#methodology — Public Fediverse posts

If meetings don't deliver, change format.
Example:
Unlike COPs, the purpose was to "debate practical ways to move away from coal, oil and gas".
The representatives described the conference as a “safe space for discussion”. Said a rep: “That kind of space I haven’t seen in my 10-year history with the UNFCCC.”

The representatives have walked away with plans for three workstreams:
a. to develop national “roadmaps” to move away from fossil fuels,
b. to design new tools to address fossil-fuel subsidies – with support by the International Institute for Sustainable Development #IISD
c. to connect fossil fuel producers and consumers to address carbon-intensive trade – with support by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development #OECD

More:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/santa-marta-key-outcomes-from-first-summit-on-transitioning-away-from-fossil-fuels/
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/68dc91a7e566d74a91e8e22d/t/69f2979327f294060a2cb53d/1777506195819/TAFF+Conference_Co-host+Takeaways_DEF.pdf
https://transitionawayconference.com/methodoloy

#safeSpace #safety #personalSafety #climate #TAFF #meetings #methodology #facilitation #safeSpaces

"Why not just use Lean?"

https://lawrencecpaulson.github.io//2026/04/23/Why_not_Lean.html

#HackerNews #Lean #Programming #Lean #Methodology #Software #Development #Hacker #News #Tech #Insights

On Trip-Hammers and Rolling Mills

Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax “heart-protector” on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No such plate survives from a Roman site after 300 BCE, and no sculpture or painting shows it. As Roman rule expands across Italy, locals stop building tombs with detailed paintings full of arms and armour, and body armour tends to be a rare find. By the fifth century BCE, Samnites and Campanians had replaced simple disc breastplates with more complex arrangements of a breastplate, a backplate, a bronze belt and armoured straps over the shoulders and under the arms. We therefore have to assume that Romans either reverted to a style of armour from several hundred years before, or that Polybius’ description just mentions one-part of a seven-part armour. To my knowledge, no other surviving writer says that Romans wore such a breastplate, and there are no carvings or paintings which show Romans wearing them (Varro’s pectorale was made of strips of leather, De Lingua Latina 5.24). Both interpretations match objects from the ancient Mediterrean, and both match later armour from other cultures such as the “good iron for his body” worn by Robert the Bruce’s militia in 13181 and char-aina “four mirrors” armour in the Persianate world. I am doubtful that most Romans could afford not only a helmet, a sword, and and iron-bound shield but most of a bronze breastplate, but Devereaux is more confident. There are a lot of things to think about here, such as why the Roman Republic, a relatively egalitarian society, did not leave much art which showed ordinary soldiers. However, this week I will write down my thoughts about one technical question which I took the time to work through.

I think that if you wanted to make a bronze breastplate in the ancient world, you took an ingot and hammered it thin (possibly starting by melting it and pouring it onto a broad flat stone). You need to stop frequently, heat, and cool in air or quench in water to anneal it so it does not get too hard and brittle and crack. Devereaux thinks that they were “probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot.” In a comment he referred me to David Sim in the UK.

I don’t own Sim’s book Iron for the Eagles but I do own Roman Imperial Armour (Oxbow Books, 2012) by David Sim and J. Kaminski which presents Sim’s theory (and Sim’s article in Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 2003/4). Sim’s argument seems to take the following form (pp. 49-57): some armour from the Roman empire has smooth, parallel surfaces and consistent thickness. I don’t know any way to do this by hand or with powered up-and-down motion, but I can do it with a pair of rollers turned by hand and an assistant feeding metal between them. Such rollers would likely have been recycled when no longer needed and mounted in wooden machines, therefore would have left no archaeological evidence.

I don’t know how common the iron or copper-alloy sheet with smooth, parallel surfaces actually is. Table 7 of the book shows that one part of a Roman armour or shield usually varies in thickness across its surface by a factor or 2 or 3 which is typical of low-tech armour. The main examples of smooth parallel surfaces seem to be scale armour and layers within a sheet of iron or steel, and the paper on that steel notes that the same could probably be achieved with a trip-hammer (Fulford, Sim, and Doig 2004: 201). A trip-hammer is a long hammer on a pivot, whose long end comes close to a turning shaft driven by water or a motor. Pegs on the shaft lift the hammer and cause it to strike an anvil in a steady rhythm with more than human force, so the operator just has to focus on positioning the work.

Whereas trip-hammers were widely used in the Roman empire, late medieval Europe, and China, roller mills for sheet metal only appear in Europe in the 18th century, and mills for making bar iron into rods for nails only in the 16th century. That is almost 2000 years later than Polybius. Forming two cylinders and mounting them parallel to one another with handmade tools is harder than it looks, and making an adjustable mill that can produce more than one thickness is even harder. It was hard to justify specialized machines before the 20th century, because labour was cheap and markets were unstable. You could not rely on making one specialized thing for a distant market, because one day the seas would be closed by pirates or the road over the mountains would be shut to keep the plague out. If you wanted to keep in business, you needed to produce a variety of goods, or simple and versatile goods like nails. Copper alloys were traded in ingots, and iron was traded in bars, because skilled metalworkers could make anything you wanted from the raw material. If you bought specialized pre-made forms, you might find that there was no market for finishing them.

To make a breastplate, you do not want sheet metal of uniform thickness. You will want the front and center to be thicker and stronger, and the sides to be thinner, because you are most concerned with being stabbed or shot through the vital organs by someone in front of you. As you stretch the metal to fit around your body, it will get thicker in some places and thinner in others, and if you have time to take care you will put the thick metal in the middle and thin near the edges. Nobody but you and your servant will ever see the inside, so it does not matter if the inside is lumpy and oxidized as long as the outside is smooth and beautiful. So there would be no benefit to using rollers, as there would be for making 0.3 mm stock for scale armour and applied decorations.

Sim’s approach in Roman Imperial Armour seems quite a contemporary one, with a focus on specialized labour-saving machines, uniform properties and dimensions. Moving between contemporary and traditional approaches often takes some adjusting, as when I volunteer on carpentry projects with no wood-to-wood joinery and everything butted and nailed together and my inner fourteenth-century person has to take a lie down and drink some ale. Reenactor Matthew Amt has some disagreements with how Sim makes pilum heads and spearheads, and a specialist in reproducing ancient metalwork did not like the book:

Roman Imperial Armour: The Production of Early Imperial Military Armour overreaches in basing so many of its assertions on the limited experience of a hobbyist blacksmith. It would be presumptuous for a metal-detectorist to write a treatise on archaeological practice, but for some reason academics think that any experience at all qualifies them to extrapolate on ancient craft industries.

no citation because this was from a private forum discussion! Ask me in person if you want to know who said this.

Iron for the Eagles has a very good reputation and I hope to read it one day.

Also, a roller mill is a crank-based mechanism. Cranks were probably invented in Iberia around the fifth century BCE. In the last few centuries BCE, Italians were starting to adopt them for purposes like milling grain. The famous rotary querns from Pompeii were a new and high-tech way of making your flour. It is only in the past few decades that it became clear when and where rotating millstones were invented. Sim and Kaminski know some of this history because they cite L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 The Ancient Engineers. However, they don’t notice that if cranks were a new technology, its unlikely that they were immediately applied to milling. Europeans had been using cranked grindstones for at least 700 years before they started to use cranked roller mills for metalworking. That suggests that adapting the crank mechanism to metalworking is not an obvious next step. And central Italy in the third and second century BCE was not a center of mechanical and metallurgical innovation, but a place which was dazzled by Celtic swords and Hellenistic devices like the Antikythera mechanism. Slaves from the east seem to have replaced Italy’s native textile traditions by the end of the Republic because they were cheap and clever and it was easier to let them do what they knew how to do than retrain them.

There were a few ares where Imperial Roman technology was similar to 16th-18th century Europe, such as the size of ships and the availability of iron. Celts and Romans did use a lot of thin iron, bronze, silver, and brass sheet, and making such sheet by hand and then smoothing it out is time-consuming and wasteful. The shield from Dürrnberg grave 373 had many iron reinforcements just 0.15-0.20 mm thick after corrosion.2 I am open to the possibility that trip-hammers or stamping mills were used to beat out sheet in the Roman empire, since they were used for other tasks. I might even be convinced that rolling mills were used in some places for specific purposes like making very thin brass sheet for strapends, lanterns, and scale armour. The Roman empire had large-scale production in centralized locations for distribution by sea and fairly extensive use of water power. However, I would want much more evidence to believe in roller mills in Polybius’ Italy, and I expect that if some shops had trip-hammers to bang out helmets and buckets, others just used teams of sweaty men with hammers. As late as the First World War, some firearms were made in giant factories, and others were made with hammers and files in one-room workshops in Spain.

There are lots of threads I would like to pull further, like when sheet metal in standard gauges first appeared, and my onetime teacher John Peter Oleson’s argument about whether the ships from Lake Nemi in Italy had cranks on their pumps (in 1984, he thought the cranks were “archaeologically a fantasy” based on misinterpreting fragments of wood). I never got around to finishing Panagiota Manti‘s thesis on casting ancient Greek helmets. However, I hope that this shows why I am open to the use of articulated cuirasses in Polybius’ Italy, somewhat less open to the use of trip-hammers, and quite skeptical of the use of roller mills or armourers who started with sheet metal. Ancient metalworking is an exciting topic where archaeologists, metallurgists, and makers can work together, but its hard to keep up with.

Unlike ancient metalworkers, I am not secretive about my methods! But unlike many ancient writers I am not independently wealthy. If you can, please support this site.

Further Reading

Michael Fulford, David Sim, Alistair Doig, “The production of Roman ferrous armour: a metallographic survey of material from Britain, Denmark and Germany, and its implications,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, Volume 17 (2004) pp. 197-220

(scheduled 6 April 2026)

Edit 2026-04-06: first photo is in the wrong museum! Had a quick look at the book by Oleson.

1. https://www.rps.ac.uk/mss/1318/29 I will discuss and translate this in my second article on linen armour for Medieval Clothing & Textiles ↩︎
2. https://doi.org/10.11588/jrgzm.2009.1.16569 I don’t yet have a Zotero plugin in this browser to paste bibliographic details, but you can find them in “Plywood shields in European history,” Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 23/24 (2022/23) pp. 9-23 ↩︎

On Trip-Hammers and Rolling Mills

Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax “heart-protector” on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No such plate survives from a Roman site after 300 BCE, and no sculpture or painting shows it. As Roman rule expands across Italy, locals stop building tombs with detailed paintings full of arms and armour, and body armour tends to be a rare find. By the fifth century BCE, Samnites and Campanians had replaced simple disc breastplates with more complex arrangements of a breastplate, a backplate, a bronze belt and armoured straps over the shoulders and under the arms. We therefore have to assume that Romans either reverted to a style of armour from several hundred years before, or that Polybius’ description just mentions one-part of a seven-part armour. To my knowledge, no other surviving writer says that Romans wore such a breastplate, and there are no carvings or paintings which show Romans wearing them (Varro’s pectorale was made of strips of leather, De Lingua Latina 5.24). Both interpretations match objects from the ancient Mediterrean, and both match later armour from other cultures such as the “good iron for his body” worn by Robert the Bruce’s militia in 13181 and char-aina “four mirrors” armour in the Persianate world. I am doubtful that most Romans could afford not only a helmet, a sword, and and iron-bound shield but most of a bronze breastplate, but Devereaux is more confident. There are a lot of things to think about here, such as why the Roman Republic, a relatively egalitarian society, did not leave much art which showed ordinary soldiers. However, this week I will write down my thoughts about one technical question which I took the time to work through.

I think that if you wanted to make a bronze breastplate in the ancient world, you took an ingot and hammered it thin (possibly starting by melting it and pouring it onto a broad flat stone). You need to stop frequently, heat, and cool in air or quench in water to anneal it so it does not get too hard and brittle and crack. Devereaux thinks that they were “probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot.” In a comment he referred me to David Sim in the UK.

I don’t own Sim’s book Iron for the Eagles but I do own Roman Imperial Armour (Oxbow Books, 2012) by David Sim and J. Kaminski which presents Sim’s theory (and Sim’s article in Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 2003/4). Sim’s argument seems to take the following form (pp. 49-57): some armour from the Roman empire has smooth, parallel surfaces and consistent thickness. I don’t know any way to do this by hand or with powered up-and-down motion, but I can do it with a pair of rollers turned by hand and an assistant feeding metal between them. Such rollers would likely have been recycled when no longer needed and mounted in wooden machines, therefore would have left no archaeological evidence.

I don’t know how common the iron or copper-alloy sheet with smooth, parallel surfaces actually is. Table 7 of the book shows that one part of a Roman armour or shield usually varies in thickness across its surface by a factor or 2 or 3 which is typical of low-tech armour. The main examples of smooth parallel surfaces seem to be scale armour and layers within a sheet of iron or steel, and the paper on that steel notes that the same could probably be achieved with a trip-hammer (Fulford, Sim, and Doig 2004: 201). A trip-hammer is a long hammer on a pivot, whose long end comes close to a turning shaft driven by water or a motor. Pegs on the shaft lift the hammer and cause it to strike an anvil in a steady rhythm with more than human force, so the operator just has to focus on positioning the work.

Whereas trip-hammers were widely used in the Roman empire, late medieval Europe, and China, roller mills for sheet metal only appear in Europe in the 18th century, and mills for making bar iron into rods for nails only in the 16th century. That is almost 2000 years later than Polybius. Forming two cylinders and mounting them parallel to one another with handmade tools is harder than it looks, and making an adjustable mill that can produce more than one thickness is even harder. It was hard to justify specialized machines before the 20th century, because labour was cheap and markets were unstable. You could not rely on making one specialized thing for a distant market, because one day the seas would be closed by pirates or the road over the mountains would be shut to keep the plague out. If you wanted to keep in business, you needed to produce a variety of goods, or simple and versatile goods like nails. Copper alloys were traded in ingots, and iron was traded in bars, because skilled metalworkers could make anything you wanted from the raw material. If you bought specialized pre-made forms, you might find that there was no market for finishing them.

To make a breastplate, you do not want sheet metal of uniform thickness. You will want the front and center to be thicker and stronger, and the sides to be thinner, because you are most concerned with being stabbed or shot through the vital organs by someone in front of you. As you stretch the metal to fit around your body, it will get thicker in some places and thinner in others, and if you have time to take care you will put the thick metal in the middle and thin near the edges. Nobody but you and your servant will ever see the inside, so it does not matter if the inside is lumpy and oxidized as long as the outside is smooth and beautiful. So there would be no benefit to using rollers, as there would be for making 0.3 mm stock for scale armour and applied decorations.

Sim’s approach in Roman Imperial Armour seems quite a contemporary one, with a focus on specialized labour-saving machines, uniform properties and dimensions. Moving between contemporary and traditional approaches often takes some adjusting, as when I volunteer on carpentry projects with no wood-to-wood joinery and everything butted and nailed together and my inner fourteenth-century person has to take a lie down and drink some ale. Reenactor Matthew Amt has some disagreements with how Sim makes pilum heads and spearheads, and a specialist in reproducing ancient metalwork did not like the book:

Roman Imperial Armour: The Production of Early Imperial Military Armour overreaches in basing so many of its assertions on the limited experience of a hobbyist blacksmith. It would be presumptuous for a metal-detectorist to write a treatise on archaeological practice, but for some reason academics think that any experience at all qualifies them to extrapolate on ancient craft industries.

no citation because this was from a private forum discussion! Ask me in person if you want to know who said this.

Iron for the Eagles has a very good reputation and I hope to read it one day.

Also, a roller mill is a crank-based mechanism. Cranks were probably invented in Iberia around the fifth century BCE. In the last few centuries BCE, Italians were starting to adopt them for purposes like milling grain. The famous rotary querns from Pompeii were a new and high-tech way of making your flour. It is only in the past few decades that it became clear when and where rotating millstones were invented. Sim and Kaminski know some of this history because they cite L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 The Ancient Engineers. However, they don’t notice that if cranks were a new technology, its unlikely that they were immediately applied to milling. Europeans had been using cranked grindstones for at least 700 years before they started to use cranked roller mills for metalworking. That suggests that adapting the crank mechanism to metalworking is not an obvious next step. And central Italy in the third and second century BCE was not a center of mechanical and metallurgical innovation, but a place which was dazzled by Celtic swords and Hellenistic devices like the Antikythera mechanism. Slaves from the east seem to have replaced Italy’s native textile traditions by the end of the Republic because they were cheap and clever and it was easier to let them do what they knew how to do than retrain them.

There were a few ares where Imperial Roman technology was similar to 16th-18th century Europe, such as the size of ships and the availability of iron. Celts and Romans did use a lot of thin iron, bronze, silver, and brass sheet, and making such sheet by hand and then smoothing it out is time-consuming and wasteful. The shield from Dürrnberg grave 373 had many iron reinforcements just 0.15-0.20 mm thick after corrosion.2 I am open to the possibility that trip-hammers or stamping mills were used to beat out sheet in the Roman empire, since they were used for other tasks. I might even be convinced that rolling mills were used in some places for specific purposes like making very thin brass sheet for strapends, lanterns, and scale armour. The Roman empire had large-scale production in centralized locations for distribution by sea and fairly extensive use of water power. However, I would want much more evidence to believe in roller mills in Polybius’ Italy, and I expect that if some shops had trip-hammers to bang out helmets and buckets, others just used teams of sweaty men with hammers. As late as the First World War, some firearms were made in giant factories, and others were made with hammers and files in one-room workshops in Spain.

There are lots of threads I would like to pull further, like when sheet metal in standard gauges first appeared, and my onetime teacher John Peter Oleson’s argument about whether the ships from Lake Nemi in Italy had cranks on their pumps. I never got around to finishing Panagiota Manti‘s thesis on casting ancient Greek helmets. However, I hope that this shows why I am open to the use of articulated cuirasses in Polybius’ Italy, somewhat less open to the use of trip-hammers, and quite skeptical of the use of roller mills or armourers who started with sheet metal. Ancient metalworking is an exciting topic where archaeologists, metallurgists, and makers can work together, but its hard to keep up with.

Unlike ancient metalworkers, I am not secretive about my methods! But unlike many ancient writers I am not independently wealthy. If you can, please support this site.

Further Reading

Michael Fulford, David Sim, Alistair Doig, “The production of Roman ferrous armour: a metallographic survey of material from Britain, Denmark and Germany, and its implications,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, Volume 17 (2004) pp. 197-220

(scheduled 6 April 2026)

1. https://www.rps.ac.uk/mss/1318/29 I will discuss and translate this in my second article on linen armour for Medieval Clothing & Textiles ↩︎
2. https://doi.org/10.11588/jrgzm.2009.1.16569 I don’t yet have a Zotero plugin in this browser to paste bibliographic details, but you can find them in “Plywood shields in European history,” Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 23/24 (2022/23) pp. 9-23 ↩︎

On Trip-Hammers and Rolling Mills

Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax “heart-protector” on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No such plate survives from a Roman site after 300 BCE, and no sculpture or painting shows it. As Roman rule expands across Italy, locals stop building tombs with detailed paintings full of arms and armour, and body armour tends to be a rare find. By the fifth century BCE, Samnites and Campanians had replaced simple disc breastplates with more complex arrangements of a breastplate, a backplate, a bronze belt and armoured straps over the shoulders and under the arms. We therefore have to assume that Romans either reverted to a style of armour from several hundred years before, or that Polybius’ description just mentions one-part of a seven-part armour. To my knowledge, no other surviving writer says that Romans wore such a breastplate, and there are no carvings or paintings which show Romans wearing them (Varro’s pectorale was made of strips of leather, De Lingua Latina 5.24). Both interpretations match objects from the ancient Mediterrean, and both match later armour from other cultures such as the “good iron for his body” worn by Robert the Bruce’s militia in 13181 and char-aina “four mirrors” armour in the Persianate world. I am doubtful that most Romans could afford not only a helmet, a sword, and and iron-bound shield but most of a bronze breastplate, but Devereaux is more confident. There are a lot of things to think about here, such as why the Roman Republic, a relatively egalitarian society, did not leave much art which showed ordinary soldiers. However, this week I will write down my thoughts about one technical question which I took the time to work through.

I think that if you wanted to make a bronze breastplate in the ancient world, you took an ingot and hammered it thin (possibly starting by melting it and pouring it onto a broad flat stone). You need to stop frequently, heat, and cool in air or quench in water to anneal it so it does not get too hard and brittle and crack. Devereaux thinks that they were “probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot.” In a comment he referred me to David Sim in the UK.

I don’t own Sim’s book Iron for the Eagles but I do own Roman Imperial Armour (Oxbow Books, 2012) by David Sim and J. Kaminski which presents Sim’s theory (and Sim’s article in Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 2003/4). Sim’s argument seems to take the following form (pp. 49-57): some armour from the Roman empire has smooth, parallel surfaces and consistent thickness. I don’t know any way to do this by hand or with powered up-and-down motion, but I can do it with a pair of rollers turned by hand and an assistant feeding metal between them. Such rollers would likely have been recycled when no longer needed and mounted in wooden machines, therefore would have left no archaeological evidence.

I don’t know how common the iron or copper-alloy sheet with smooth, parallel surfaces actually is. Table 7 of the book shows that one part of a Roman armour or shield usually varies in thickness across its surface by a factor or 2 or 3 which is typical of low-tech armour. The main examples of smooth parallel surfaces seem to be scale armour and layers within a sheet of iron or steel, and the paper on that steel notes that the same could probably be achieved with a trip-hammer (Fulford, Sim, and Doig 2004: 201). A trip-hammer is a long hammer on a pivot, whose long end comes close to a turning shaft driven by water or a motor. Pegs on the shaft lift the hammer and cause it to strike an anvil in a steady rhythm with more than human force, so the operator just has to focus on positioning the work.

Whereas trip-hammers were widely used in the Roman empire, late medieval Europe, and China, roller mills for sheet metal only appear in Europe in the 18th century, and mills for making bar iron into rods for nails only in the 16th century. That is almost 2000 years later than Polybius. Forming two cylinders and mounting them parallel to one another with handmade tools is harder than it looks, and making an adjustable mill that can produce more than one thickness is even harder. It was hard to justify specialized machines before the 20th century, because labour was cheap and markets were unstable. You could not rely on making one specialized thing for a distant market, because one day the seas would be closed by pirates or the road over the mountains would be shut to keep the plague out. If you wanted to keep in business, you needed to produce a variety of goods, or simple and versatile goods like nails. Copper alloys were traded in ingots, and iron was traded in bars, because skilled metalworkers could make anything you wanted from the raw material. If you bought specialized pre-made forms, you might find that there was no market for finishing them.

To make a breastplate, you do not want sheet metal of uniform thickness. You will want the front and center to be thicker and stronger, and the sides to be thinner, because you are most concerned with being stabbed or shot through the vital organs by someone in front of you. As you stretch the metal to fit around your body, it will get thicker in some places and thinner in others, and if you have time to take care you will put the thick metal in the middle and thin near the edges. Nobody but you and your servant will ever see the inside, so it does not matter if the inside is lumpy and oxidized as long as the outside is smooth and beautiful. So there would be no benefit to using rollers, as there would be for making 0.3 mm stock for scale armour and applied decorations.

Sim’s approach in Roman Imperial Armour seems quite a contemporary one, with a focus on specialized labour-saving machines, uniform properties and dimensions. Moving between contemporary and traditional approaches often takes some adjusting, as when I volunteer on carpentry projects with no wood-to-wood joinery and everything butted and nailed together and my inner fourteenth-century person has to take a lie down and drink some ale. Reenactor Matthew Amt has some disagreements with how Sim makes pilum heads and spearheads, and a specialist in reproducing ancient metalwork did not like the book:

Roman Imperial Armour: The Production of Early Imperial Military Armour overreaches in basing so many of its assertions on the limited experience of a hobbyist blacksmith. It would be presumptuous for a metal-detectorist to write a treatise on archaeological practice, but for some reason academics think that any experience at all qualifies them to extrapolate on ancient craft industries.

no citation because this was from a private forum discussion! Ask me in person if you want to know who said this.

Iron for the Eagles has a very good reputation and I hope to read it one day.

Also, a roller mill is a crank-based mechanism. Cranks were probably invented in Iberia around the fifth century BCE. In the last few centuries BCE, Italians were starting to adopt them for purposes like milling grain. The famous rotary querns from Pompeii were a new and high-tech way of making your flour. It is only in the past few decades that it became clear when and where rotating millstones were invented. Sim and Kaminski know some of this history because they cite L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 The Ancient Engineers. However, they don’t notice that if cranks were a new technology, its unlikely that they were immediately applied to milling. Europeans had been using cranked grindstones for at least 700 years before they started to use cranked roller mills for metalworking. That suggests that adapting the crank mechanism to metalworking is not an obvious next step. And central Italy in the third and second century BCE was not a center of mechanical and metallurgical innovation, but a place which was dazzled by Celtic swords and Hellenistic devices like the Antikythera mechanism. Slaves from the east seem to have replaced Italy’s native textile traditions by the end of the Republic because they were cheap and clever and it was easier to let them do what they knew how to do than retrain them.

There were a few ares where Imperial Roman technology was similar to 16th-18th century Europe, such as the size of ships and the availability of iron. Celts and Romans did use a lot of thin iron, bronze, silver, and brass sheet, and making such sheet by hand and then smoothing it out is time-consuming and wasteful. The shield from Dürrnberg grave 373 had many iron reinforcements just 0.15-0.20 mm thick after corrosion.2 I am open to the possibility that trip-hammers or stamping mills were used to beat out sheet in the Roman empire, since they were used for other tasks. I might even be convinced that rolling mills were used in some places for specific purposes like making very thin brass sheet for strapends, lanterns, and scale armour. The Roman empire had large-scale production in centralized locations for distribution by sea and fairly extensive use of water power. However, I would want much more evidence to believe in roller mills in Polybius’ Italy, and I expect that if some shops had trip-hammers to bang out helmets and buckets, others just used teams of sweaty men with hammers. As late as the First World War, some firearms were made in giant factories, and others were made with hammers and files in one-room workshops in Spain.

There are lots of threads I would like to pull further, like when sheet metal in standard gauges first appeared, and my onetime teacher John Peter Oleson’s argument about whether the ships from Lake Nemi in Italy had cranks on their pumps. I never got around to finishing Panagiota Manti‘s thesis on casting ancient Greek helmets. However, I hope that this shows why I am open to the use of articulated cuirasses in Polybius’ Italy, somewhat less open to the use of trip-hammers, and quite skeptical of the use of roller mills or armourers who started with sheet metal. Ancient metalworking is an exciting topic where archaeologists, metallurgists, and makers can work together, but its hard to keep up with.

Unlike ancient metalworkers, I am not secretive about my methods! But unlike many ancient writers I am not independently wealthy. If you can, please support this site.

Further Reading

Michael Fulford, David Sim, Alistair Doig, “The production of Roman ferrous armour: a metallographic survey of material from Britain, Denmark and Germany, and its implications,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, Volume 17 (2004) pp. 197-220

(scheduled 6 April 2026)

1. https://www.rps.ac.uk/mss/1318/29 I will discuss and translate this in my second article on linen armour for Medieval Clothing & Textiles ↩︎
2. https://doi.org/10.11588/jrgzm.2009.1.16569 I don’t yet have a Zotero plugin in this browser to paste bibliographic details, but you can find them in “Plywood shields in European history,” Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 23/24 (2022/23) pp. 9-23 ↩︎

On Trip-Hammers and Rolling Mills

Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax “heart-protector” on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No such plate survives from a Roman site after 300 BCE, and no sculpture or painting shows it. As Roman rule expands across Italy, locals stop building tombs with detailed paintings full of arms and armour, and body armour tends to be a rare find. By the fifth century BCE, Samnites and Campanians had replaced simple disc breastplates with more complex arrangements of a breastplate, a backplate, a bronze belt and armoured straps over the shoulders and under the arms. We therefore have to assume that Romans either reverted to a style of armour from several hundred years before, or that Polybius’ description just mentions one-part of a seven-part armour. To my knowledge, no other surviving writer says that Romans wore such a breastplate, and there are no carvings or paintings which show Romans wearing them (Varro’s pectorale was made of strips of leather, De Lingua Latina 5.24). Both interpretations match objects from the ancient Mediterrean, and both match later armour from other cultures such as the “good iron for his body” worn by Robert the Bruce’s militia in 13181 and char-aina “four mirrors” armour in the Persianate world. I am doubtful that most Romans could afford not only a helmet, a sword, and and iron-bound shield but most of a bronze breastplate, but Devereaux is more confident. There are a lot of things to think about here, such as why the Roman Republic, a relatively egalitarian society, did not leave much art which showed ordinary soldiers. However, this week I will write down my thoughts about one technical question which I took the time to work through.

I think that if you wanted to make a bronze breastplate in the ancient world, you took an ingot and hammered it thin (possibly starting by melting it and pouring it onto a broad flat stone). You need to stop frequently, heat, and cool in air or quench in water to anneal it so it does not get too hard and brittle and crack. Devereaux thinks that they were “probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot.” In a comment he referred me to David Sim in the UK.

I don’t own Sim’s book Iron for the Eagles but I do own Roman Imperial Armour (Oxbow Books, 2012) by David Sim and J. Kaminski which presents Sim’s theory (and Sim’s article in Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 2003/4). Sim’s argument seems to take the following form (pp. 49-57): some armour from the Roman empire has smooth, parallel surfaces and consistent thickness. I don’t know any way to do this by hand or with powered up-and-down motion, but I can do it with a pair of rollers turned by hand and an assistant feeding metal between them. Such rollers would likely have been recycled when no longer needed and mounted in wooden machines, therefore would have left no archaeological evidence.

I don’t know how common the iron or copper-alloy sheet with smooth, parallel surfaces actually is. Table 7 of the book shows that one part of a Roman armour or shield usually varies in thickness across its surface by a factor or 2 or 3 which is typical of low-tech armour. The main examples of smooth parallel surfaces seem to be scale armour and layers within a sheet of iron or steel, and the paper on that steel notes that the same could probably be achieved with a trip-hammer (Fulford, Sim, and Doig 2004: 201). A trip-hammer is a long hammer on a pivot, whose long end comes close to a turning shaft driven by water or a motor. Pegs on the shaft lift the hammer and cause it to strike an anvil in a steady rhythm with more than human force, so the operator just has to focus on positioning the work.

Whereas trip-hammers were widely used in the Roman empire, late medieval Europe, and China, roller mills for sheet metal only appear in Europe in the 18th century, and mills for making bar iron into rods for nails only in the 16th century. That is almost 2000 years later than Polybius. Forming two cylinders and mounting them parallel to one another with handmade tools is harder than it looks, and making an adjustable mill that can produce more than one thickness is even harder. It was hard to justify specialized machines before the 20th century, because labour was cheap and markets were unstable. You could not rely on making one specialized thing for a distant market, because one day the seas would be closed by pirates or the road over the mountains would be shut to keep the plague out. If you wanted to keep in business, you needed to produce a variety of goods, or simple and versatile goods like nails. Copper alloys were traded in ingots, and iron was traded in bars, because skilled metalworkers could make anything you wanted from the raw material. If you bought specialized pre-made forms, you might find that there was no market for finishing them.

To make a breastplate, you do not want sheet metal of uniform thickness. You will want the front and center to be thicker and stronger, and the sides to be thinner, because you are most concerned with being stabbed or shot through the vital organs by someone in front of you. As you stretch the metal to fit around your body, it will get thicker in some places and thinner in others, and if you have time to take care you will put the thick metal in the middle and thin near the edges. Nobody but you and your servant will ever see the inside, so it does not matter if the inside is lumpy and oxidized as long as the outside is smooth and beautiful. So there would be no benefit to using rollers, as there would be for making 0.3 mm stock for scale armour and applied decorations.

Sim’s approach in Roman Imperial Armour seems quite a contemporary one, with a focus on specialized labour-saving machines, uniform properties and dimensions. Moving between contemporary and traditional approaches often takes some adjusting, as when I volunteer on carpentry projects with no wood-to-wood joinery and everything butted and nailed together and my inner fourteenth-century person has to take a lie down and drink some ale. Reenactor Matthew Amt has some disagreements with how Sim makes pilum heads and spearheads, and a specialist in reproducing ancient metalwork did not like the book:

Roman Imperial Armour: The Production of Early Imperial Military Armour overreaches in basing so many of its assertions on the limited experience of a hobbyist blacksmith. It would be presumptuous for a metal-detectorist to write a treatise on archaeological practice, but for some reason academics think that any experience at all qualifies them to extrapolate on ancient craft industries.

no citation because this was from a private forum discussion! Ask me in person if you want to know who said this.

Iron for the Eagles has a very good reputation and I hope to read it one day.

Also, a roller mill is a crank-based mechanism. Cranks were probably invented in Iberia around the fifth century BCE. In the last few centuries BCE, Italians were starting to adopt them for purposes like milling grain. The famous rotary querns from Pompeii were a new and high-tech way of making your flour. It is only in the past few decades that it became clear when and where rotating millstones were invented. Sim and Kaminski know some of this history because they cite L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 The Ancient Engineers. However, they don’t notice that if cranks were a new technology, its unlikely that they were immediately applied to milling. Europeans had been using cranked grindstones for at least 700 years before they started to use cranked roller mills for metalworking. That suggests that adapting the crank mechanism to metalworking is not an obvious next step. And central Italy in the third and second century BCE was not a center of mechanical and metallurgical innovation, but a place which was dazzled by Celtic swords and Hellenistic devices like the Antikythera mechanism. Slaves from the east seem to have replaced Italy’s native textile traditions by the end of the Republic because they were cheap and clever and it was easier to let them do what they knew how to do than retrain them.

There were a few ares where Imperial Roman technology was similar to 16th-18th century Europe, such as the size of ships and the availability of iron. Celts and Romans did use a lot of thin iron, bronze, silver, and brass sheet, and making such sheet by hand and then smoothing it out is time-consuming and wasteful. The shield from Dürrnberg grave 373 had many iron reinforcements just 0.15-0.20 mm thick after corrosion.2 I am open to the possibility that trip-hammers or stamping mills were used to beat out sheet in the Roman empire, since they were used for other tasks. I might even be convinced that rolling mills were used in some places for specific purposes like making very thin brass sheet for strapends, lanterns, and scale armour. The Roman empire had large-scale production in centralized locations for distribution by sea and fairly extensive use of water power. However, I would want much more evidence to believe in roller mills in Polybius’ Italy, and I expect that if some shops had trip-hammers to bang out helmets and buckets, others just used teams of sweaty men with hammers. As late as the First World War, some firearms were made in giant factories, and others were made with hammers and files in one-room workshops in Spain.

There are lots of threads I would like to pull further, like when sheet metal in standard gauges first appeared, and my onetime teacher John Peter Oleson’s argument about whether the ships from Lake Nemi in Italy had cranks on their pumps (in 1984, he thought the cranks were “archaeologically a fantasy” based on misinterpreting fragments of wood). I never got around to finishing Panagiota Manti‘s thesis on casting ancient Greek helmets. However, I hope that this shows why I am open to the use of articulated cuirasses in Polybius’ Italy, somewhat less open to the use of trip-hammers, and quite skeptical of the use of roller mills or armourers who started with sheet metal. Ancient metalworking is an exciting topic where archaeologists, metallurgists, and makers can work together, but its hard to keep up with.

Unlike ancient metalworkers, I am not secretive about my methods! But unlike many ancient writers I am not independently wealthy. If you can, please support this site.

Further Reading

Michael Fulford, David Sim, Alistair Doig, “The production of Roman ferrous armour: a metallographic survey of material from Britain, Denmark and Germany, and its implications,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, Volume 17 (2004) pp. 197-220

(scheduled 6 April 2026)

Edit 2026-04-06: first photo is in the wrong museum! Had a quick look at the book by Oleson.

1. https://www.rps.ac.uk/mss/1318/29 I will discuss and translate this in my second article on linen armour for Medieval Clothing & Textiles ↩︎
2. https://doi.org/10.11588/jrgzm.2009.1.16569 I don’t yet have a Zotero plugin in this browser to paste bibliographic details, but you can find them in “Plywood shields in European history,” Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 23/24 (2022/23) pp. 9-23 ↩︎

But it's pretty hard to argue with me about the #methodology I have proposed for ending #societal #ills. It matches every #morality #system in history. And it's #financially #responsible and far more #effective than anything that's ever been done anywhere. Period. I have good reason to be confident.

But it's pretty hard to argue with me about the #methodology I have proposed for ending #societal #ills. It matches every #morality #system in history. And it's #financially #responsible and far more #effective than anything that's ever been done anywhere. Period. I have good reason to be confident.

An inside look into methodology

#methods #methodology #anthropology #relationalanthropology

http://invisiblymisdiagnosed.com/2026/01/21/glass-ceiling-records-song-archive-archive-as-methodology/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

Detecting Drought Stress In Trees From The Air [Switzerland]
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https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/detecting-drought-stress-trees-from-air-eidg-forschungsanstalt-wsl-mrjue <-- shared technical article
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110856 <-- shared paper
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https://www.inverse.com/science/trees-dying-shocking-rates-understanding-save-them <-- shared technical article
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#Umweltbeobachtung #Wald #Trockenheit #Drohnen #Forschung #EnvironmentalMonitoring #Forest #Trees #Drought #Drones #Research #UAV #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #tree #vegetation #climatechange #heatstress #hot #summer #sunlight #discolouration #leaf #leaves #defoliation #impacts #crowns #canopy #water #hydrology #drought #risk #hazard #drone #imagery #survey #nativetree #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #measurement #methodology #drought #coping #Droughtstress #Forest #NDVI #PRI #Xanthophyll #Turgorlosspoint #waterstress #dehydration #mortality #death #dying #loss #hydraulicfailure #biology #botany #canopy

Detecting Drought Stress In Trees From The Air [Switzerland]
--
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/detecting-drought-stress-trees-from-air-eidg-forschungsanstalt-wsl-mrjue <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110856 <-- shared paper
--
https://www.inverse.com/science/trees-dying-shocking-rates-understanding-save-them <-- shared technical article
--
#Umweltbeobachtung #Wald #Trockenheit #Drohnen #Forschung #EnvironmentalMonitoring #Forest #Trees #Drought #Drones #Research #UAV #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #tree #vegetation #climatechange #heatstress #hot #summer #sunlight #discolouration #leaf #leaves #defoliation #impacts #crowns #canopy #water #hydrology #drought #risk #hazard #drone #imagery #survey #nativetree #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #measurement #methodology #drought #coping #Droughtstress #Forest #NDVI #PRI #Xanthophyll #Turgorlosspoint #waterstress #dehydration #mortality #death #dying #loss #hydraulicfailure #biology #botany #canopy

Detecting Drought Stress In Trees From The Air [Switzerland]
--
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/detecting-drought-stress-trees-from-air-eidg-forschungsanstalt-wsl-mrjue <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110856 <-- shared paper
--
https://www.inverse.com/science/trees-dying-shocking-rates-understanding-save-them <-- shared technical article
--
#Umweltbeobachtung #Wald #Trockenheit #Drohnen #Forschung #EnvironmentalMonitoring #Forest #Trees #Drought #Drones #Research #UAV #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #tree #vegetation #climatechange #heatstress #hot #summer #sunlight #discolouration #leaf #leaves #defoliation #impacts #crowns #canopy #water #hydrology #drought #risk #hazard #drone #imagery #survey #nativetree #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #measurement #methodology #drought #coping #Droughtstress #Forest #NDVI #PRI #Xanthophyll #Turgorlosspoint #waterstress #dehydration #mortality #death #dying #loss #hydraulicfailure #biology #botany #canopy

Detecting Drought Stress In Trees From The Air [Switzerland]
--
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/detecting-drought-stress-trees-from-air-eidg-forschungsanstalt-wsl-mrjue <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110856 <-- shared paper
--
https://www.inverse.com/science/trees-dying-shocking-rates-understanding-save-them <-- shared technical article
--
#Umweltbeobachtung #Wald #Trockenheit #Drohnen #Forschung #EnvironmentalMonitoring #Forest #Trees #Drought #Drones #Research #UAV #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #tree #vegetation #climatechange #heatstress #hot #summer #sunlight #discolouration #leaf #leaves #defoliation #impacts #crowns #canopy #water #hydrology #drought #risk #hazard #drone #imagery #survey #nativetree #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #measurement #methodology #drought #coping #Droughtstress #Forest #NDVI #PRI #Xanthophyll #Turgorlosspoint #waterstress #dehydration #mortality #death #dying #loss #hydraulicfailure #biology #botany #canopy

Detecting Drought Stress In Trees From The Air [Switzerland]
--
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/detecting-drought-stress-trees-from-air-eidg-forschungsanstalt-wsl-mrjue <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2025.110856 <-- shared paper
--
https://www.inverse.com/science/trees-dying-shocking-rates-understanding-save-them <-- shared technical article
--
#Umweltbeobachtung #Wald #Trockenheit #Drohnen #Forschung #EnvironmentalMonitoring #Forest #Trees #Drought #Drones #Research #UAV #GIS #spatial #mapping #remotesensing #tree #vegetation #climatechange #heatstress #hot #summer #sunlight #discolouration #leaf #leaves #defoliation #impacts #crowns #canopy #water #hydrology #drought #risk #hazard #drone #imagery #survey #nativetree #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #measurement #methodology #drought #coping #Droughtstress #Forest #NDVI #PRI #Xanthophyll #Turgorlosspoint #waterstress #dehydration #mortality #death #dying #loss #hydraulicfailure #biology #botany #canopy

Visual Clustering Of Urban Environments: Associations With Household And Travel Characteristics
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104546 <-- shared paper
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#UrbanAnalytics #TravelBehavior #BuiltEnvironment #StreetViewImagery #UrbanDesign #TransportationPlanning #Seattle #Equity #DataScience #PSRC #PugetSound #PacificNorthWest #USA #PNW #model #modeling #StreetView #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #remotesensing #StreetView #SVI #BMI #urbanform #travel #routing #travelbehaviour #methodology #visualintelligence #planning #policy #urbanplanning #mobility #visualmetrics #walkability #transit #urbandesign #workflow #GIS #spatial #mapping

Visual Clustering Of Urban Environments: Associations With Household And Travel Characteristics
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104546 <-- shared paper
--
#UrbanAnalytics #TravelBehavior #BuiltEnvironment #StreetViewImagery #UrbanDesign #TransportationPlanning #Seattle #Equity #DataScience #PSRC #PugetSound #PacificNorthWest #USA #PNW #model #modeling #StreetView #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #remotesensing #StreetView #SVI #BMI #urbanform #travel #routing #travelbehaviour #methodology #visualintelligence #planning #policy #urbanplanning #mobility #visualmetrics #walkability #transit #urbandesign #workflow #GIS #spatial #mapping

Visual Clustering Of Urban Environments: Associations With Household And Travel Characteristics
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104546 <-- shared paper
--
#UrbanAnalytics #TravelBehavior #BuiltEnvironment #StreetViewImagery #UrbanDesign #TransportationPlanning #Seattle #Equity #DataScience #PSRC #PugetSound #PacificNorthWest #USA #PNW #model #modeling #StreetView #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #remotesensing #StreetView #SVI #BMI #urbanform #travel #routing #travelbehaviour #methodology #visualintelligence #planning #policy #urbanplanning #mobility #visualmetrics #walkability #transit #urbandesign #workflow #GIS #spatial #mapping

Visual Clustering Of Urban Environments: Associations With Household And Travel Characteristics
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104546 <-- shared paper
--
#UrbanAnalytics #TravelBehavior #BuiltEnvironment #StreetViewImagery #UrbanDesign #TransportationPlanning #Seattle #Equity #DataScience #PSRC #PugetSound #PacificNorthWest #USA #PNW #model #modeling #StreetView #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #remotesensing #StreetView #SVI #BMI #urbanform #travel #routing #travelbehaviour #methodology #visualintelligence #planning #policy #urbanplanning #mobility #visualmetrics #walkability #transit #urbandesign #workflow #GIS #spatial #mapping

Visual Clustering Of Urban Environments: Associations With Household And Travel Characteristics
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104546 <-- shared paper
--
#UrbanAnalytics #TravelBehavior #BuiltEnvironment #StreetViewImagery #UrbanDesign #TransportationPlanning #Seattle #Equity #DataScience #PSRC #PugetSound #PacificNorthWest #USA #PNW #model #modeling #StreetView #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #remotesensing #StreetView #SVI #BMI #urbanform #travel #routing #travelbehaviour #methodology #visualintelligence #planning #policy #urbanplanning #mobility #visualmetrics #walkability #transit #urbandesign #workflow #GIS #spatial #mapping

High Resolution Simulation Of Urban Compound Flooding Under Climate Impacts
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102771 <-- shared paper
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#ClimateChange #FloodResilience #UrbanPlanning #ClimateAdaptation #HydrodynamicModeling #CompoundFlooding #SeaLevelRise #sealevel #Flood #flooding #depth #hazard #risk #riskassessment #Urban #urbanplanning #resilience #NewYorkCity #NYC #Hoboken #NewJersey #infrastructure #damage #cost #economics #vulnerability #urban #hydrodynamic #city #cities #climatechange #extremeweather #model #modeling #spatial #GIS #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #highresolution #pluvia #rainfall #precipitation #fluvial #HurricaneIda #stormsurge #building #structures #topography #drainagesystems #infiltration #emergencyservices #framework #workflow #methodology

High Resolution Simulation Of Urban Compound Flooding Under Climate Impacts
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102771 <-- shared paper
--
#ClimateChange #FloodResilience #UrbanPlanning #ClimateAdaptation #HydrodynamicModeling #CompoundFlooding #SeaLevelRise #sealevel #Flood #flooding #depth #hazard #risk #riskassessment #Urban #urbanplanning #resilience #NewYorkCity #NYC #Hoboken #NewJersey #infrastructure #damage #cost #economics #vulnerability #urban #hydrodynamic #city #cities #climatechange #extremeweather #model #modeling #spatial #GIS #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #highresolution #pluvia #rainfall #precipitation #fluvial #HurricaneIda #stormsurge #building #structures #topography #drainagesystems #infiltration #emergencyservices #framework #workflow #methodology

High Resolution Simulation Of Urban Compound Flooding Under Climate Impacts
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102771 <-- shared paper
--
#ClimateChange #FloodResilience #UrbanPlanning #ClimateAdaptation #HydrodynamicModeling #CompoundFlooding #SeaLevelRise #sealevel #Flood #flooding #depth #hazard #risk #riskassessment #Urban #urbanplanning #resilience #NewYorkCity #NYC #Hoboken #NewJersey #infrastructure #damage #cost #economics #vulnerability #urban #hydrodynamic #city #cities #climatechange #extremeweather #model #modeling #spatial #GIS #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #highresolution #pluvia #rainfall #precipitation #fluvial #HurricaneIda #stormsurge #building #structures #topography #drainagesystems #infiltration #emergencyservices #framework #workflow #methodology

High Resolution Simulation Of Urban Compound Flooding Under Climate Impacts
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102771 <-- shared paper
--
#ClimateChange #FloodResilience #UrbanPlanning #ClimateAdaptation #HydrodynamicModeling #CompoundFlooding #SeaLevelRise #sealevel #Flood #flooding #depth #hazard #risk #riskassessment #Urban #urbanplanning #resilience #NewYorkCity #NYC #Hoboken #NewJersey #infrastructure #damage #cost #economics #vulnerability #urban #hydrodynamic #city #cities #climatechange #extremeweather #model #modeling #spatial #GIS #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #highresolution #pluvia #rainfall #precipitation #fluvial #HurricaneIda #stormsurge #building #structures #topography #drainagesystems #infiltration #emergencyservices #framework #workflow #methodology

High Resolution Simulation Of Urban Compound Flooding Under Climate Impacts
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2026.102771 <-- shared paper
--
#ClimateChange #FloodResilience #UrbanPlanning #ClimateAdaptation #HydrodynamicModeling #CompoundFlooding #SeaLevelRise #sealevel #Flood #flooding #depth #hazard #risk #riskassessment #Urban #urbanplanning #resilience #NewYorkCity #NYC #Hoboken #NewJersey #infrastructure #damage #cost #economics #vulnerability #urban #hydrodynamic #city #cities #climatechange #extremeweather #model #modeling #spatial #GIS #mapping #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #highresolution #pluvia #rainfall #precipitation #fluvial #HurricaneIda #stormsurge #building #structures #topography #drainagesystems #infiltration #emergencyservices #framework #workflow #methodology

Want your paper accepted and not rejected?
🔁 Boost if this helped and drop your best
#WritingTip!
#Academic #Essay #Research #Thesis #Dissertation #ResearchPaper #Citation #References #APA #MLA #ReferenceManagement #Zotero #Mendeley #EndNote #Proofreading #Editing #Revision #Draft #Formatting #Structure #LiteratureReview #Methodology #Results #Discussion #Argument #Evidence #Plagiarism #AcademicIntegrity #PeerReview #WritingProcess #WritingTips #WritingCommunity #GradSchool #PhD #Academia

A workshop of the MLTC Cross- #NIHR Collaboration programme suggests three challenge themes in #multimorbidity research #methodology:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26335565251372222

Wired:
Transparency, standardisation, reproducibility of multimorbidity research made the list!

Tired:
Bullet points in figure 1 have more detail on building methodological capacity than the text. Investing in methodologists (of any kind) is not part mentioned as far as I can see.

#Training #ECRs #Epidemiology #Statistics

A workshop of the MLTC Cross- #NIHR Collaboration programme suggests three challenge themes in #multimorbidity research #methodology:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26335565251372222

Wired:
Transparency, standardisation, reproducibility of multimorbidity research made the list!

Tired:
Bullet points in figure 1 have more detail on building methodological capacity than the text. Investing in methodologists (of any kind) is not part mentioned as far as I can see.

#Training #ECRs #Epidemiology #Statistics

A workshop of the MLTC Cross- #NIHR Collaboration programme suggests three challenge themes in #multimorbidity research #methodology:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26335565251372222

Wired:
Transparency, standardisation, reproducibility of multimorbidity research made the list!

Tired:
Bullet points in figure 1 have more detail on building methodological capacity than the text. Investing in methodologists (of any kind) is not part mentioned as far as I can see.

#Training #ECRs #Epidemiology #Statistics

A workshop of the MLTC Cross- #NIHR Collaboration programme suggests three challenge themes in #multimorbidity research #methodology:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26335565251372222

Wired:
Transparency, standardisation, reproducibility of multimorbidity research made the list!

Tired:
Bullet points in figure 1 have more detail on building methodological capacity than the text. Investing in methodologists (of any kind) is not part mentioned as far as I can see.

#Training #ECRs #Epidemiology #Statistics

#Development #Approaches
Fixing the fun front-end stuff? · Fix the important front-end stuff too https://ilo.im/166qo0

_____
#Methodology #Workflows #WebDev #Frontend #Accessibility #SemanticHTML #HTML #CSS

🗓️ Another date for your diaries - CPC-CG's Athina Vlachantoni is also a speaker at 2025's final National Centre for Research Methods #NCRM Data Resources Training Network webinar on 19 November:

'Exploring #digital life, #technology change & attitudes to #AI through national #datasets'

Register: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/e7fdcac7-be93-4c40-b4d1-0e634c5b2e52@c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77

#demography #population #socialscience #methodology #researchmethods #datasets #nationaldatasets #longitudinal

https://garyowl.com/2025/06/30/how-visionaries-build-disruptive-companies/

#disruptive innovation, #startup, #business #methodology, #product-market fit, #customer development, #business model canvas, #lean startup, #empirical validation, #entrepreneurship theory

Colluding Rhino Poachers Exploit Space–Time Variation In Opportunity And Risk
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https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13106 <-- shared paper
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“[R]esearch analysing over 500 rhino poaching incidents and exploring what these patterns reveal about the behaviours of poachers, rangers, and rhinos. [Their] study highlights concerning evidence of criminal syndicate infiltration, space–time targeting by poachers, and how behavioural insights can inform effective responses—from targeted dehorning to bolstering ranger resilience…”
#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #wildlifeconservation #wildlife #conservation #statistics #geostatistics #rhino #rhinohorn #rhinoceros #poaching #rangers #criminal #syndicate #mafia #criminalsyndicate #activity #crime #illegal #behaviour #dehorning #rangerstation #protection #humanimpacts #ecosystem #habitat #deterrencetheory #deterrence #methodology #tourist #tourism #reserve #spatiotemporal #opportunity #risk #hazard #riskassessment #Africa #SouthAfrica #alldataisspatial
@Sabi Sand Nature Reserve

#Zoomposium with Dr. Dr. #Walter #von #Lucadou: “On the #borders between #physics and #psychology - #hauntings, #ghosts and other #physical #phenomena”

It turned out that von Lucadou is anything but a #spiritual #ghosthunter, but on the contrary is rather located in #science and #rationally tries to fathom the #physical-explainable phenomena with #empirical ##methodology.

More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2024/03/12/grenzen_physik_psychologie/

or: https://youtu.be/TPCADLkSBWM

New in our electronic #collection:

➡️ Levels of Explanation

🔗 https://academic.oup.com/book/59296

#OpenAccess #OpenScience #PhilosophyOfScience #philosophy #methodology #reductionism #metaphysics

📖 As part of the #REWIND project, Alba Comino published ‘Intertwining Narrative and Technology: Reinterpreting European Cultural Heritage through the Voices of Latin American Women Writers’ in the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, where she describes the #methodology used in the project.

🔓 In #OpenAccess: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/ijhac.2024.0333

@histodons
@litstudies

#Histodons #DigitalHumanities #LitStudies #CulturalHeritage #Ontology #DeepData #SentimentAnalysis #WomenWriters

I'm in that uncomfortable position smack in the middle between too much (quantity of tasks) to do and not enough (variety) to do. In this situation I usually defer to adding more variety and doing things not on my immediate todo list. I also touch a lot of tasks without committing to completing them.

I realize this can be frustrating to the people I work with.

#workhabits #work #methodology #todo #tcb #rainyday

https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/7717/
(ouch for the metals idea…)
"…we critique the #methodology that the authors outline and present previously non-disclosed data and metadata directly related to the experiments they present.…The data and #metadata that Sweetman et al. omit significantly alters how one interprets the results and directly undermines their claims…we suggest that the hypothesis that #polymetallicnodules produce oxygen can be wholly rejected…"

#darkoxygen #deepsearesearch

The proceedings of the 14th International #SpaceSyntax symposium are now published, containing papers from scholars all around the world on topics such as #architecture #ArchitectureResearch #ComplexBuildings #Urbanism #UrbanMorphology #methodology #EvidenceBasedDesign #SpatialCognition and #SpaceUseBehaviours

https://www.tabedizioni.it/shop/product/space-syntax-symposium-14-1734?order=ordering+desc&open_access=1
#OpenAccess

Statistical #consulting guidelines for #EarlyCareerResearchers in #psychiatry and mental health– beyond ChatGPT. Joint work with Elise Dusseldorp at Leiden University published today in @thebjpsych (BJPsych Advances) | Read it here in full: https://bit.ly/3ZpjMd8

Feel free to share it and your feedback is welcome.
#Statistics #Research #methodology #statisticalliteracy #mentalhealthprofessionals

«Unveiling the Art and Science of Virtual HUMINT» is coming VERY soon. The second pre-print is already in the oven.

#HUMINT #CyberHUMINT #VirtualHUMINT #STIX #Methodology #Frameworks #Books

«Unveiling the Art and Science of Virtual HUMINT» is coming VERY soon. The second pre-print is already in the oven.

#HUMINT #CyberHUMINT #VirtualHUMINT #STIX #Methodology #Frameworks #Books

«Unveiling the Art and Science of Virtual HUMINT» is coming VERY soon. The second pre-print is already in the oven.

#HUMINT #CyberHUMINT #VirtualHUMINT #STIX #Methodology #Frameworks #Books

«Unveiling the Art and Science of Virtual HUMINT» is coming VERY soon. The second pre-print is already in the oven.

#HUMINT #CyberHUMINT #VirtualHUMINT #STIX #Methodology #Frameworks #Books

«Unveiling the Art and Science of Virtual HUMINT» is coming VERY soon. The second pre-print is already in the oven.

#HUMINT #CyberHUMINT #VirtualHUMINT #STIX #Methodology #Frameworks #Books

In September the U.S. Census Bureau plans to meet with disability community stakeholders to better understand challenges in data availability and access for their community.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/disability-data-needs.html

#Disability #Data #DataScience #Survey #Methodology #Equity #DataEquity

This meme has crossed my feed in a number of places lately. I’m sharing it for debate, not for approval or agreement. If you share from my post, please leave my commentary intact. This has been a public service announcement.

#Scientism is very nearly a straw man. I’m willing to concede that there are some people who treat #science like a religion, but their numbers are tiny and they have zero influence on the conduct of research AFAICT. Anti-science #zealots who come up with memes like this, OTOH, are numerous and disturbingly influential.

It’s also amusing how the meme assumes #epistemology is a gold standard against which other intellectual pursuits must be measured. The author assigns to #philosophy the same unquestionable authority he accuses others of assigning to science.

So I’ll stake my claim: scientific #methodology—in the literal sense of the study of methods—has done more to illuminate “how we know what we know” in the last couple of centuries than formal epistemology has done in millennia. If this be scientism, make the most of it.

#HigherEducation #Pedagogy #Teaching #Cirriculum hashtag#Research #Methodology #ResearchMethodology

Performance And Accuracy Of Cross-Section Tracking Methods For Hydromorphological Habitat Assessment In Wadable Rivers With Sparse Canopy Conditions
--
https://doi.org/10.1002/rra.4252 <-- shared research article
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #water #hydrology #streams #depth #bathymetry #RTK #GNSS #GPS #CPGPS #hydromorphological #hydromorphology #riverrestoration #monitoring #research #corrleation #metrics #turbidity #wadeable #canopy #vegetation #watermanagement #survey #efficient #lowcost #robust #methodology #comparasion #interpolation #SarineRiver #Fribourg #Switzerland #biodiversity #habitat #ecosystem #waterdepth #manual #treecanopy #tree #streamgaging #streamgauging #remotesensing #stream #topobathy

Major #trans #health #orgs slam the #CassReview for its "#selective & #inconsistent use of #evidence," claiming it #deprives #trans #youth of #essential #care

#Activists #criticize the #lack of robust #methodology & #oversight, causing #distress among #patients & #families post-#Tavistock closure.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #UK #Tories #TERFS #NHS #Hate #Bigotry #Violence #Genocide #Discrimination #Transphobia #GateKeeping #WorkingAsIntended #TERFIsland

https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/05/23/trans-health-bodies-cass-review-evidence/