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How does a society resolve legal disputes lacking evidence? Although such cases would typically be dismissed by modern courts, an interesting but little-known alternative element observed in some legal systems is the option to request a decisive oath in a lawsuit. Distinct from ordinary (testimonial) oaths that are routinely administered to witnesses at trial with the aim of eliciting only truthful testimony, a decisive oath can end a lawsuit in cases where the plaintiff has no evidence. We argue that the oath option may improve on burden-of-proof rules because standard theory overlooks the possibility that some defendants will truthfully admit their guilt after having professed an oath to be truthful. The reason is that people with strong religious or moral beliefs have internalised an ethic of honesty that overrides material consequences. We show that when the fraction of such people is large enough, the oath option achieves a more accurate resolution of disputes than burden-of-proof rules. Evidence from the Ottoman courts in Istanbul during the 16th and 17th centuries supports the argument regarding the positive relationship between religiosity and the use of the decisive oath for dispute resolution. The viability of the decisive oath declined in recent centuries, despite remaining ‘on the books’ in some countries. We suggest that its global demise can be attributed to rising intellectual opposition, increasing complexity of laws and/or legal disputes, falling cost of gathering evidence, and a general trend toward the separation of religion and state.

This paper, describes an agent based model of the spreading of a population over a territory. The models aims at reproducing a distribution of settlements with statistical and spatial characteristics similar to a historically produced pattern. The model operates on a representation of a real territory, taking into account hydrography and relief. The two main goals are to obtain a rank size distribution of the size of settlements which corresponds to a power law (also known as the Zipf Law of settlements) and to place the settlements in the territory in patterns that are close to the real ones, in zones where settlements were the result of a long historical process. The goal of the project was to demonstrate that a set of relatively simple rules could produce a complex pattern, similar to the result of a long and complex historical process. Therefore, it is an assumed reductionist approach.

Our conclusions show that a simple territorial logic, taking into account the quality of land, accessibility, population growth and migration preferences could reproduce Zipf distributions and interesting patterns of agent flow among the settlements created. However, achieving spatial patterns closer to the historical record needs an extra dimension involving field of sight. The best results were achieved by creating an artifical population which chooses to create settlements in places where a wide field of view exists of quality territory.

The behavior of pile composite foundation is studied using the flexibility method. During the analysis, determination of the flexibility matrix (settlement) is critical. However, conventional methods of Winkler and elastic half-space foundation models are incapable of considering the time effects of soil consolidation and creep. The foundation model of Zaretsky and Tsytovich [1965] can be used to evaluate settlement for unsaturated soils, but the complexity of numerical integration over an arbitrary loading area hinders its application. In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed for numerical integration by rotating the loading surface using the equiareal transformation technique. Therefore, a simplified closed-form solution is developed to calculate time dependent settlement for foundation soils. The efficacy of the proposed technique is demonstrated using illustrative examples of an elastic half-space, a rigid raft foundation without piles, and rigid pile composite foundations with multiple piles under surface loading. Furthermore, parametric study is conducted to evaluate the sensitivity of model parameters. The permeability $k$ and Poisson’s ratio $\nu$ are found to be important, whereas pore pressure coefficient $\beta$ and degree of saturation $B$ are less significant in the calculation.

Several studies on liquefaction using physical model tests and numerical analysis have been conducted in recent years; however, few studies have investigated the effect of liquefaction-induced settlement on structures. Especially, this settlement seriously influences on gravity foundation during earthquake. This study aims to investigate the settlement of the surrounding ground of steel pipe sheet pile (SPSP) foundation during liquefaction by using an effective stress analysis. 2D numerical modeling was used in this study and the behavior of undrained soil was idealized using a cocktail glass model. The numerical results were compared with experimental results from a 1-G shaking table test with a scale of 1:60. The results indicate that the settlement of surface ground and SPSP foundation rapidly increase when the liquefaction occurs and is significantly influenced by permeability coefficient of ground.

The reduction of soil strength and stiffness caused by soil liquefaction is an important issue in designing pile or shallow foundations on liquefiable soils. In practice, strength and stiffness reduction is considered via a reduction factor ($D_E$) approach in seismic design. Different sets of values of $D_E$ are available according to the factor of safety against liquefaction ($F_L$) of the liquefiable soil; these ($F_L$) values are usually calculated using simplified liquefaction analysis procedures. Each set of $D_E$ is calibrated and constructed for specific simplified liquefaction analysis procedures or soil conditions. Thus, engineers have difficulty in selecting $D_E$ when using a simplified liquefaction analysis procedure without a corresponding set of $D_E$. In this study, values of $D_E$ for simplified liquefaction analysis procedures commonly used in Taiwan are obtained using a single element test via FLAC program and UBCSAND model. In addition, a novel application of $D_E$ is introduced to improve the usability of the simplified numerical procedure used to predict the liquefaction-induced settlement of a shallow foundation. Simulation results show that the simplified numerical procedure with $D_E$ approach yields a convincing and conservative result.