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Despite a large number of available techniques around Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP), no holistic framework exists which supports researchers and practitioners to organise knowledge when designing, comparing and evaluating NLP applications. This paper addresses this lack of a holistic framework by developing a taxonomy for Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing. Based on a systematic literature review as proposed by Webster and Watson [1] and vom Brocke et al. [2] and the iterative taxonomy development process of Nickerson et al. [3] we derived five novel dimensions and 38 characteristics based on a sample of 205 papers. Our research suggests, that a Deep Learning NLP approach can be distinguished by five dimensions which were partly derived from the CRISP-DM methodology: application understanding, data preparation, modeling, learning technique and evaluation. We, therefore, hope to provide guidance and support for researchers and practitioners when using Deep Learning for NLP to design, compare and evaluate NLP applications.

In the last decade, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have been more and more established for the screening and detection of diseases and pathologies, as well as for describing interactions between measures where classical methods are too complex or fail. The purpose of this paper is to model the measured postoperative position of an intraocular lens implant after cataract surgery, based on preoperatively assessed biometric effect sizes using techniques of machine learning.In this study, we enrolled 249 eyes of patients who underwent elective cataract surgery at Augenklinik Castrop-Rauxel. Eyes were measured preoperatively with the IOLMaster 700 (Carl Zeiss Meditec), as well as preoperatively and postoperatively with the Casia 2 OCT (Tomey). Based on preoperative effect sizes axial length, corneal thickness, internal anterior chamber depth, thickness of the crystalline lens, mean corneal radius and corneal diameter a selection of 17 machine learning algorithms were tested for prediction performance for calculation of internal anterior chamber depth (AQD_post) and axial position of equatorial plane of the lens in the pseudophakic eye (LEQ_post).The 17 machine learning algorithms (out of 4 families) varied in root mean squared/mean absolute prediction error between 0.187/0.139 mm and 0.255/0.204 mm (AQD_post) and 0.183/0.135 mm and 0.253/0.206 mm (LEQ_post), using 5-fold cross validation techniques. The Gaussian Process Regression Model using an exponential kernel showed the best performance in terms of root mean squared error for prediction of AQDpost and LEQpost. If the entire dataset is used (without splitting for training and validation data), comparison of a simple multivariate linear regression model vs. the algorithm with the best performance showed a root mean squared prediction error for AQD_post/LEQ_post with 0.188/0.187 mm vs. the best performance Gaussian Process Regression Model with 0.166/0.159 mm.In this paper we wanted to show the principles of supervised machine learning applied to prediction of the measured physical postoperative axial position of the intraocular lenses. Based on our limited data pool and the algorithms used in our setting, the benefit of machine learning algorithms seems to be limited compared to a standard multivariate regression model.In den vergangenen Jahren wurden zunehmend Systeme der künstlichen Intelligenz in der Medizin etabliert, die Pathologien oder Erkrankungen erkennen und schwer zu erfassende Zusammenhänge zwischen Eingangsgrößen beschreiben sollen. Ziel der Studie ist es, anhand von biometrischen Messgrößen vor der Kataraktoperation die physikalische Position der Intraokularlinse nach der Operation mit Verfahren des maschinellen Lernens vorherzusagen.249 Augen von Patienten, die sich zur elektiven Kataraktoperation an der Augenklinik Castrop-Rauxel vorstellten, wurden mit dem IOLMaster 700 (Carl Zeiss Meditec) und vor sowie nach der Operation mit dem Casia 2 (Tomey) untersucht. Aus den Effektgrößen Augenlänge, Hornhautdicke, interne Vorderkammertiefe, Linsendicke, mittlerer Hornhautradius und Hornhautdurchmesser wurde eine Auswahl von 17 Algorithmen des Maschinenlernens auf ihre Vorhersagequalität hin getestet für die Bestimmung der postoperativen internen Vorderkammertiefe (AQD_post) und der Lage des Linsenäquators relativ zum Hornhautscheitel (LEQ_post).Die 17 Modelle (4 Algorithmusfamilien) variierten im mittleren quadratischen/mittleren absoluten Vorhersagefehler zwischen 0,187/0,139 mm und 0,255/0,204 mm (AQD_post) und 0,183/0,135 mm und 0,253/0,206 mm (LEQ_post) bei einer Kreuzvalidierung (5-fold cross validation). Der Algorithmus mit der besten Performance war bei beiden Vorhersagen ein Gaussian Process Regression Model mit einem exponentiellen Kernel. Prüft man am gesamten Datensatz (ohne Aufteilung in Trainings- und Validierungsdaten) ein einfaches multiples lineares Regressionsmodell gegen den Algorithmus mit der besten Performance, so ergibt sich bei der Vorhersage von AQD_post/LEQ_post ein mittlerer quadratischer Vorhersagefehler von 0,188/0,187 mm gegenüber dem Gaussian Process Regression Model mit 0,166/0,159 mm.In der Arbeit soll das Prinzip des überwachten Maschinenlernens in der Anwendung auf die Nachbildung der physikalisch gemessenen postoperativen axialen Position von Intraokularlinsen gezeigt werden. Bei den vorliegenden Daten ist der Gewinn durch die Verwendung von Algorithmen des maschinellen Lernens (bei den hier verwendeten Algorithmen) gegenüber einem multiplen linearen Regressionsansatz gering.

With English functioning as the global lingua franca of the modern world, actively employed to discuss, describe and promote all there is under the heaven, the paper focuses on the linguistic mechanisms of English “re-nationalization”, that is its adaptation to other cultures, originally external to it, which it might be called to describe. Since the goal of this paper is to illustrate that the secondary cultural orientation of language follows certain general principles and the linguistic mechanisms are the same regardless of the culture being described, we left the culture factor as the only variable (Russian vs. Transoxanian region), restricting the empirical data to texts similar in genre and addressee (culturological research for relatively wide readership) and temporal parameters (time of creation). The selected empirical data was then analysed on the phono-graphical, lexical and architectonic levels in relation to the way they are affected by the text’s secondary cultural orientation. The conducted comparison of two independent researches dedicated to the Russian and Transoxanian region’s cultures revealed some striking similarities, which are by no means coincidental. Rather the results summed up in the present paper confirm our hypothesis that a language adaptation to the task of describing an external culture is based on certain strategies; at that both the scope of these strategies and the factors affecting their choice are universal and show no dependence on the culture being described.

Hardening is the process of configuring IT systems to ensure the security of the systems' components and data they process or store. The complexity of contemporary IT infrastructures, however, renders manual security hardening and maintenance a daunting task. In many organizations, security-configuration guides expressed in the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) are used as a basis for hardening, but these guides by themselves provide no means for automatically implementing the required configurations. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides. In many organizations, security-configuration guides expressed in the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) are used as a basis for hardening, but these guides by themselves provide no means for automatically implementing the required configurations. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides.

This paper presents a markup model for encoding non-SI units and measurements. Historical texts contain many examples of compound measurements, composed of sets of units and numerical components. Instead of using the element, which requires a single set of @unit and @quantity, we propose a newly defined set of tags for encoding idiosyncratic measurement semantics, namely (model.encodingDescPart), (model.global and contained by ), (model.measureLike), and a relevant attribute @factor (which shows factors of numerical values given in a referenced element). All of these elements and attributes will be included in the TEI P5 Guidelines, and they are especially useful when encoding units that are not based on the decimal system. Though this paper offers example encodings based on a Japanese historical source, the Engi-Shiki, this model is also applicable to the markup of units used for measurement within various cultural spheres other than Japan.

The paper publishes an icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, a Royal Door, and two parts of an epistyle with the Deesis scene. This group of works, which once decorated the iconostasis in the Church of Saint George Mouzeviki (c. 1550-1560) in Kastoria, belongs to the creative opus of the painter Anthony (zographos Antonios), known for his work at Mount Athos (1537-1552). The paper also argues that the frescoes in the Church of St. George, preserved in fragments and in a poor state of repair, can also be attributed to the same artist.

The existence of the standards for transmitting documents in electronic format, which ensure their import without being operated once again in the information system of the client, does not exclude the process of inventory of the goods received for identification, inaccuracies that may occur. This paper present a software solution which has been made for optimizing inventory process by using of bar code scanners on Android devices. For this we have made research on client site to identifying needs, and we have to do research for joining different technology together to achieve the main scope.

The approach of this paper is a retrospective one. It is an attempt to show that many important ideas of Herodotus, a great ancestor of Aristotle, have influenced his practical philosophy. The paper focuses specially on several topics from the Histories of Herodotus, which have found a resonance in the Nicomachean ethics and in the Politics of Aristotle. The main ones in respect of the ethical theory are: the different forms of justice and the just as for example the super-human justice, the just in the family relations, the judicial just and the just in the polis or the larger human community. Book Epsilon of the Nicomachean Ethics is indebted to Herodotus in several points. In respect of Aristotles' political theory, there are two topics in the History of Herodotus which deserve a special interest: firstly, the conversation of the three noble Persians, who discuss the six basic types of political order and organization of power-and-submission in a state or city-state (in book ІІІ, 80-82); this becomes a paradigm for the next typologies of Plato (in the Republic and the Statesman) and Aristotle (in the Politics); secondly, the importance of personal freedom, the equity of the speaking (discussing?) men on the agora, and the supremacy of law for the well-being of any community and its peaceful future. The legacy of Herodotus is obvious in many anthropological and ethical concepts of Aristotle, especially in his most read and quoted ethical writing and in his Politics

This paper restores the historical context of Milindapaha . The text is unique, because it is one of the very few documents of Ancient India, in which one of the authors is considered a Greek ( yavana ) as a participant in the dialog. To reconstruct the context of the book, the basic archeological data about the Indo-Greek Kingdom, including epigraphics, are summed up, as well as there are analyzed some references to the kingdom given in the Mahāvaṃsa , the earliest chronicle of Sri Lanka. These mentions in the Mahāvaṃsa are matched with the numismatics of Ceylon. From this analysis it is concluded that the document of Milindapaha was most likely created in Gāndhārī in the interval from the beginning of the 1st century B.C. to the end of the 1st century A.D., i.e. during the period of the domination of the syncretic culture of the North of India, combining Buddhism with certain elements of Hellenism. The treatise of Milindapaha was then preserved in Sri Lanka's tradition by continuing good political contacts with the Roman Empire after 400 A.D., that is, after the collapse of the Kushan and the Western Kshatrapas, the last dynasties that had previously preserved elements of Hellenism in the Indian subcontinent. The philosophical meaning of the treatise is then considered and it is concluded that in the text we can find direct references to the proto-Nyāya with the requirement to verify premises by examples. But the logical teaching of Milindapaha is far more archaic than the teaching of Nyāyasūtra , because only two sources ( pramāṇa ) of true knowledge are implicitly used: paccakkha (obvious) and anumāna (inference), and instead of the two verification methods called udāhārana and upamā , only one verification method called opamma is offered.

International audience; Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) are large datasets containing spatiotemporal information about the surface of the Earth. In order to exploit the potential of such series, SITS analysis techniques have been designed for various applications such as earthquake monitoring, urban expansion assessment or glacier dynamic analysis. In this paper, we present an unsupervised technique for browsing SITS in preliminary explorations, before deciding whether to start deeper and more time consuming analyses. Such methods are lacking in today’s analyst toolbox, especially when it comes to stimulating the reuse of the ever growing list of available SITS. The method presented in this paper builds a summary of a SITS in the form of a set of maps depicting spatiotemporal phenomena. These maps are selected using an entropy-based ranking and a swap randomization technique. The approach is general and can handle either optical or radar SITS. As illustrated on both kinds of SITS, meaningful summaries capturing crustal deformation and environmental phenomena are produced. They can be computed on demand or precomputed once and stored together with the SITS for further usage.

In the paper the method is presented how to update traditional digitalised dictionaries based on comparison of the dictionary lemmas and a big corpus. Hunspell platform is used for generation of all the word forms from the dictionary lemmas. 6th edition of The Dictionary of Modern Lithuanian was chosen for its comparison with the lexical data from The Joint Corpus of Lithuanian. The outcome of the comparison was two lists of non-overlapping lexis: the list of the dictionary lemmas unused in the present-day Lithuanian and the list of the dictionary gaps, i.e., frequently used words and word forms ignored by the dictionary. The latter is discussed in greater detail to give lexicographers a clue for updates.

The paper addresses a recently discovered rock-hewn chapel in the Davitgareji Desert, which has preserved late twelfth-early thirteenth century wall paintings dominated by a cycle of St Demetrios. The cycle, which finds no parallel in Georgia, is remarkable in many regards and raises important questions as to the chronology and geographical spread of such cycles, the provenance of unknown iconographical redactions, the history of the relics of St Demetrios, the function of the chapel dedicated to the saint, and the interaction between Georgian and Byzantine artistic and cultural traditions, in general.

The syntactic parser ARTEMIS (Automatically Representing Text Meaning via an Interlingua-based System) is a prototype intended to process natural language within the environment of the Functional Grammar Knowledge Base (FunGramKB) (Perinan-Pascual & Arcas-Tunez, 2010). Different from other parsing devices, ARTEMIS is grounded on two functional linguistic models: Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Van Valin & La Polla, 1997; Van Valin, 2005) and the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM) (Ruiz de Mendoza & Mairal Uson, 2008). However, certain adjustments have to be made to both models in order to meet the requirements derived from the fact that ARTEMIS follows the paradigm of Unification Grammars, in such a way that to comply with this paradigm, the GDE (Grammar Development Environment) within ARTEMIS needs to integrate two types of constructs: a catalogue of Attribute-Value Matrixes (AVMs) to describe grammatical units, and a set of production rules (grammatical, lexical and constructional) to allow it to produce a feature based grammar. It is the aim of this paper to give an overview of the investigation carried out so far within ARTEMIS in relation to these two aspects. We will do so by revisiting the literature in relation to the adjustments made to the linguistic models, especially to the RRG, and by reviewing the efforts made to describe the units and design the rules necessary for the parsing of simple sentences in English. Our paper will conclude by pointing at prospective research needed for the completion of this project.

E.J. Lowe was a prominent and theistically–inclined philosopher who developed and defended a four–category ontology with roots in Aristotle’s Categories. But Lowe engaged in little philosophical theology and said even less about how a divine being might fit into his considered ontology. This paper explores ways in which the reality of a divine being might be squared with Lowe’s ontology. I motivate the exploration with a puzzle that suggests Lowe must reject either divine aseity or the traditional view that God is a substance. After showing that the puzzle cannot be overcome by rejecting one of its premises, I consider ways in which Lowe might try to reject the puzzle wholesale. I argue that the best way to reject the puzzle is to countenance a fifth fundamental category, the category of supernatural substance.

This paper introduces a framework for managing bias in machine learning (ML) projects. When ML-capabilities are used for decision making, they frequently affect the lives of many people. However, bias can lead to low model performance and misguided business decisions, resulting in fatal financial, social, and reputational impacts. This framework provides an overview of potential biases and corresponding mitigation methods for each phase of the well-established process model CRISP-DM. Eight distinct types of biases and 25 mitigation methods were identified through a literature review and allocated to six phases of the reference model in a synthesized way. Furthermore, some biases are mitigated in different phases as they occur. Our framework helps to create clarity in these multiple relationships, thus assisting project managers in avoiding biased ML-outcomes.

The goal of this paper is to offer a model to quantify the level of complexity of the linguistic content of a corpus in Italian extracted from OpenWHO, WHO’s health emergency learning platform (Rohloff et al. 2018; Zhao et al. 2019). The nature of the computational ranking costs of a typology of relativization strategies is investigated. To reach this goal, the results of the corpus are compared with other three syntactic annotated corpora from Italian belonging to different genres (news, social media, encyclopedic entries, legal). The results show that online learning contents in public health reduce complex structures in syntactic terms. The case study presented here provides a methodology to quantify syntactic and computational complexity in corpus studies.

Expression of time is an important field in linguistic research. In Lithuanian linguistics, the study of time has focused first and foremost on tense and aspect systems. Therefore, Lithuanian language has developed a big diversity of means to encode time, e.g. noun cases ( vasarą ‘in summer’) and noun phrases ( liepos vakarą ‘in July evening’), prepositional phrases ( po darbo ‘after work’), adverbs ( netrukus ‘soon’), subordinate clauses ( kai nustos lyti ‘when it stops raining’). All of them despite their different grammatical status are suggested to be called temporal adverbials. ‘Adverbial’ is a quite new notion in Lithuanian linguistics, it was first presented in the studies of stance adverbials but is also convenient in the field of linguistic expression of time. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing a semantic-functional class of temporal adverbials in Lithuanian linguistics and to show their position in the system of means that encode time. The second part of the paper presents a few semantic models of the temporal adverbials made by foreign linguists and the semantic research of Lithuanian temporal means that should be regarded as temporal adverbials. Keywords: linguistic expression of time; temporal adverbial; adverb; tense; aspect; lexical aspect; deixis of time DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Lietkalb.2016.10.9923

In this paper we will investigate the nature of deverbal nominals across languages. Deverbal nouns are typically classified according to their word-formation model: affixation and conver-sion. Our study will compare the word formation of deverbal nominals in Slavic (Croatian, Slovenian and Polish) and Romance languages (Italian, French and Spanish) in order to show (i) that affixation corresponds to a specific mode of morphological operations and (ii) that the differences and similarities between deverbal nominals of these two language families follow from the properties of the base verbs. Furthermore, our analysis will try to shed some light on the distinction between nouns and verbs. The paper comprises three major thematic parts. The first part briefly reviews the basic notions and theoretical assumptions of Generative Grammar regarding word formation. We have especially tried to explain those notions that we draw from Distributed Morphology. This part further exposes the theoretical framework that is used in this paper. In the second part, deverbal nominals in Slavic languages are analysed and de-scribed. We primarily investigate the Slavic languages, since in these languages morphology plays a larger role in the construction of deverbal nouns. The third part contains an investiga-tion of the phrasal structure of nominalizations across the Romance languages. We close the work with a general conclusion about the behaviour of deverbal nouns in these two groups of languages. We concentrate mainly on the differences between the phrasal architecture of nom-inalizations and correspondent verbal constructions.

This paper investigates the effect of mobile payment on the adoption and use of traditional payment instruments such as cash, checks, and credit, debit and prepaid cards at the point of sale (POS). Data are from a 2012 representative survey on consumer payment choice in the United States. Using discrete-choice random utility models to simulate consumer behavior, the estimation provides two major findings. First, mobile payment does not replace physical payment cards, but is likely to substitute for paper-based payment methods such as cash and checks at the adoption stage. Second, mobile payment does not statistically significantly influence the choice of payment means at the POS in terms of usage. However, there is suggestive evidence that it is complementary to card payments and a substitute for paper-based payment instruments. The findings highlight the potential social welfare gains of mobile payment and provide key insights into challenging issues for the private industry sector. This paper furthermore offers novel evidence on the impact of mobile payment on the use and adoption of existing payment instruments and contributes to the literature on consumer payment choice.

In 1950, Turing proposed to answer the question “can machines think” by staging an “imitation game” where a hidden computer attempts to mislead a human interrogator into believing it is human. While the cybercrime of bots defrauding people by posing as Nigerian princes and lascivious e-girls indicates humans have been losing the Turing test for some time, this paper focuses on “deepfakes,” artificial neural nets generating realistic audio-visual simulations of public figures, as a variation on the imitation game. Deepfakes blur the lines between fact and fiction, making it possible for the mere fiction of a nuclear apocalypse to make itself real. Seeing oneself becoming another, doing and saying strange things as if demonically possessed, triggers a disillusionment of our sense of self as human cloning and sinister doppelgängers become a reality that’s open-source and free. Along with electronic club music, illicit drugs, movies like Ex Machina and the coming sex robots, the primarily pornographic deepfakes are how the aliens invade by hijacking human drives in the pursuit of a machinic desire. Contrary to the popular impression that deepfakes exemplify the post-truth phenomenon of fake news, they mark an anarchic, massively distributed anti-fascist resistance network capable of sabotaging centralized, authoritarian institutions’ hegemonic narratives. That the only realistic “solutions” for detecting deepfakes have been to build better machines capable of exposing them ultimately suggests that human judgment is soon to be discarded into the dustbin of history. From now on, only a machine can win the Turing test against another machine. Author(s): Vincent Le Title (English): The Deepfakes to Come: A Turing Cop’s Nightmare Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 8-18 Page Count: 11 Citation (English): Vincent Le, “The Deepfakes to Come: A Turing Cop’s Nightmare,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 8-18. Author Biography Vincent Le, Monash University Vincent Le is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Monash University. He has taught philosophy at Deakin University and The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. He has published in Hypatia, Cosmos and History, Art + Australia, Šum, Horror Studies and Colloquy, among other journals. His recent work focuses on the reckless propagation of the will to critique.

The institution of ostracism has been considered a central practice of the Athenian democracy during the fifth century B.C.: the purpose of its establishment was to prevent tyranny. Anyway, according to Athenaion Politeia (22, 6), from Xanthippos’ ostracism (484) Athenians started to use the practice to remove from Athens any person who seemed to be too great, even if unconnected with tyranny. Among the ostraka against Xanthippos found during the Agora Excavations, one seems to be remarkable because it contains an elegiac couplet which stated why the father of Perikles should be ostracized. Interpretations of the text differ in details, but the general sense is that Xanthippos should be condemned because he did most wrong of all the leaders. Analyzing the inscription and the events of the Aeginetan War (Her. VI 88-93), this paper supposes that the ostracism of Xanthippos could have been caused by the rising figure of Themistokles, who condemned the Alkmeonid associate for his failed attack against Aegina. In fact, this defeat elicited a sacrilege against one of Nikodromos’ supporter. As the word ἀλeιτeρο῀ ν, inscribed on the ostrakon, seems to suggest, this event could have been related to the Cylonian curse.

As a student of intellectual, religious, and cultural developments in areas of the Chinese cultural sphere, my initial motivation for engaging with digital texts thirty years ago was to open up the new possibilities that the digital medium offered to researchers, without losing any of the affordances of a traditional printed edition. This requirement includes use of texts for reading, translating, annotating, quoting, and publishing, thus integrating with the whole of the scholarly workflow. At that time theories of electronic texts started to appear and the Text Encoding Initiative had already begun to create a common text model and interchange specification, based mainly on European languages. For East Asian texts, things were much more complicated because of different and quickly evolving character encoding standards, different textual traditions and approaches to text editing, as well as different institutional embedding. In this paper, I will look back at these developments, first to recount some of the history, albeit from a strictly personal perspective, but also to take stock of the situation and consider where we are now, how we got there, and what remains to be done to realize the dream of the universal digital text, easily shared and annotated, but still tractable, verifiable, and authoritative.

The noun phrase (NP), one of the key elements of a sentence, can reveal the characteristics of a learner’s linguistic competence. The present study focuses on actual decomposition of NP in the predicate construction. This is when the attribute elements of a noun phrase are included in the predicate construct as factor-actualized determinants. In this position, the copula verb is merely a grammatical means of allowing the attribute to become a predicate (Gaulmyn, Basset 1991: 177).The aim of the study being a more thorough investigation of the criteria and peculiarities of producing this type of predicate constructs in learner language, the present research is based on the empirical material from the Lithuanian learner corpus. The paper briefly discusses the concept of the predicate construction and describes the process of compiling the learner corpus as well as the principles of data selection. The analysis of the NP in a predicate construction is then presented, and the characteristic cases from the corpus data are examined. The main limitation of the present study is related to the scope of the learner corpus. Having summarized the results of the quantitative and qualitative research, the following conclusions were formulated. The learner language is dominated by NP predicate constructions with an adjective more often than a noun. As to the verb conjunction, the typical attribute verb être ‘to be’ was the only one widely used in the corpus under investigation. The analysis of the corpus data also revealed a number of specific errors that are typical of the learners’ written language. In general, the predictive constructions in the learners’ language are characterized by the omission of redundancy tags in the grammatical categories of gender and number. The analysis of the learner corpus provided a broader look at the NP in a predicate construction, highlighting the simplicity, conciseness and repetition of this construct. The results of the study are important for a more comprehensive description of the learners’ language, for solving problems in foreign language analysis, and for contributing to the quality of teaching and learning the French language.

This paper aims to present a particular role-play technique called radio role-play developed specifically for the use in ELT classrooms. The technique is defined within the context of drama education and language teaching, and characterized in terms of its unique features. Practical examples from teaching practice are provided. Any kind of teaching material (text/recording) can serve as an input for radio role-play. The content is contextualized within the fictional broadcast studio as the students take on roles of a host and their guest(s) ‐ usually characters from the textbook articles, recordings, or any other teaching material. The setting of a radio studio is unique in terms of its close relation to a real studio setting ‐ sitting down at a table, facing the partner, possible use of microphones, jingles, soundscapes, etc. At the same time the setting provides protection, a sense of anonymity and safety, which results in high engagement levels. In practice, the radio role-play is organized as pair or group work, and the tasks are performed simultaneously. The outcomes of preliminary qualitative research (probe) carried out with high-school students aged 17-18 at B2 level are presented. 1 Origins and development This paper aims to present a technique that emerged and evolved from the author’s teaching practice. At the beginning there was an inspiration and personal experience with improvised performances taking place in a fictional radio studio, the idea of which later naturally infiltrated in the author’s English teaching practice. What first was an intuitive experimenting using the general concept was later transformed through reflective practice into a role-play technique presented in this writing. For the purpose of this paper, role-play will be understood as a technique commonlyusedinlanguageteachingtodevelopfluencyandpossiblyspontaneity and expression of emotions (Holden 1981: 1; Maley and Duff 2009: 1-2). Larsen-Freeman (2000: 80; 134) illustrates an effective use of role-play by different EFL methods such as suggestopedia or communicative language teaching throughout the history of English language teaching. In the teaching

In this paper we present our multicopter flight assistance software uavRC, which bears on a distributed system with interchangeable MAV-drivers and a browser-based user interface that can be used on any computer, tablet or smartphone. The software components can be distributed on different computers and are even executable on a Raspberry Pi. The components communicate over a well-defined interface. One module is the browser based user interface, another module is the MAV driver. There are additional modules like a task-scheduler, a path-planer and many more. Currently the software is in beta stage, so there is still a lot of work in progress. With this paper we focus on the software architecture.

The goal of this paper is to offer a cross-linguistic analysis of the most commonly occurring additive focus adverbs used in Italian, French and English – namely anche, aussi and also – on the basis of a corpus of written texts. The corpus used in this paper consists of comparable online news in Italian, French and English amounting to approximately 750000 words. In line with previous findings, our results show that there are important quantitative and qualitative differences between It. anche, Fr. aussi and E. also. These items differ not only in their overall frequency of use but also in the specific syntactic configurations in which they occur when they associate with the Subject of a canonical sentence. These differences are partly enhanced by the fact that this paper concentrates on a non-prototypical configuration, i. e. on the cases in which the canonical Subject coincides with a new entity while the Predicate is maintained.

Although the ODD (One Document Does it all) language is normally used to create TEI customizations or extensions, it is also a highly effective tool for editors working in other XML markup languages. This paper will discuss the use of ODD to define a highly constrained schema for HTML5 that will enforce stylistic rules and encoding practices, define custom attributes and value lists, and enable easier editing and validation of project content in the Oxygen XML Editor environment. I will provide a brief history of the project, whose first incarnation, created with the Dreamweaver HTML editor, was somewhat chaotically coded, and show how the implementation of an ODD-based schema provides huge advantages for authors, editors, and encoders, as well as substantially simplifying the code itself.

espanolEn este trabajo se examinan las relaciones entre el poder absoluto y el lenguaje. Los campos de concentracion del regimen nacionalsocialista se entienden como el espacio donde se materializa la maxima expresion del totalitarismo. Al convertirse en sociedades forzadamente multilingues desde el inicio de la guerra, la lengua alemana puede convertirse, mas que nunca, en un instrumento mas de opresion al servicio del sistema: se deforma para convertirse practicamente en un protolenguaje violento yrudimentario, y su conocimiento por parte de los reclusos se relaciona siempre con las perspectivas de supervivencia. Ademas, se desarrolla una lengua franca que incorpora rasgos de varios idiomas hablados por los deportados; sirve para la comunicacion entre los prisioneros y pone de manifiesto las estructuras sociales del campo. En este contexto, surge inevitablemente la figura del interprete concentracionario, el enlace comunicativo entre persecutores y perseguidos. El estudio de su comportamiento parece de especial interes para poder alcanzar conclusiones sobre la mediacion interlinguistica en espacios de maxima presion. EnglishThis paper examines the relationships between absolute power and language. Nazi concentration camps embody the space where the maximum expression of totalitarianism was put into practice. By becoming forcedly multilingual societies from the onset of the war, the German language grew to be, more than ever, an instrument of oppression at the service of the system: deformed and distorted, it practically evolved into a violent and rudimentary protolanguage. Being able to acquire and use this new form of speech was directly related to the prisoners’ prospects of survival. In addition, a lingua franca that incorporated features of several languages spoken by the deportees naturally emerged; it was used in the communication among inmates and revealed the social structures of the camp. In this intercultural space, concentrarionary interpreters arose as the communicative link between persecutors and persecuted. The study of their behavior seems especially interesting for researchers concerned about enlightening the mechanisms through which interlinguistic mediation develops in spaces of maximum pressure.

Depression is an affective disorder characterised by psychomotor retardation; in speech, this shows up in reduction of pitch (variation, range), loudness, and tempo, and in voice qualities different from those of typical modal speech. A similar reduction can be observed in sleepy speech (relaxation). In this paper, we employ a small group of acoustic features modelling prosody and spectrum that have been proven successful in the modelling of sleepy speech, enriched with voice quality features, for the modelling of depressed speech within a regression approach. This knowledge-based approach is complemented by and compared with brute-forcing and automatic feature selection. We further discuss gender differences and the contributions of (groups of) features both for the modelling of depression and across depression and sleepiness.

Der Beitrag erörtert die Entwicklung des Video-Streaming-Marktes und die Bedeutung für Öffentliche und wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken. Dabei geht er auch auf die Spezialisierung bestimmter Anbieter ein. Zusammenfassend ist festzuhalten, dass Streaming von AV-Medien vor allem für Öffentliche Bibliotheken ein wertvolles Zusatzangebot für Nutzende darstellt, für wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken hinsichtlich der Dauerhaftigkeit, Zitierfähigkeit und Nachnutzbarkeit von Ressourcen noch wesentliche Fragen ungelöst bleiben. The paper discusses the development of the video streaming market and its importance for public and academic libraries. It also deals with the specialization of certain providers. In summary, it can be said that streaming of AV media is a valuable additional service for users, especially for public libraries, but for academic libraries essential questions regarding the persistence, citation and subsequent use of resources remain unsolved.

ABOUT THE POSSIBLE ANCIENT CZECH-BALTIC LEXICAL CONNECTIONSSummaryThe paper deals with the ancient (up to the 13th century A. D.) Czech–Baltic lexical correspondences. The West Balts are supposed to penetrate into Moravia and the territory of the middle Danube. Probably they were the Galinds, that at the turn of the two eras moved from South Prussia, their homeland, to the South and split into two branches in the territory of Volyn. Accord­ing to the data of onomastics and toponymies, one of the branches settled near the Czech–Polish boundary, another moved to Podmoskovye. Here follows the enumeratien of the Czech lexemes touched upon in the paper and having the Baltic (and some of them also Russian) correspondences:Klábositi ‘to chat, to talk nonsense’, lebediti se ‘to be in bliss, luxuriate’, třměti ‘to reel’, baracht(a) ‘chatter, babble’, klopýtati‘to stumble, to stagger along’, hárati se‘to heat (about cow)’, harhule ‘growth on a tree, excrescence’, batoliti se ‘waddle’, šklebit ‘to light dimly’, kobrtati ‘to stumble’, drobiti ‘to feel feverish, to shiver’, rozblptati ‘to be boiled to pulp’, duznit ‘to bang one’s back’, obočí ‘eyebow’, duněti ‘to rattle’, žíně ‘a special rope for climbing to a beehive on a tree’, těpiti ‘to carry’, řije ‘period if heat of deers’.

With the development of medical technique and computational electromagnetics, high resolution anatomic human models have already been widely developed and used in computation of electromagnetic fields induced in human body. Although these so called voxel-based human models are powerful tools for research on electromagnetic safety, their unchangeable standing posture makes it impossible to simulate a realistic scenario in which people have a lot of different postures. This paper describes a poser program package which was developed as an improved version of the free-from deformation technique to overcome this problem. It can set rotation angles of different human joints and then deform the original human model to make it have different postures. The original whole-body human model can be deformed smoothly, continuity of internal tissues and organs is maintained and the mass of different tissues and organs can be conserved in a reasonable level. As a typical application of the postured human models, this paper also studies the effect of the step voltage due to a lightning strike on the human body. Two voxel-based human body models with standing and walking posture were developed and integrated into simulation models to compute the current density distribution in the human body shocked by the step voltage. In order to speed up the transient simulation, the reduced c technique was used, leading to a speedup factor of around 20. The error introduced by the reduced c technique is discussed and simulation results are presented in detail.

Although Swiss dialects of German are widely used in everyday communication, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of transcribed spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for dialectological, historical and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source, and summarise a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to stimulate the use of the corpus for dialectological research.

Nowadays there are a few tools on the market which support the development of soft competences and build users’ motivation to self-development. One of the newly created tools, which is described in this paper is the Internet application called Integrated Development Assistant (ZAR), which can be accessed at the Internet address: www.zar.edu.pl. The ZAR system differs from the existent solutions because it combines online practices with the face-to-face ones (diagnostic and educational games). It also allows to follow in a flexible way and shape the educational path of an adult, therefore in some areas, it is an innovative tool, offering functions which have not been used in other applications so far and the one integrating various solutions applied in competitive tools. ZAR provides its users with the possibility to use educational contents, development materials, etc. The assumptions of ZAR are based on the concept of real/ideal me by E. T. Higgins.

Summary Individual-tree growth models are the new standard for modeling growth and yield. Their main purpose is to simulate future forest management scenarios but they can also be used to predict wood quality, rockfall protection or habitat quality. Individual tree growth models may consist of different models but core models are diameter increment, height increment, crown ratio (often used as a predictor for increment) and mortality. The model differentiation is based on how these four models include tree age (size), competition and site. Four common growth simulators in Central Europe are BWIN, Moses, Prognaus and Silva. These four models are commonly deployed to simulate 30 years of growth, but a prospective application is the simulation of a whole rotation period (80–150 years). It is therefore crucial to understand the possibilities and limitations of these models by evaluating them. This review paper summarizes the statistical and emergent properties’ evaluation results for these models. Statistical evaluations focus on individual models of a simulator, whereas the evaluation of emergent properties evaluates the entire simulator, by testing if the models conform to known principles of stand growth. Further, the meaning of these evaluation results for the development and improvement of individual-tree growth models is discussed.

Again on numeral-nominal phrases in subject position The paper presents a formal account of sentences with a numeral-nominal subject and an adjectival complement, such as Tych pięciu facetów zostało zabitych ‘These five guys were killed’. The agreements in such sentences are highly idiosyncratic. To cope with them in the framework of a certain formal grammar of Polish, a number of extra means are proposed: special “numeral” realization of the nominal phrase in subject position, special “plural” adjectival complement, special rules that introduce the adjectival phrase in genitive, special valence frames for such strange phrases, and, finally, a special mechanism of interphrasal gender-number agreements. The paper argues for individual treatment of idiosyncrasies, instead of an artificial account in terms of general principles.

Foreign elements in the Polish lexicon, using the example of Słownik elektroniczny jednostek frazeologicznych (SEJF) ‘Electronic Dictionary of Multi-Word Units’ The paper discusses the presence of foreign phraseological units and of their grammatical features in phraseological dictionaries of general Polish. The author adduces lexicographical descriptions of specific phrasemes from Polish and foreign words dictionaries, and compares them with corpus data. Based on these analyses, she proposes a set of detailed solutions which were implemented in Słownik elektroniczny jednostek frazeologicznych (SEJF) ‘Electronic Dictionary of Multi-Word Units’ that she is preparing. SEJF is going to be the first electronic grammatical dictionary of Polish idiomatic phrases to provide paradigms for the described units. The paper closes with a list of one hundred analysed phrasemes, each with the assigned lexeme class and, in the case of nouns, also the gender value.

Investigating and teaching collocations. The starting point of the paper is the observation that foreign language learners translate collocations literally from their L1. Collocations are conceived here as phrasal units which can be placed between free word groups and idioms. The paper focuses on metaphoric collocations, i.e. with polysemic collocator. In this type of collocation the collocator is used in a metaphoric meaning, while it appears in denotative meaning in free word groups. Contrasting types of collocation are presented in a model. Data from empirical research show that foreign language learners of a certain level regard metaphoric collocations as marked and transfer them less often than non-metaphoric collocations. The paper supports the need for pointing out the significance of collocations even for beginners.

El objeto de este trabajo es analizar y describir algunos aspectos de la lengua cuyo conocimiento, expresión y recepción incumbe al ámbito social y cultural, más que lo puramente formal; es decir, que en ocasiones podemos entender la totalidad de las palabras sin captar el mensaje implícito o, incluso, podemos rechazar algún tipo de construcción lingüística juzgándola rara o anómala y, por tanto, poco significativa desde nuestra perspectiva social y cultural propia, aunque la misma sea altamente significativa desde el punto de vista del emisor y de su marco social y cultural. Para poner de relieve este tipo de construcciones lingüísticas, abordaré aquellas referencias y expresiones con contenido sexual que se precisa comunicar del árabe al español en el ámbito de la interpretación en los Servicios Públicos, o en el ámbito social. Por ello, este trabajo se centrará exclusivamente en la interpretación, porque es ella, frente a la traducción, la que precisa de la presencia física y efectiva de los tres actores de la comunicación, a saber: el proveedor del servicio, el usuario del mismo y el intérprete. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and describe certain aspects of language whose knowledge, expression and reception affect the social and cultural field rather than what’s purely formal; that is to say, sometimes we may understand the words but we may not understand the implicit message or we may even dismiss some kind of linguistic constructions because they are seen as strange or anomalous and therefore not very significant from our own social and cultural perspective, even though such constructions may be highly significant from the speaker’s point of view and their social and cultural context.In order to highlight this kind of linguistic constructions, I will address those references and expressions with sexual content that required to be translated from Arabic to Spanish when interpreting on the public services context. That is why this paper will focus exclusively on interpretation, given that, unlike translation, interpretation requires the physical presence and effectiveness of the three players in communication, namely: the service provider, the user of such service and the interpreter.

This paper presents a comparison of technology delivery bulk cargo. The subject of study is the structure of the tech-nology delivery bulk cargo. The aim of the study is to improve the technological scheme of delivery of cargo in the supply chain. Methods based on the analysis and synthesis of existing methods of collecting baseline information, methods of processing it in a substantiation of the choice of the most efficient transportation technologies.

The digital age has yielded systems that increasingly reduce the complexity of our everyday lives. As such, smart personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri combine the comfort of intuitive natural language interaction with the utility of personalized and situation-dependent information and service provision. However, research on SPAs is becoming increasingly complex and opaque. To reduce complexity, this paper introduces a classification system for SPAs. Based on a systematic literature review, a cluster analysis reveals five SPA archetypes: Adaptive Voice (Vision) Assistants, Chatbot Assistants, Embodied Virtual Assistants, Passive Pervasive Assistants, and Natural Conversation Assistants.

A mansionary (from the Latin mansio, ‘a dwelling’) was a member of a community of four to ten secular priests governed by a provost and required to reside by and serve a chantry chapel, similar to a cathedral canon or beneficed chantry priest. Every day they would sing the Hours of Our Lady and offer two Masses, one in honour of Our Lady or the Holy Trinity, and the other for the dead kin of the chantry founder. The chapels they served were attached to a cathedral or a parish church. Those established by the monarch often had pastoral duties, sometimes involving a school or hospice. In Lithuania, they appear from the late 15th century at the cathedrals of Vilnius, Varniai and Lutsk (in Janow Podlaski), and represented a considerable financial investment to establish and maintain. After the Council of Trent, they become even rarer, and concentrate more on pastoral and other educational duties. The paper discusses what a mansionary priest was, and how many of them served in the Diocese of Vilnius and other sees within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Why was it deemed meet and fit to establish a mansionariate in Lithuania at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, and how were such foundations affected by local Reform movements? Key words: mansionary, chantry, cathedral, parish, Little Hours of Our Lady, memorial, pastoral duties, Lithuania, Poland, Vilnius, Podlasie.

Publications from the early quantitative revolution in geography saw a significant change in the use of visual material. While the old regionalist paradigm of "Länderkunde" was dominated by images of "geographical individuals" the new geography was dominated by abstract models and visualized laws and theories. Overall visual material gains in importance, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This paper follows the changed functions, possibilities and promises of visualizing epistemic things in geography's new paradigm. This is done by following the translations, transformations and mobilizations of the famous hexagon Walter Christaller published in his 1933 "Theory of central places in South Germany". Since the 1940s this Hexagon has become not only an icon of the new geography, but an instrument for making quantitative-theoretical thinking in the geography plausible and at the same time to build a visual bridge between the old and the new geography.

Summary Inverted pendulum on cart belongs to a class of highly non-linear, multivariable and complex system which is currently a keen area of interest for researchers in the field of control engineering and robotics. This paper considers stabilisation and control of inverted pendulum on cart moving on an inclined surface. The task of controlling inverted pendulum on inclined surface is much difficult as compared to that moving on horizontal surface. An offline control of the proposed system has been successfully achieved using proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and fuzzy controllers. A Matlab-Simulink model of the proposed system has been built using mathematical equations derived from Newton's second law. The study compares the proposed techniques in terms of settling time, overshoot, undershoot and steady state error. The simulation results are illustrated with the help of graphs and tables which confirms the validity of the proposed techniques.

The article investigates the English language, functioning as a lingua franca, in a modern multicultural and polyethnic universe in cross-cultural communication across the extrapolation of the secondary varieties of the given lingual system. The paper discusses history and meaning of the term “lingua franca”, characterizes its various definitions, describes the role, played by English, as an intermediary language in the distribution areas of the secondary varieties in contemporary community. The study also discusses functioning of lingua franca as a means of communication within multicultural ethnic communities. As a sociolinguistic term “lingua franca” does not have a unified definition and represents a variety of interpretations: “any language of wider interethnic communication”; certain types of “contact languages” used in interethnic communication; “verbal means of interethnic communication.” Having analyzed the problematics, we consider that in the era of globalization the English language has the status of macrointermediary language by virtue of the fact that it not only plays an intermediary role as in the context of certain nations, ethnic groups, but also covers the entire world community and is a global, world, polyethnic and multicultural one.

Z chwilą, gdy pojawiła się działalność gospodarcza, pojawiła się chęć oszukiwania i naginania rzeczywistości w imię własnej korzyści (łac. pro bono sua). Artykuł jest próbą uporządkowania panującego chaosu terminologicznego wokół pojęcia nadużyć (ang. fraud) w przedsiębiorstwach prywatnych poprzez traktowanie nadużyć jako pojęcia parasolowego. Sugestia ta została wysunięta w ramach pracy magisterskiej obronionej w 2015 roku w Katedrze Finansów i Rachunkowości MŚP UŁ. Promotorem była dr A. Skoczylas-Tworek. Zastosowana przeze mnie metoda badawcza to krytyczna analiza obecnego piśmiennictwa. At the moment when an economic activity emerged, cheating and bending the rules for own benefits surfaced will of cheating and bending the rules for own benefits (lat. pro bono sua). Hence this topic is not a novelty. The main aim of this paper is sorting put the terms and a presentation of my own division of frauds. This proposal was put forward within my Master Thesis. It was defended in 2015 in Finance and Accountancy of SMEs Chair UL. The tutor was A. Skoczylas-Tworek. A research method which was employed by me is a critical analysis of a current writing concerning the fraud topic.

The paper describes the up-to-date methods of teaching or learning foreign languages, which are conditioned by the integration of information technologies in the teaching process. Internet gives a perfect opportunity to enliven the lectures of foreign languages, to improve their quality and effectiveness. The main advantage of internet is its authentic material in an authentic context. The examples of such authentic material can be Web 2.0 (website of second generation), Wiki, blogs and podcasts. The second advantage of internet is that it helps the learners to cooperate together. The teachers can lead the learners more effectively, consult each learner individually. It diversifies the teaching process, encourages the activity of students, who have learning difficulties.

In this work, we propose a novel approach to prioritize the depth map computation of multi-view stereo (MVS) to obtain compact 3D point clouds of high quality and completeness at low computational cost. Our prioritization approach operates before the MVS algorithm is executed and consists of two steps. In the first step, we aim to find a good set of matching partners for each view. In the second step, we rank the resulting view clusters (i.e. key views with matching partners) according to their impact on the fulfillment of desired quality parameters such as completeness, ground resolution and accuracy. Additional to geometric analysis, we use a novel machine learning technique for training a confidence predictor. The purpose of this confidence predictor is to estimate the chances of a successful depth reconstruction for each pixel in each image for one specific MVS algorithm based on the RGB images and the image constellation. The underlying machine learning technique does not require any ground truth or manually labeled data for training, but instead adapts ideas from depth map fusion for providing a supervision signal. The trained confidence predictor allows us to evaluate the quality of image constellations and their potential impact to the resulting 3D reconstruction and thus builds a solid foundation for our prioritization approach. In our experiments, we are thus able to reach more than 70% of the maximal reachable quality fulfillment using only 5% of the available images as key views. For evaluating our approach within and across different domains, we use two completely different scenarios, i.e. cultural heritage preservation and reconstruction of single family houses., Comment: This paper was accepted to ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/isprs-journal-of-photogrammetry-and-remote-sensing) on March 21, 2018. The official version will be made available on ScienceDirect (https://www.sciencedirect.com)

As proposed by several scholars, among the many modern on-lookers depicted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, foreign diplomats are also portrayed: e.g., the Portuguese ambassador and the Florentine emissaries. In the present paper it is suggested that portraits of four of the six members of the momentous Ethiopian delegation – which was headed by Antonio, chaplain of aṣe Ǝskǝndǝr, and arrived at Rome in the first half of November 1481 – may be identified in two scenes, i.e. the Temptation of Moses by Sandro Botticelli and the Crossing of the Red Sea by Biagio d’Antonio Tucci. The paper focuses on the relationship between the visual representation of these four men – Antonio being most probably included – and two contemporary literary works: the treatise by Paride de Grassi on the ambassadors to the Roman curia and the writing by Andreas Trapezuntius on the Roman political situation at the end of 1481 respectively. Such topics as the genuflexion of the Ethiopians and the content of Sixtus IV with the Ethiopian embassy are dealt with. The importance of the suggested identifications for the problematic chronology of the frescoes is also discussed, and so a few other aspects of the two narrative scenes., Aethiopica, Vol 14 (2011)

In this letter, we report on two major improvements with respect to the results presented in our recent paper on imaging geodesy: the atmospheric delay estimation using numerical weather model data and the continental drift adjustment from different geodetic coordinate systems. First, we demonstrate that the GPS-based zenith delay estimates used in our recent paper to correct synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data can be replaced by estimates calculated from numerical weather model data. This leads to a much wider applicability of our approach and even improves the accuracy from 3.8 cm to 3.2 cm. Second, for measuring the absolute position within the SAR image, the coordinate system used has to be carefully chosen, otherwise continental drift affects the results. We show that correct consideration of the reference frames eliminates residual offsets by up to 3.1 cm.