted during the Venetian occupation, as a basis for comparison. Chapter two takes this portrait and compares it to the portrait of Neophytos, a twelfth-century hermit monk who also used the Deësis scene as the setting for his portrait. By looking at these particular scenes as works of art, this chapter introduces ideas to consider throughout the dissertation on the ways these constructions reveal wishes of the donors, such as strategies of hierarchy, of veneration and viewer's access. Chapter three explores how the family group portrait serves as a document for the biography of the family. Chapter four deals with the important social practice of the dowry and my idea that some of the later portraits, which include daughters, may be displaying dowry wealth. Chapter five looks at family commemorative portraiture found particularly in icons, beginning the fourteenth century, where deceased family members are portrayed alongside, seemingly, living family members. Finally, in chapter six, I examine the ways in which these family portraits may indicate political changes on the island, especially as Cyprus moves from a feudal society to a commercial one in the Venetian period. In order to facilitate discoveries that might be made by organizing the material in a systematic manner, I have assembled a catalogue of Cypriot family donor portraits and a chart indicating the numbers of men, women and children included in family groups, in the appendices. It is my hope that this dissertation will create more discussion about family groups and will, hopefully, uncover other portraits that may be added to this list, making it a more complete picture of the surviving record. / Art History

No description available.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the announcement by the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Achille Occhetto, that the time had come to shed its communist name and identity inaugurated a decade of uncertainty and change for the party. As the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS), it faced the challenge of developing its post-communist identity amid the upheaval in the Italian political system that followed the Tangentopoli (Bribesville) scandal. The transition to the 'Second Republic', spurred by widespread anti-party sentiment, brought new electoral systems and forms of coalition-making, a changed array of allies and opponents, a personalisation of certain political roles, and changed relationships between the national and local dimensions of politics. In 2000, now called the Left Democrats (DS), the party was the largest component in the nationally governing coalition and even provided the prime minister. Yet the rise to the pinnacle of power had been accompanied by decreasing electoral support. In over ten years of post-communist life, the party had failed to achieve the real breakthrough hoped for by Occhetto: to unite the Italian left in a single party that dominated government or opposition, as in other Western European countries. The primary aim of this thesis is to contribute to understanding the party's fortunes through a case study of the way the turbulent years from 1989 to 2000 were experienced in the Venetian provincial federation. This decade of change has so far not been examined from a local perspective, yet local studies were particularly fruitful in the analysis of the PCI, as they allowed exploration of the ways party debates were perceived, and decisions made at national level were implemented, 'on the ground' in specific contexts. I have not chosen the Venetian federation as a microcosm of the experience in the periphery as a whole but as an interesting and relevant component of the full picture. The Venetian party enjoyed greatly increased responsibilities in government at sub-national levels in the second half of the 1990s, due to successful alliance strategies, but decreasing electoral support. I seek to explain the local party's electoral and power outcomes in terms of a combination of external and internal factors: on one hand, the opportunities and constraints presented by the changing environment; and, on the other, internal dynamics that hampered the party in responding to those challenges. In particular I stress the significance of the crisis precipitated by Occhetto's proposal to transform the party in 1989 and the constraints on the local party's legitimacy and visibility in the competitive environment that developed in the Second Republic. I attribute these constraints to the mixed electoral systems operating at sub-national levels, intra-coalition rivalry, and a striking case of an individual enjoying personal power and influence in the local political system. As a secondary theme, I analyse change in the party type that accompanied these outcomes, in light of theories on general trends in party transformations in Western Europe. I identify rapid changes in the local party's aims, functions and organisational roles and relationships, and in its relationship with the national leadership. I argue that this process of change, consistent with the transformation of a mass party into an electorally focused party, was accelerated at local level by the changing competitive environment and the sudden increase in government responsibilities. The introduction in chapter 1 sets the party's story in context and outlines the aims and argument of the thesis. Chapter 2 introduces the local case study in light of existing analyses of the party's development, the tradition of local studies of the PCI, and theories on party types and transformations. The central chapters are dedicated to the case study, which is based largely on interviews with members of the federation's leadership groups in various periods. The organisation of the material reflects my division of the federation's story into distinct phases, each reflecting a stage in the development of both the party's alliance strategy and the local political system. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the implications of the case study findings for the party as a whole and make a claim for the continuing validity of local studies of Italian political parties.

This dissertation argues that Venetian space in the sixteenth century was embedded with various boundaries that individuals challenged and that communities and Venetian secular and ecclesiastical authorities reinforced. The development of Venetian urban space played an essential role in the formation of Venetian civic identity, which in turn was predicated upon the myth of Venice. The time period examined includes the re-establishment of the Roman Inquisition, and the early period of the Inquisition in Venice, which were concomitant with a time of religious and social disruption. Documents of the Venetian government and contemporary diarists offer contextual evidence; however, trials before the Holy Office in Venice, particularly cases involving those accused of witchcraft, inform the greatest portion of this study. Drawing on such evidence, this dissertation challenges the argument that “Venetian” society was cohesive and well balanced. By repurposing common and sacred items to invoke supernatural entities and perform heterodox practices, those accused of witchcraft challenged the Venetian secular and ecclesiastical authorities as they created a competing vision regarding the definition of domestic sacred space. Examination of the neighborhood as a social space reveals boundaries, both real and imagined, and the challenges to the boundaries that those living on the margins of society displayed through the creation of their own communities. Finally, inhabitants’ use of public space and their movement throughout these spaces offers evidence of challenges to boundaries as well as the measures authorities took in re-establishing these boundaries. Ultimately, competing desires for belonging and legitimacy, as well as disagreements over physical, ideological, and social boundaries set Venetian inhabitants and authorities in opposition.

Successful integration of daylighting systems requires the ability to predict their performance for given climates. In this dissertation, a bottom-up approach is applied to evaluate the optical performance of a selection of daylighting systems. The evaluations are based on the optical properties of the included materials, and part of the dissertation focuses on developing new optical characterization methods. The work on characterization techniques uses an integrating sphere method to characterize the transmittance of light scattering samples more accurately. The method's principle is to reduce the discrepancy in light distribution between the reference and the sample scans by using an entry port beam diffuser. For samples exhibiting distinct light scattering patterns, the benefits of improved uniformity outweigh the errors introduced by the diffusing material. The method is applicable to any integrating sphere instrument, and its simplicity makes it suitable for standard measurements. In addition to normal-hemispherical properties, many daylighting applications require knowledge of the system's spatial light distribution. This dissertation presents a method combining experimental techniques and ray tracing simulations to assess the light distribution from a Venetian blind system. The method indicates that ray tracing based on simplified optical data is inadequate to predict the light distribution for slat materials exhibiting both specular and diffuse properties. Ray tracing is a promising complement to experimental methods used to characterize light guiding or light redirecting systems. Here, spectrophotometric measurements of a scaled mirror light pipe validate a ray tracing model. The model shows excellent agreement with experimental results for both direct and diffuse incident light. The spectral evaluation shows no dramatic color changes for the transmitted light. The ray tracing model is used to evaluate four daylighting systems for a selection of Swedish locations. The percentage of occupied time when the studied systems achieve full design illuminance is relatively low, but the systems provide a valuable contribution to the required illuminance. Additionally, this dissertation provides an overview of available energy efficient windows and illustrates the importance of including the solar energy transmittance when evaluating window energy performance. Overall, this dissertation presents optical characterization techniques for improved performance evaluations of daylighting systems.

The dissertations offers an analysis of Takkanot Kandiyah, a corpus of communal statutes from the Jewish community in Candia, the capital of Venetian Crete. These texts were written between 1228 and 1583 and collected as a coherent work by the Cretan Jewish historian Elijah Capsali. The collection has been used by scholars as a source regarding the social and economic history of Jewish Candia, but so far, not much attention has been paid to Takkanot Kandiyah as a specific work of Jewish legal literature, providing a unique opportunity to study the development of leadership of a semi-autonomous Jewish community. The dissertation is divided into an introduction, two parts and a conclusion. In the introduction (chapter one), I outline the structure of Takkanot Kandiyah, summarise its historical background and comment on the current state of research on the Jewry in Venetian Crete. Part One (chapters two-six) then provides a detailed overview of Takkanot Kandiyah and set it into its religious, historical, literary, and legal context. In Part Two (chapters seven-ten), I examine the various areas of life touched upon by the statutes and categorise the ordinances depending on the topics covered, pointing out the collection’s concern with both halakhic and (broadly speaking) extra-halakhic matters. The main argument of the dissertation is that Takkanot Kandiyah proves the gradual development of a specific political system in which the Jewish public affairs were managed largely by the group of lay leaders. Many of them were wealthy members of long-established local families whose authority was not sanctioned by their religious education or rabbinic ordination, but by popular consent and the readiness of the Venetian government to respect them as leaders of their coreligionists. The collection also reflects the ways in which the Jewish leadership dealt with the challenges of inner diversity arising from continuing arrivals of Jewish immigrants from various parts of the Mediterranean. Showing a strong tendency towards continuity, yet also an ability to accommodate to the need of the day, Takkanot Kandiyah is a major testimony to the legal history of Cretan Jewry and to the development of leadership and communal autonomy in a pre-modern Jewish community.

This thesis discusses the function and perception of the Venetian (or Venetan) tongue from a sociolinguistic diachronic perspective.   Venetian, spoken by over 6 million people in 7 countries, in an Italian context is referred to as an Italian dialect. Though defined as language in Brazil, by the Veneto region in Italy and by several international organizations (amongst them UN and UNESCO), the Italian State does not confirm its status.   Venetian appeared as a written language in the XII century, anticipating the earliest texts in Italian itself in the Florentine form. From the ninth century it was spread by Venetian merchants and by the Venetian Republic itself to the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, from Istria down to modern day Albania, and later on even further, to the Greek archipelagos and the ports of the Holy land. The expansion of the "Serenissima" in the Italian hinterland led to the homogenisation of the language in the area that forms the base of the modern "Veneto" spoken today.   Venetian was the spoken language in all contexts in the Republic, and was used in official acts, such as the Statuti Veneti, the Mariegole and within the diplomacy. Though the official use of written Venetian was gradually out conquered by Italian from the sixteenth century, it remained the sole spoken language in all state organs until the fall of the Republic in 1797 and was used by the diplomacy of the Ottoman Empire in its contacts with European countries.    After the annexation of Veneto to Italy in 1866, the Italian State has actively combated the use of Venetian (and even forbidden it during the fascist regime), but nevertheless, today Venetian is one the most vigorous of the Italian "dialects": at least 72% of the inhabitants in the Veneto region use the language actively and a recent study demonstrates that as many as 65% of the foreigners living in the region learn the language because of professional or social necessity.   In a diachronic perspective the Venetian tongue can hardly be considered an Italian dialect, not only because of its autonomous development from Vulgar Latin or its different grammar and morphosyntax, but also because of its function and perception: used as an official language not only by the Serenissima, but also by other states, and because of its literacy that for centuries has invented and followed autonomous traditions and created notable works in poetry, theatre, prose and science.