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The digital divide is deeply felt by undergraduate students in resource-restricted universities, but creative, if also labor-intensive, solutions exist for instructors negotiating paywalls and other institutional impediments. In this essay, I argue that teaching early modern drama outside the restraints of the Shakespearean archive and through a host of digital archives, databases, and tools not only engages students in inquiry-based, active learning but also cultivates a critical sense of how digital tools obviate and exacerbate questions of access. To make my case, I describe how I designed and taught a course on non-Shakespearean drama for English majors at Shippensburg University, one of Pennyslvania’s state-funded universities. After describing the mechanics of the course, I further theorize and examine the ways centering digital archives, databases, and tools as course texts enables students to think critically about the content available through these resources as well as the information hierarchies and receptions histories they promulgate.

Color-shift keying (CSK) is a type of visible light wireless communication, where a visible color is preset and is to appear constant during the human vision's “critical flicker fusion threshold” and “critical color fusion threshold.” This paper is first in the open literature to systematically investigate how CSK's largest achievable “minimum distance” (d\min ) would vary with the preset chromaticity and with the constellation size ( M). This paper discovers this elegant approximation: The best d_{\min } \approx 1.921M^{-0.5985} - 2.736M^{-0.645} (\tilde{x}^2 + \tilde{y}^2)^{0.7802(\log _{2}M)^{-0.436} }, where (\tilde{x}, \tilde{y})$ refers to the preset chromaticity's displacement (in a two-dimensional space) from the case of all LEDs emitting with an equal intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Codex Cumanicus is a unique manuscript of language of the Turkic people at the end of thirteenth and beginning of fourteenth century of our era, contains Latin-Persian-Cuman and German words, early Cuman riddles, collection of religious texts. The Codex may be divided into two distinct and independent parts: I) a practical handbook of the Cuman language with glossaries in Italo-Latin, Persian and Cuman II) a mixed collection of religious texts, linguistic data and folkloric materials ( the Cuman riddles), stemming from a number of hands, with translations into Latin and a dialect of Eastern Middle High German. The original copy of the Codex Cumanicus, which is presently, housed in the Library of St. Mark, in Venice, Cod. Mar. Lat. DXLIX, and the second copy of the manuscript placed in the Laurentian library in Florence, Cod. Ashburnham 1584. The aim of the work is to research the structure, content and peculiarities of the script of another copy of "Codex Cumanicus" created by an unknown scribe in November, 5 in 1824, which is kept at the National library of Medici in Florence. The article is also dedicated to specification of process connected with the given copy and as well as the history of appearance of the seals of the National libraries of France and Venice on the first and last pages of the original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior work has shown that multibiometric systems are vulnerable to presentation attacks, assuming that their matching score distribution is identical to that of genuine users, without fabricating any fake trait. We have recently shown that this assumption is not representative of current fingerprint and face presentation attacks, leading one to overestimate the vulnerability of multibiometric systems, and to design less effective fusion rules. In this paper, we overcome these limitations by proposing a statistical meta-model of face and fingerprint presentation attacks that characterizes a wider family of fake score distributions, including distributions of known and, potentially, unknown attacks. This allows us to perform a thorough security evaluation of multibiometric systems against presentation attacks, quantifying how their vulnerability may vary also under attacks that are different from those considered during design, through an uncertainty analysis. We empirically show that our approach can reliably predict the performance of multibiometric systems even under never-before-seen face and fingerprint presentation attacks, and that the secure fusion rules designed using our approach can exhibit an improved trade-off between the performance in the absence and in the presence of attack. We finally argue that our method can be extended to other biometrics besides faces and fingerprints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a problem a customer had involving facsimile transmission failure and how it was resolved through analysis of multiple signals. This is the thirty-eighth article in a series on telecommunication technologies. This contribution is from the Network Interface Engineering Group, Technical Assistance and Support Center, Maintenance and Service Operations Department, Network Business Headquarters, NTT EAST. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel A-source impedance network is proposed in this letter. The A-source impedance network uses an autotransformer for realizing converters for any application that demand a very high dc voltage gain. The network utilizes a minimal turns ratio compared to other magnetically coupled impedance source networks to attain a high voltage gain. In addition, the proposed converter draws a continuous current from the source, and hence it is suitable for many types of renewable energy sources. The derived network expressions and theoretical analysis are finally validated experimentally with an example single-switch 400-W dc–dc converter. For the closed-loop control design and stability assessment, a small signal model and its analysis of the proposed network are also presented in brief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the digital edition of Paul Klee’s Bildnerische Form- und Gestaltungslehre, the collection of his important teaching notes during his time at the Bauhaus as facsimile and transcript. A major challenge of this project is the dynamic nature of the material: the teaching material was restructured, revised and subsequently reused several times. While the transcriptions are unfortunately only available as images, which severely limits the possibilities for re-use of the research data, the edition nevertheless provides a vital source for art-historical research on an artist who influenced a generation of successors.

This review discusses the Digital Scholarly Edition Welscher Gast digital that is conducted as part of the German Research Foundation special research programme Materiale Textkulturen. The edition project aims at analysing the production and transmission of the medieval didactic poem Der Welsche Gast (‘The Romance Stranger’; c. 1215/16). The centre of the edition is an easily accessible and easily readable base text. It is conceived as the starting point into different branches of research that tightly combine philological and art historical studies. The edition, which is in the middle stage of its genesis, builds on a sound theoretical model of its source materials and impresses with innovative and interesting display of data and research findings.

This review discusses Melville's Marginalia Online, a digital edition and online catalogue of the private library of author Herman Melville. The project is one of the first to make (parts of) a writer's library digitally available for research. By synthesizing and augmenting existing studies of Melville's reading, MMO provides an original scholarly resource. As such, the site offers an insight into the intellectual environment and literary influences of Herman Melville. Improvements can be made in the way this scholarship is communicated to the user. Moreover, considering the novelty of this type of research in the digital environment, it would be valuable to expand upon the technical implementations, or to publish the XML-transcriptions of Melville's marginalia.

The Commedia project aims to investigate the manuscript transmission of the poem, using Sanguineti's previous edition and checking the validity of his stemma with computer methods. Full transcriptions of the seven selected witnesses are provided alongside the corresponding facsimiles. The end results of the collation and phylogenetic analysis differ from Sanguineti's edition and reshape the stemma. No new critical text is provided. The edition is easy to navigate and high quality editorial materials are available. A metrical markup enriches the text and the integrated VBase tool allows the user to retrieve variants in different witnesses and parts of the poem.

By focusing on the recent French and American phenomenon of "classic" comics reprinted in actual-size facsimile reproductions of original artwork instead of the traditional reduced four-color format, this paper addresses the diversity of practices among "comics readers," from the most casual to the most sophisticated. Unlike individual relationships to the medium emphasizing bibliophily, academic interpretation, or sketchhunting, the appreciation of volumes of original comic art exemplifies a connoisseurship combining archaeological and esthetic aspirations. Its agenda is to experience a reading that enables one to get as close as possible to the past actuality and, ideally, the authenticity of the cartoonist's creative process before it was altered by the cultural industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 2014 exhibition of Meriç Algün Ringborg at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, exploring identity and belonging involved the making of facsimiles. The installation included a sound work, booklets to be taken, and a book to be read. Exhibition copies were created of personal letters for open display which were not to be touched. Contrary to the artist's wishes, the work was constantly handled. Made for this one installation, the facsimiles transcended the exhibition and were returned with the work to the artist. The paper examines issues of authenticity and control from a conservation standpoint, and details discussions surrounding reproduction in contemporary art museum conservation practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raymond (Ray) Tomlinson was a computer engineer best known for developing the TENEX operating system and implemented the first email program on the Arpanet system in 1971. In its official biography, the Internet Hall of Fame states that "Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate." This interview is the second in a two-part Annals series based on an oral history conducted by Marc Weber and Gardner Hendrie for the Computer History Museum (CHM) in June 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human perceptions of music and image are closely related to each other, since both can inspire similar human sensations, such as emotion, motion, and power. This paper aims to explore whether and how music and image can be automatically matched by machines. The main contributions are three aspects. First, we construct a benchmark dataset composed of more than $45\,000$ music-image pairs. Human labelers are recruited to annotate whether these pairs are well-matched or not. The results show that they generally agree with each other on the matching degree of music-image pairs. Secondly, we investigate suitable semantic representations of music and image for this cross-modal matching task. In particular, we adopt lyrics as a middle-media to connect music and image, and design a set of lyric-based attributes for image representation. Thirdly, we propose cross-modal ranking analysis (CMRA) to learn the semantic similarity between music and image with ranking labeling information. CMRA aims to find the optimal embedding spaces for both music and image in the sense of maximizing the ordinal margin between music–image pairs. The proposed method is able to learn the non-linear relationship between music and image, and to integrate heterogeneous ranking data from different modalities into a unified space. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal methods in the music–image matching task, and achieves a consistency rate of $91.5\%$ with human labelers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reads Graham Rawle's collage novel Woman's World (2005) by utilizing the literal and metaphoric meanings of the facsimile as critical tools. Woman's World is an assemblage of circa 40,000 fragments cut and pasted from over a 1000 copies of British women's magazines of the early 1960s. These snippets are reproduced in facsimile and thus feature a jerky variety of font types, cases, and sizes. Woman's World does not only present a facsimile of its found graphic materials but it also studies, in my reading, the "facsimile" (similarizing, imitating, copying) qualities of gender identification, adopted discourses, (cross-)dressing, and the novel's own construction. The "varieties of similarity" within the facsimile that the novel presents relate to its thematic concerns. The visible outlines of the materials mark breaches in the concepts of gender and discourse as unified entities. The forms and degrees of facsimile also seem to pluralize, and relativize, the very idea of making similar and thus the very concept of identity--typographic, gender, or other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a review of the digital edition of the Becerro Galicano of San Millán de la Cogolla, one of the oldest medieval cartularies in Spain and one of the most important sources for the study of Christian Spain between the 8th and 12th century. The edition introduces new features impossible to achieve by previously printed versions, such as the possibility of reordering the documents according to different parameters or an easier manipulation of the huge number of documents thanks to a search tool capable of detecting both variants and lemmata of personal names and places. However, the use of an SQL database instead of XML/TEI encoding imposes constraints that should be removed in the future, such as the lack of expressive power towards the representation of textual structures and the lack of interoperability with other digital projects.

In this letter, a new topology called “quasi-Y-source dc–dc converter” is presented. It inherits all the advantages of the original Y-source converter. In addition, the new topology draws a continuous current from the source, which is definitely more appropriate for most renewable sources. It also has dc-current-blocking capacitors, which will definitely help to prevent the coupled inductor core from saturation. Experimental testing has proven the validity of the proposed network and its application as a high boost dc–dc converter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews the Leal Conselheiro Electronic Edition, the first digital edition of the medieval text Leal Conselheiro, a moral treatise authored by king Edward I of Portugal. The goal of the research project behind the edition, a co-operation between the University of Lisbon and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is to offer a scholarly, critical, and practically useful text in digital form. The review argues that the resulting digital edition is built upon solid methodological grounds, i.a. by integrating previous editorial work and resorting to the TEI standard for encoding, but that it misses to make its achievements accessible and usable in the desired way, first of all by holding back the underlying basic data and because of a presentation that is sometimes confusing and does not tap the full potential of a digital edition.

Sandrart.net describes itself as a 'research platform for the history of art and culture of the 17th century'. It is a digital edition of Joachim von Sandrart’s magnum opus, the 'Teutsche Academie', published between 1675 and 1680 in a German and between 1680 and 1684 in a Latin version. Facsimiles and full texts for both publications are provided as well as a bibliography and additional texts. Browse and search functionalities allow for easy access. Particular emphasis lies on commenting the text and identifying entities such as places, works of art or persons, for which extensive dossiers are provided. These kind of information can also be downloaded as raw XML and as semantic data expressed in RDF. The project undoubtedly marks the state of the art in the critically digitizing and editing 17th century prints.

Much effort was put into the digital edition of the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest and most complete Codices of the New Testament. Whereas the material is conserved in four different places, this edition reconstructs a virtual codex, transcribing the text and offering documentary data for easy and deep access to the material. It can be described as a high quality project that aroused great public interest. At the same time, a printed facsimile edition was published allowing for a comparison of the two editions.

This review addresses the digital edition of Nietzsche’s works, Nietzschesource. The project presents a definite step ahead in the history of editions of the works of the 19th century philosopher and writer and offers the best text available to date. Moreover, it includes a growing archive of digital facsimiles of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and thus allows a wide base of scholars to suggest corrections and emendations of the established text. As a digital edition, however, it is in many respects disappointing, for it fails to make use of the great possibilities modern editorial techniques offer, for instance, the possibility to enrich texts with contextual material such as information on persons and places mentioned in the texts.

This paper reviews a semi-diplomatic edition of the oldest gloss commentary on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a popular fifth-century encyclopaedic allegory of the seven liberal arts. Based on and including facsimiles of a ninth-century manuscript from Leiden University Library (Vossianus Latinus Folio 48), the edition was produced collaboratively by various specialists. While it succeeds in providing full access to an important textual witness to a rich commentary tradition – the complex nature of which defies any attempts at capture in a print edition – the integration of a deeper critical analysis of the textual transmission and an augmentation of the material presented is still desirable.

In many scientific and commercial domains, we encounter flexibility objects, i.e., objects with explicit flexibilities in a time and an amount dimension (e.g., energy or product amount). Applications of flexibility objects require novel and efficient techniques capable of handling large amounts of such objects while preserving flexibility. Hence, this paper formally defines the concept of flexibility objects (flex-objects) and provides a novel and efficient solution for aggregating and disaggregating flex-objects. Out of the broad range of possible applications, this paper will focus on smart grid energy data management and discuss strategies for aggregation and disaggregation of flex-objects while retaining flexibility. This paper further extends these approaches beyond flex-objects originating from energy consumption by additionally considering flex-objects originating from energy production and aiming at energy balancing during aggregation. In more detail, this paper considers the complete life cycle of flex-objects: aggregation, disaggregation, associated requirements, efficient incremental computation, and balance aggregation techniques. Extensive experiments based on real-world data from the energy domain show that the proposed solutions provide good performance while satisfying the strict requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper intends to explore strategies of cultural translation and their conditioning factors based on the contrastive study of the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng, Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's A Dream of Red Mansions and David Hawkes' The Story of the Stone. Part 1 presents the two versions' different treatment of the original cultural messages in the novel such as the colour word 红(red), the animal words 龙(dragon) and 凤(phoenix), the religious word 神 仙 (immortal), the culinary words 米 (rice), 饭 (meal), 碗 (bowl) and 锅 (pan), the ethical expressions 三从四德 (three obediences and four virtues), 恃才侮上(arrogance and insolence), 贤 惠 (wifeliness), rhetorical devices and aesthetic concepts. Part 2 analyses their distinct translating strategies and the factors conditioning them. The Yangs' version prefers literal translation while the Hawkes' free translation; the former emphasises the rendition of meaning and the latter the production of effect; the former prioritises 'cultural facsimile' and the latter 'cultural adaptation'. The translator's cultural background, his purpose of translating and the target readership are the main factors conditioning the adoption of strategies. Part 3 expounds on the implications of the contrastive study on cultural translation. As a cultural mediator, the translator must develop a high sensitivity to cross-cultural communication, and take full account of the translating purpose, the target readership and the textual type when adopting a translating strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the next challenges and trends for online transaction-processing (OLTP) database systems? Here, Andrew Pavlo opines on how database management system developers will need to respond as new hardware technologies become widely available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]