Arabian Travellers, 1800–1950: An Analytical Bibliography

Western travelogue writing has long been a crucial source of information for scholars of the Arabian Peninsula, but nonetheless, this body of literature has not yet been studied comprehensively and systematically by a modern scholar. This article addresses that deficiency by collecting data on the nationality, routes travelled and intertextual citations of 91 authors active in Arabia from 1800 to 1950. The results of this study provide quantitative verification for several existing theories on Western travel writing in Arabia, including Edward Said’s claim that ‘Orientalism’ was predominantly an Anglo-French project, and observations by Said, James Canton and others that European travellers had intimate ties with European imperialism. At the same time, this study challenges some existing arguments about Western travel writing in Arabia, especially claims by Alaine Hutson and others about the inherent unreliability of this corpus of sources.     

At the frontiers of scientific advancement: the factors that influence scientists to become or choose to become publicly funded principal investigators

This paper aims to unearth the factors that influence scientists in becoming and choosing to become publicly funded principal investigators (PIs). PIs are the linchpins of knowledge transformation and bridging triple helix actors, particularly academia-industry. At a micro level, PIs are at the nexus of engaging and interacting with other triple helix actors. No study to date has specifically focused on the factors that influence scientists to become or choose to become publicly funded PIs. For scientists taking on the role of a PI represents an important landmark in their research career. Set in an Irish research system we found two main categories of influencing factors—push and pull. Pull factors are where the PI has more choice in choosing to become a PI, where as push factors is where the PI has less choice in choosing to become a PI. Pull factors we identified were control, career ambition and advancement, personal drive and ambition. Pull factors we identified were project dependencies and institutional pressures.     

Survey of 1276 shoeprint impressions and development of an automatic shoeprint pattern matching facility.

1276 shoeprints were collected at a scientific exhibition. Details regarding the age groups of the participants, style, size and manufacturer/brand of their shoes were recorded. The impressions were assigned to pattern groups showing that the most common pattern was present in only 1% of the population studied and most patterns were much less common. The impressions were digitized and a system developed for automatically sorting a database of images of outsole patterns in response to a reference image. The database images are ranked so that those from the same pattern group as the reference shoeprint are likely to be at the start of the list. A database of 486 complete shoeprint images belonging to 142 pattern groups was established with each group containing two or more examples. Tests of the system have shown that the first-ranked database image belongs to the same pattern group as the reference image 60% of the time and that a correct match appears within the first 5% of the ranked images 88% of the time. The system has translational and rotational invariance so that the spatial positioning of the reference shoeprint images does not have to correspond with the spatial positioning of the shoeprint images of the database. The performance of the system for matching partial shoeprints was also determined.