Fictitious toponyms in the responsa: Bashan's ruleset revisited

Fictitious personal names and toponyms are not infrequent in legal casenotes as used for didactic purposes nowadays. There is a long tradition of fictitious names being used in the legal literature. The problem with medieval or early modern legal (here, rabbinical) responsa is that if they are used as evidence for historical purposes, as though they were chronicles, confusion may occurs. Historian Eliezer Bashan showed that this is the case, indeed, with particular reference to rabbinical responsa from the Ottoman empire where Holy Land toponyms occur. He set forth several tentative rules to decide whether a toponym is there to literally refer to the place it names, or whether, instead, the name is used fictitiously. This paper formalizes the ruleset.

Assessing the suitability of ship design for human factors issues associated with evacuation and normal operations

Evaluating ship layout for human factors (HF) issues using simulation software such as maritimeEXODUS can be a long and complex process. The analysis requires the identification of relevant evaluation scenarios; encompassing evacuation and normal operations; the development of appropriate measures which can be used to gauge the performance of crew and vessel and finally; the interpretation of considerable simulation data. In this paper we present a systematic and transparent methodology for assessing the HF performance of ship design which is both discriminating and diagnostic. The methodology is demonstrated using two variants of a hypothetical naval ship.