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New Leaves: Riffling the History of Digital Pagination
Get PDFThis article presents a new history of digital pagination. Virtual pagination works very differently from its print correlate. Despite this, encapsulated and paginated formats have gained a solid digital foothold. Nonetheless, many commentators have argued that we must overcome such a reliance on and continuity with print in the digital space. This article charts a fresh history of the development of digital pagination through a revisionist interrogation of three interrelated phenomena:
1. That digital pages do not behave as do their physical correlates but instead mimic earlier historical forms of print that fused pagination, scrolling, and the tablet form.
2. That the development of PDF was almost abandoned by Adobe’s board of directors, who could see no audience for it.
3. That there are other more robust lineages of constraint for digital pages from cinema and television.
Drawing on new correspondence with the creators of the PDF format I argue from these historical tracings that nothing was sure about the development of textual pagination in the digital space. Further, the digital page almost never came to the prominence and dominance now presumed in discussions of digital reading
Using Triples to assess symmetry under weak dependence
Get PDFThe problem of assessing symmetry about an unspecified center of the one-dimensional marginal distribution of a strictly stationary random process is considered. A well-known U-statistic based on data triples is used to detect deviations from symmetry, allowing the underlying process to satisfy suitable mixing or near-epoch dependence conditions. We suggest using subsampling for inference on the target parameter, establish the asymptotic validity of the method in our setting, and discuss data-driven rules for selecting the size of subsamples. The small-sample properties of the proposed inferential procedures are examined by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Applications to time series of output growth and stock returns are also presented
Refugees in the European Union: from emergency alarmism to common management
Get PDFThe flows of refugees have ignited the European political debate, thereby boosting nationalistic forces in almost all countries. The aim of this paper is to counterbalance a widespread view about their overall impact and show that the number of asylum seekers did not represent a “refugee crises”. It argues, however, that the current European Union institutions and procedures are highly insufficient to successfully manage refugee inflows and asylum requests. It is often forgotten that large number of refugees are created from conflicts initiated or not prevented by EU members themselves. Once the problem comes into existence, as the procedures based on the Dublin Convention are widely recognised as inadequate, the paper provides a few suggestions for implementing radical changes to manage refugees and asylum seekers in the EU
‘Poles of the World Unite’: the transnational history of the 1929 World Congress of Poles abroad in the context of interwar Soviet-Polish rivalries
Get PDFBy investigating the information and propaganda campaign surrounding the election of delegates to the 1929 Congress of Poles Abroad, this article seeks to elucidate a complex interplay between foreign policy considerations, security concerns and minority policies of the Polish and Soviet governments. It aims to examine the role of national minorities in the Soviet modernisation project, as well as in the on-going Polish-Soviet rivalry of the interwar period. The focused case study of the information campaign, and the public discussion surrounding the election process to the Congress contributes also to the debates on mass political culture in the interwar Soviet Union. Party communication, intelligence and secret reports compiled during the local elections and conferences provide a unique source for sampling public opinion of the Polish population regarding the Soviet regime in the early years of Stalin’s First Five-Year plan. This paper argues that despite considerable efforts of the party to define and promote Polish identity and thus shift their loyalties closer to the Soviet state, the Polish population in Soviet Ukraine even at the end of the 1920s continued to express persistent nonconformity and a lack of faith in the Soviet government
The Digital Humanities and Literary Studies
Get PDFThis short book delivers an introduction and overview of developing intersections between digital methods and literary studies. The volume will serve as the best starting place for those who wish to learn more about the possibilities, but also the limitations, of the oft-touted digital humanities in the literary space. The volume will engage with the proponents of digital humanities and its detractors alike, aiming to offer a fair and balanced perspective on this controversial topic. The book combines a survey and background approach with my own original literary research and is, therefore, well-placed to straddle the divide between seasoned digital experts and interested newcomers
In situ identification of Palaeoarchaean biosignatures using co-located Perseverance rover analyses: perspectives for in situ Mars science and sample return
Get PDFThe NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is currently exploring Jezero crater, a Noachian–Hesperian locality that once hosted a delta–lake system with high habitability and biosignature preservation potential. Perseverance conducts detailed appraisals of rock targets using a synergistic payload capable of geological characterization from kilometer to micron scales. The highest-resolution textural and chemical information will be provided by correlated WATSON (imaging), SHERLOC (deep-UV Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy), and PIXL (X-ray lithochemistry) analyses, enabling the distributions of organic and mineral phases within rock targets to be comprehensively established. Herein, we analyze Paleoarchean microbial mats from the *3.42 Ga Buck Reef Chert (Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa)—considered astrobiological analogues for a putative ancient martian biosphere—following a WATSON–SHERLOC–PIXL protocol identical to that conducted by Perseverance on Mars during all sampling activities. Correlating deep-UV Raman and fluorescence spectroscopic mapping with X-ray elemental mapping, we show that the Perseverance payload has the capability to detect thermally and texturally mature organic materials of biogenic origin and can highlight organic–mineral interrelationships and elemental colocation at fine spatial scales. We also show that the Perseverance protocol obtains very similar results to high-performance laboratory imaging, Raman spectroscopy, and mXRF instruments. This is encouraging for the prospect of detecting microscale organicbearing textural biosignatures on Mars using the correlative micro-analytical approach enabled by WATSON, SHERLOC, and PIXL; indeed, laminated, organic-bearing samples such as those studied herein are considered plausible analogues of biosignatures from a potential Noachian–Hesperian biosphere. Were similar materials discovered at Jezero crater, they would offer opportunities to reconstruct aspects of the early martian carbon cycle and search for potential fossilized traces of life in ancient paleoenvironments. Such samples should be prioritized for caching and eventual return to Earth. Key Words: Mars—Astrobiology— Mars 2020—Biosignatures—Buck Reef Chert—Microbial mats. Astrobiology 22, xxx–xxx
Middle
No full textWhy do people ever see things through?
Why do they ever stay?
It's so hard.
Every relationship reaches a crossroad some time.
As dawn breaks, Maggie is heating some milk and Gary wonders what she's doing out of bed. Maybe it's time for an honest conversation – but how much honesty can this marriage take?
Following his five-star play Beginning, which played sold-out runs at the National Theatre and in the West End, writer David Eldridge brings his raw, touching and funny style to a portrait of a 21st century marriage, the second of three plays to explore love and relationships
Characteristics and outputs of university spin-offs in the United Kingdom
Get PDFResearch on the formal role of universities in stimulating regional economic development is relatively recent. However, the role of universities in contributing to regional technological and service variety is underresearched. In this study, we use a data set that has wide geographic coverage. The analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of the UK-wide contribution of university spin-offs (USOs) to the innovation capacity of their host regional economies. We argue that the survival and growth of USOs imply embeddedness in innovation ecosystems in a region. The findings show that the majority of firms in the sample are relatively young, small in size, and are still at the early stages of their life cycle. Hence, the products and services that are offered are fairly small in number. Nevertheless, their products/services based on university research have the potential for value capture by other firms thus implying contributions to a range of related and unrelated industry sectors within a region or beyond the local
The EU’s initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic: disintegration or ‘failing forward’?
Get PDFThis article examines the European Union’s initial response (March-July 2020) to the multifaceted crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It does so on the basis of two competing hypotheses in relation to what this response indicates about the process of integration. The first is drawn from the literature on ‘disintegration’ while the second is based on the recent argument (Jones, Kelemen, and Meunier 2016) that the EU has been ‘failing forward’ in reaction to the crises that it has been facing for more than a decade. It is argued that while the first hypothesis ought to be rejected, there is evidence indicating that the EU has responded much more in line with the ‘failing forward’ thesis. Indeed it is argued that there is (in the EU’s initial response) more evidence of the latter (forward) than the former (failing)
Unity and Disunity in the Positive Tradition
Get PDFBook synopsis: Freedom is widely regarded as a basic social and political value that is deeply connected to the ideals of democracy, equality, liberation, and social recognition. Many insist that freedom must include conditions that go beyond simple “negative” liberty understood as the absence of constraints; only if freedom includes other conditions such as the capability to act, mental and physical control of oneself, and social recognition by others will it deserve its place in the pantheon of basic social values. Positive Freedom is the first volume to examine the idea of positive liberty in detail and from multiple perspectives. With contributions from leading scholars in ethics and political theory, this collection includes both historical studies of the idea of positive freedom and discussions of its connection to important contemporary issues in social and political philosophy
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