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A gift is not just for festive seasons and personal landmarks. Over the years gifts have helped to create new bonds between nations, secure marriages, end wars or just strengthen [...]

Trains magazine doesn't just write about trains. It gets its paper by train, too. The paper for Trains is produced at a sprawling mill along the St. Lawrence River in [...]

ARTIST YAYOI KUSAAAA'S fantastical Mount Fuji scenes are printed on it, designer Yumi Katsura makes bridal gowns from it, and film director David Lynch creates lithographs with it. Called washi, [...]

My plan for the next column (after this one) was to interview Norfolk Southern officials about one of the country's most serious breakdowns in freight and passenger service, between Toledo [...]

Several years ago, a Class I railroad executive made a speech in which he described the railroad's hub-and-spoke system for its general freight, or merchandise, traffic. The executive said that [...]

The article presents several sampling of websites for historical paper ephemera. These include The Art of American Advertising, 1865-1910 and Center for Popular Music for Library Collections, T209-Contentnea Cards, 1909-1910 and The John and Carolyn Grossman Collection for nonlibrary collections and Centre for Ephemera Studies and Ephemera Society of America for organizations.

The article offers research related to CS (Computer Science) as of 2017. Particular focus is given to research relating to using computer networks as physical sensors to monitor breathing and even look through walls. The use of atomic clocks, high-performance read-write transactions and Wi-Fi technology.

Drivers on Minnesota Highway 33 seldom pay much attention to the open country just north of Cloquet. The four-lane highway serves as a conduit for travelers coming off Interstate 35 [...]

The article discusses a paper presented at the Chilembwe Revisited Symposium, held at the Edinburgh University in Scotland on February 7, 2015, that talks about the life and death of Baptist pastor John Chilembwe. Topics discussed include details of Chilembwe's birth and family including a putative daughter Sylvia, his travel to the U.S. in 1897 to obtain a western education, and his role in the Chilembwe Rebellion of 1915.

The article discusses the role that necessity played in the invention of paperweights from the late 19th century through the 1950s in the U.S., including the electrical engineer Charles P. Steinmetz's use of ad-hoc paperweights throughout his career. An overview of various items used to hold down paper, including rounded stones and horseshoes, is provided.

The American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) has since its inception published annual serial monographs or journals to achieve its mission of communicating horticultural science. To recognize the accomplishments of the membership, a series of professional awards was created. After the individual awards, the ASHS created publication awards. This paper, and the papers that follow, document the publication awards of the ASHS. The papers were based on presentations at the 2023 annual conference and serve as additional recognition of the contributions of member authors and as a historical record of achievements of the ASHS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN THE FORESTS of northern Idaho, a small piece of the once-mighty Milwaukee Road survives into the 21st century. In 1980, after the Milwaukee Road abandoned its main line west [...]

Phil Roberts has had a long day. The Blue Ridge Southern conductor started work at 6:30 a.m., building manifest train T-31 for the daily un east to Norfolk Southern's N.C., [...]

An excerpt from a speech delivered by computer scientist and computer science professor Donald Knuth at Stanford University on May 7, 2014, about computer science history is presented.

The article looks at issues in the history of computing and computer science. The author assesses computer scientist Donald Knuth's criticisms of historiographic trends in the history of computer science, particularly as described by computer scientist Martin Campbell-Kelly in a 2007 paper entitled "The History of the History of Software." Topics include computer scientists versus historians as researchers on the history of computing.

This paper introduces an explicit reference governor to supervise closed-loop linear time-delay systems. The proposed scheme enforces state and input constraints by modifying the reference of the supervised system so that the state vector always belongs to admissible sublevel sets of a suitably defined Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional. To accomplish this, this paper extends the existing definition of “dynamic safety margin” to a time-delay setting and illustrates how to employ classic Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals even though the reference is time varying. Constraint enforcement for arbitrary reference signals and asymptotic convergence to any strictly steady-state admissible set point is rigorously proven. Experimental results are reported to demonstrate the simplicity, practicality, and robustness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago. Three themes unify the five generations of datacenter networks detailed in this paper. First, multi-stage Clos topologies built from commodity switch silicon can support cost-effective deployment of buildingscale networks. Second, much of the general, but complex, decentralized network routing and management protocols supporting arbitrary deployment scenarios were overkill for single-operator, pre-planned datacenter networks. We built a centralized control mechanism based on a global configuration pushed to all datacenter switches. Third, modular hardware design coupled with simple, robust software allowed our design to also support inter-cluster and wide-area networks. Our datacenter networks run at dozens of sites across the planet, scaling in capacity by 100x over 10 years to more than 1 Pbps of bisection bandwidth. A more detailed version of this paper is available at Ref. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the optimal decentralized state-feedback control of large-scale systems. The large-scale system is composed of subsystems and defined over a connected digraph. One step time is required for information to travel across an edge in the graph. Under the above-mentioned setup, when subsystem process noises are uncorrelated, the explicit optimal state-feedback controller can be designed by independence decomposition based on information hierarchy graph. However, this decomposition method fails when the subsystem process noises are correlated. In this paper, we propose a new decomposition method for system state and control input, and split the optimal state-feedback control problem with correlated process noises into two subproblems that can be solved separately. The solution to the first subproblem can be obtained by solving a linear matrix equation. The second subproblem is solved by algebraic Ricatti equation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply Thompson sampling to a class of average reward stochastic control problems with parameter uncertainty. Specifically, we study an average reward stochastic control problem over an infinite horizon in which both the reward and state transition distributions are parameterized by an unknown parameter taking values in a finite space. The main result of this paper is a proof showing that Thompson sampling achieves a worst case average per period regret of O(T^-1), which is asymptotically optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the profile of two Baseball legends Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey who created history in their own ways.

Modeling and prediction of temporal sequences is central to many signal processing and machine learning applications. Prediction based on sequence history is typically performed using parametric models, such as fixed-order Markov chains ( $n$ -grams), approximations of high-order Markov processes, such as mixed-order Markov models or mixtures of lagged bigram models, or with other machine learning techniques. This paper presents a method for sequence prediction based on sparse hyperdimensional coding of the sequence structure and describes how higher order temporal structures can be utilized in sparse coding in a balanced manner. The method is purely incremental, allowing real-time online learning and prediction with limited computational resources. Experiments with prediction of mobile phone use patterns, including the prediction of the next launched application, the next GPS location of the user, and the next artist played with the phone media player, reveal that the proposed method is able to capture the relevant variable-order structure from the sequences. In comparison with the $n$ -grams and the mixed-order Markov models, the sparse hyperdimensional predictor clearly outperforms its peers in terms of unweighted average recall and achieves an equal level of weighted average recall as the mixed-order Markov chain but without the batch training of the mixed-order model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the robustness to model mismatch of a preexisting collocated boundary adaptive feedback law is investigated. This control law was originally designed for an antidamped pure wave partial differential equation (PDE). Actuation and measurements are located at the same boundary. Adaptive terms account for uncertain parameters located at the antidamped boundary, opposite to the collocated actuation and measurement. By extending and transforming the system state using, in particular, backstepping, this paper establishes that this controller is robust to sufficiently small in-domain damping. In particular, both stability and attractivity (convergence) are established similarly as in the nominal case. Note moreover that, assuming that some parameters are known, the exponential stability to an attractor holds. Simulations are performed to illustrate the interest of this study to attenuate mechanical vibrations in an oil-drilling context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider an environmentwhere players need to decide whether to buy a certain product (or adopt a technology) or not. The product is either good or bad, but its true value is unknown to the players. Instead, each player has her own private information on its quality. Each player can observe the previous actions of other players and estimate the quality of the product. A classic result in the literature shows that in similar settings, informational cascades occur, where learning stops for the whole network and players repeat the actions of their predecessors. In contrast to this literature, in this paper, players get more than one opportunity to act. In each turn, a player is chosen uniformly at random from all the players and can decide to buy the product and leave the market or wait. Her utility is the total expected discounted reward, and thus, myopic strategies may not constitute equilibria. We provide a characterization of perfect Bayesian equilibria (PBEs) with forward-looking strategies through a fixed-point equation of dimensionality that grows only quadratically with the number of players. Using this tractable fixed-point equation, we show the existence of a PBE and characterize PBEs with threshold strategies. Based on this characterization, we study informational cascades in two regimes. First, we show that for a discount factor $\delta$ strictly smaller than 1, informational cascades happen with high probability as the number of players $N$ increases. Furthermore, only a small portion of the total information in the system is revealed before a cascade occurs. Second, and more surprisingly, we show that for a fixed $N$ , and for a sufficiently large $\delta < 1$ , when the product is bad, there exists an equilibrium where an informational cascade can happen only after at least half of the players revealed their private information, and consequently, the probability for a “bad cascade” where all the players buy the product vanishes exponentially with $N$. Finally, when $\delta =1$ and the product is bad, there exists an equilibrium where informational cascades do not happen at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the discovery of sketchbook at the Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy and the examination of the sketchbook to determine its history, origins, and use.

The article discusses the history of the Bank of Montreal and the bank's influence on Canada's financial and economic history. It looks at how the Bank of Montreal was the first to introduce paper banknotes in Canada in 1817 and how it changed the country's financial system. Particular attention is also given to Edwin Henry King, who became president of the bank in 1869 and was known for his contributions to the business aspects of banking.

This paper studies two-player zero-sum repeated Bayesian games in which every player has a private type that is unknown to the other player, and the initial probability of the type of every player is publicly known. The types of players are independently chosen according to the initial probabilities, and are kept the same all through the game. At every stage, players simultaneously choose actions, and announce their actions publicly. For finite horizon cases, an explicit linear program is provided to compute players’ security strategies. Moreover, this paper shows that a player's sufficient statistics, which is independent of the strategy of the other player, consists of the belief over the player's own type, the regret over the other player's type, and the stage. Explicit linear programs, whose size is linear in the size of the game tree, are provided to compute the initial regrets, and the security strategies that only depends on the sufficient statistics. For discounted cases, following the same idea in the finite horizon, this paper shows that a player's sufficient statistics consists of the belief of the player's own type and the antidiscounted regret with respect to the other player's type. Besides, an approximated security strategy depending on the sufficient statistics is provided, and an explicit linear program to compute the approximated security strategy is given. This paper also obtains a bound on the performance difference between the approximated security strategy and the security strategy, and shows that the bound converges to 0 exponentially fast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the database consisting of information of archive documents on the American Civil Liberties Union who defended the civil rights of the U.S. citizens.

The article discusses what the author refers to as the six most damaging computer hacking and security breach events involving law firms in the 21st century, including information about the Panama Papers leak involving more than 11 million documents from the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca & Co. legal company. Hacking events at the Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP, Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, and Wiley Rein LLP law firms in 2012-2016 are examined, along with a Trojan horse computer virus.

The article examines the debate among scientists regarding how a nearly 1,200 year cold snap on Earth, called the Younger Dryas, began about 12,800 years ago. It covers the theory that a comet or its remnants hit or exploded over the Laurentide Ice Sheet despite the lack of a crater discovered to prove the hypothesis.

Zero-sum asymmetric information games model decision-making scenarios involving two competing players who have different information about the game being played. A particular case is that of nested information, where one (informed) player has superior information over the other (uninformed) player. This paper considers the case of nested information in repeated zero-sum games and studies the computation of strategies for both the informed and uninformed players for finite-horizon and discounted infinite-horizon nested information games. For finite-horizon settings, we exploit that for both players, the security strategy, and also the opponent's corresponding best response, depend only on the informed player's history of actions. Using this property, we formulate an linear program (LP) computation of player strategies that is linear in the size of the uninformed player's action set. For the infinite-horizon discounted game, we construct LP formulations to compute the approximated security strategies for both players, and show that the worst-case performance difference between the approximated security strategies and the security strategies converges to zero exponentially. Finally, we illustrate the results on a network interdiction game between an informed system administrator and an uniformed intruder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of stock market declines during U.S. presidents' second terms. The author recommends purchasing buyback stocks in blue chip companies including technology company Microsoft, paper supplier International Paper, and Investors Bancorp bank. Information on fthe companies' payments of dividends and yields is offered.

Relatively little literature specific to the discipline of History aims to translate theory into practice in regard to designing effective online and flipped learning experiences. This article synthesises current literature into practical advice and reflects on previous experience as an aid to historians (a) tasked with developing online or flipped units or (b) who have transitioned online and are seeking ways to improve. Feedback from students and learning analytics from a flipped unit at a large Australian university underpin the paper's advice. Student feedback and behaviour, coupled with the reflections of the unit's designers, encourage (1) prioritising effective educational media and recording practices over the production of digital material with the longest shelf life, (2) explicit consideration of unit structure and support offered to students, (3) readings which consider the student perspective, (4) enthusiasm about the delivery format, and (5) the overarching importance of constructive alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents a detailed study of the nonlinear dynamics of a tantalum oxide memristor recently fabricated at Hewlett Packard Labs. Our investigations uncover direct current, quasi-static, and alternating current behavior of the nanodevice. A thorough study of the dynamics emerging in the nanoscale element under various input/initial condition combinations reveals a fundamental property of the tantalum oxide device, which was unnoticed so far. The initial condition has no effect on the steady-state operation of the memristor under non-zero input. This property, known as fading memory in system theory, implies the uniqueness of asymptotic behavior of the memristor. The progressive input-induced memory erase phenomenon is solely determined by the switching dynamics of the nanodevice, mathematically described by the state evolution function, which governs the rate of evolution of the memristor state. A constant-sign DC input will activate on or off switching dynamics only. Consequently, due to the limited on/off memductance ratio, the memristor will asymptotically attain a fully-conducting or highly-resistive state, irrespective of the initial condition. Most interestingly, under AC periodic excitations, it is the pronounced asymmetry in the state dependence of on and off switching processes which is at the basis of the reported history erase effect. It is important to point out that this novel fading memory phenomenon does not compromise the nonvolatile behavior of the nanostructure. In fact, despite the device may be stimulated so as to forget its past history, it still has a continuum of analog nonvolatile memory states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A language model (LM) is calculated as the probability of a word sequence that provides the solution to word prediction for a variety of information systems. A recurrent neural network (RNN) is powerful to learn the large-span dynamics of a word sequence in the continuous space. However, the training of the RNN-LM is an ill-posed problem because of too many parameters from a large dictionary size and a high-dimensional hidden layer. This paper presents a Bayesian approach to regularize the RNN-LM and apply it for continuous speech recognition. We aim to penalize the too complicated RNN-LM by compensating for the uncertainty of the estimated model parameters, which is represented by a Gaussian prior. The objective function in a Bayesian classification network is formed as the regularized cross-entropy error function. The regularized model is constructed not only by calculating the regularized parameters according to the maximum a posteriori criterion but also by estimating the Gaussian hyperparameter by maximizing the marginal likelihood. A rapid approximation to a Hessian matrix is developed to implement the Bayesian RNN-LM (BRNN-LM) by selecting a small set of salient outer-products. The proposed BRNN-LM achieves a sparser model than the RNN-LM. Experiments on different corpora show the robustness of system performance by applying the rapid BRNN-LM under different conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the role of 20th-century British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing in the development of the computer science field, comparing it to the role played by 19th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in the development of the field of mathematics, on an institutional and political level as well as through their specific intellectual achievements. It notes that Turing's work foreshadowed the multidisciplinary nature of computer science.

This paper is concerned with the first passage discounted payoff criterion for continuous-time $N$ -person nonzero-sum stochastic games in countable states and Borel action spaces, where the discount factor is nonconstant. For the game with unbounded reward functions and transition rates, the optimality is over the set of all randomized history-dependent policies. After showing the uniqueness of the solution to the Shapley equation, we give some suitable conditions imposed on the primitive data for the existence of Nash equilibria. Then, a financial system is introduced to illustrate the applications of the main result here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon versions of a dynamic game with $N$ selfish players who observe their types privately and take actions that are publicly observed. Players’ types evolve as conditionally independent Markov processes, conditioned on their current actions. Their actions and types jointly determine their instantaneous rewards. In dynamic games with asymmetric information, a widely used concept of equilibrium is perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) which consists of a strategy and belief pair that simultaneously satisfy sequential rationality and belief consistency. In general, there does not exist a universal algorithm that decouples the interdependence of strategies and beliefs over time in calculating PBE. In this paper, for the finite-horizon game with independent types, we develop a two-step backward–forward recursive algorithm that sequentially decomposes the problem (w.r.t. time) to obtain a subset of PBEs, which we refer to as structured Bayesian perfect equilibria (SPBE). In such equilibria, a player's strategy depends on his/her history only through a common public belief and its current private type. The backward recursive part of this algorithm defines an equilibrium generating function. Each period in the backward recursion involves solving a fixed-point equation on the space of probability simplexes for every possible belief on types. Using this function, equilibrium strategies and beliefs are generated through a forward recursion. We then extend this methodology to the infinite-horizon model, where we propose a time-invariant single-shot fixed-point equation, which in conjunction with a forward recursive step, generates the SPBE. Sufficient conditions for the existence of SPBE are provided. With our proposed method, we find equilibria that exhibit signaling behavior. This is illustrated with the help of a concrete public goods example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In decentralized control systems with linear dynamics, quadratic cost, and Gaussian disturbances (also called decentralized LQG systems) linear control strategies are not always optimal. Nonetheless, linear control strategies are appealing due to their analytic and implementation simplicity. In this paper, we investigate decentralized LQG systems with partial history sharing information structure and identify finite-dimensional sufficient statistics for such systems. Unlike prior work on decentralized LQG systems, we do not assume partial nestedness or quadratic invariance. Our approach is based on the common information approach of Nayyar et al., 2013 and exploits the linearity of the system dynamics and control strategies. To illustrate our methodology, we identify sufficient statistics for linear strategies in decentralized systems where controllers communicate over a strongly connected graph with finite delays, and for decentralized systems consisting of coupled subsystems with control sharing or one-sided one step delay sharing information structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider a delay differential inclusion $\dot{x}(t)\in F(t,x_t)$ , where $x_t$ denotes the history function of $x(\cdot)$ along an interval of time. We extend the celebrated Filippov's theorem to this case. Then, we further generalize this theorem to the case when the state variable $x$ is constrained to the closure of an open subset $K\subset \mathbb {R}^n$. Under a new “inward pointing condition,” we give a relaxation result stating that the set of trajectories lying in the interior of the state constraint is dense in the set of constrained trajectories of the convexified inclusion ${\dot{x}(t)\in \mbox{co}\,F(t,x_t)}$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers tips for having a good school year. Parents need to treat school papers the same way as mails. Each child can be given a file box where he or she can store work that will be relevant for midterms or final exams. Once the school calendar is posted online, parents need to transfer all significant dates to a master calendar.

With enemy fire pummelling the American camp, First Class Sergeant Bennie G Adkins burst into his rudimentary headquarters and hastily gathered together any papers or files he could find. The [...]

The article discusses how there appears to be no clear connection between computer scientist Alan Turing's 1936 theories on the Universal Turing Machine (UTM) and the first stored-program electronic computers introduced in the mid-1940s. It notes that Turing's concepts of the Universal Machine were not designed to inform development of physical automatic calculating machines. Turnings relationship with mathematician John von Neumann is also covered.

The article discusses computing history in Europe, highlighting key events. Topics include the development of counting boards and sectors by inventors, the creation of a programmable handwriting automaton, and the invention of counting machines. Also noted are a cylindrical slide rule, the German relay calculator Zuse Z4, and the event Paris Computer Conference of 1951 in Paris, France.

Key Events 1767 TOWNSHEND ACTS Further to the taxation policies of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts are passed. These acts establish taxation on imported essential goods, like tea, paper [...]

An interview with former U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg is presented. When asked about his view of World War II as a justified war, Ellsberg refers to the defeat of Hitler as an important part of the war but dislikes certain tactics used by the Allied Forces during the war. He focuses on the justification of violent tactics against enemy attacks, his book 'The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner', and the Pentagon Paper Leak in 1971.