With an overwhelming volume of studies on Venice's port architecture and coastal protection, the challenge remains to convey to lay readers how the science of hydraulics was applied. This article reports an experiment in creating a vivid narrative of the movement and effects of sand over a relatively short period of twelve years (1610-1622), which, in this case, started with the fifteen-year-old carcass of a shipwreck at risk of capsizing. I emulate how the erosion of sandbanks triggered by the stranded (...) wreck affected the subsequent silting of the canal. This, in turn, influenced the relationships between land and sea, access and obstruction, and arrivals and departures. Such a microhistory of sand offers a broad picture of the maritime know-how and technology that came into play. Finally, the essay reflects on microhistory's potential to explore port architecture’s technicalities. This approach yields an understanding of the exquisitely practical, in-depth details of the engineering response to significant, contemporary, normal, and catastrophic events. (shrink)

A typology of rumours is constructed according to their relation to reality after their veracity has been authenticated. True rumours become information. Untrue rumours are categorized as affirming or denying rumours; affirming rumours state the reality of imaginary facts, whereas denying rumours undermine the reality of established facts. Denying rumour types are distinguished and discussed under rubrics of alleged survival, doubles, bogus events and so on, and through their characteristic features of hypercritical thinking, hidden reality revelation and plot denunciation. In (...) a world where knowledge is no longer seen as objective or final, where the public have become suspicious of governments and the media, and where real and synthetic images are often indistinguishable, denying rumours and ideas are expected to feature more significantly on the information market, as already typified by activity on the web. (shrink)

En este texto confluyen logradamente varios géneros literarios: es una autobiografía, porque ante nuestros ojos vemos transcurrir parte de la vida del autor; pero también es un testimonio histórico, porque aborda acontecimientos verídicamente ocurridos en el Chile que existió entre los años 1965 y 1973. Paralelamente, estamos en presencia de un texto político, que aborda la problemática de la lucha de clases y su expresión en cuanto a correlación de fuerzas sociales, políticas y, al menos esb..

At first approach the use of the word “superstition” is such that it is impossible to apply the term strictly in the human sciences. Its connotation, that is its content, is particularly subjective and negative. And its extension, that is its area of application, is indefinite and makes of it a concept that can refer to just about anything.

The image of the Other, particularly in the Western World, expresses itself through a continuous flow of representations of fabulous peoples with strange physical appearance living in far-away places. In our day, the successors to the sirens, Cyclops, unípedes and cynecephala of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the Sirians, Saturnians, Selenites and Martians of the 17th through the 20th centuries.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

THE VALUE OF SCIENCE INTRODUCTION The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them. Doubtless we should first bend our efforts to assuage human suffering, but why ? Not to suffer is a negative ...