Linda Paterson, Culture and Society in Medieval Occitania

Jews, medicine, and medieval society

reasons for the rise and decline of the spas in the first place. Neither does he adequately explore why Carratraca became one of the most important spas of the country, or why another one-Tolox-followed a very different developmental pattern, in that it began to take off at the beginning of the present century when the others were in definite decline. Moreover, although the book makes it clear ...

Fast and feast. Food in medieval society

Dietetics in medieval Islamic culture.

The origins of dietetics understood as "the systematic control of food and drink in order to conserve health or combat disease"1 may be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus, written chiefly between 430 and 330 BC. In Tradition in medicine the author argues that in the beginning man must have eaten the same food as the animals, that is, the produce of the earth, fruits, vegetables and grass. Th...

The Royal Society Clifford Paterson Lecture , 1999 Sentient Computing

Sentient computing is the proposition that applications can be made more responsive and useful by observing and reacting to the physical world. It is particularly attractive in a world of mobile users and computers. The paper presents a classification and quantification of sensor information together with a description of a method for altering the behaviour of arbitrary terminal devices. It als...

Wealth distribution and Pareto’s law in the Hungarian medieval society

The distribution of wealth in the Hungarian medieval aristocratic society is reported and studied. The number of serf families belonging to a noble is taken as a measure of the corresponding wealth. Our results reveal the power-law nature of this distribution function, confirming the validity of the Pareto law for such a society. The obtained Pareto index α = 0.92 is however smaller than the va...