Criminality and legitimization in seawaters: a study on the pirates of Malabar during the age of european commercial expansion (1500-1800)

The maritime piracy included a wide variety of associated criminal activities including attack and confiscation of vessels and merchandise, imprisonment or torturing of merchants and rulers in sea-space in return for ransom money, attack and raiding of coastal trading centers and villages, creation of fear and terror in chief channels of navigation and attacking commercial competitors as a strategy to weaken the trading ability and the wealth-mobilizing ability of their rivals. All this applied to coastal south west India during the period under study. The merchant chiefs of Cannanore like Mamale Marakkar and later under Poca Amame (Pokar Ahamad) and Pocarallee (Pokar Ali) were some of the better known protagonists that the Portuguese had to deal with. But the Malabar corsairs had their corresponding English and Sicilian corsairs in the Mediterranean.

Identification of resilience factors in rail engineering work

This paper discusses an ongoing project that aims at improving the potential for resilience of a system responsible for the planning of rail engineering work delivery. It focuses on the use of a human factors based approach as a way to achieve this end. In particular, the paper discusses the initial data collected by means of interviews and how this process gave way to a two fold goal: Understanding how the planning process works in reality and identifying any critical aspects of the system from a Resilience Engineering perspective. Given the nature of the process under study, information flows and communication issues have been given particular attention throughout the data collection and analysis stages. Initial data confirms that the planning process is greatly reliant on the capability of people using their knowledge and skills to communicate in a dynamic informational environment. Finally, the added value of the interviews is discussed from a human factors perspective and as a mean towards the aim of better understanding resilience in rail engineering planning.