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This paper questions the significance and meaning behind the Byzantine legends of Jewish image desecration between the sixth and tenth centuries. The narrative of these tales, as historical and literary phenomena, uncover the uneasy equilibrium between the Christian theologians’ fear of idolatry and their need to gratify the Christian veneration of sacred images. It also confirms how doctrinal issues regarding types of images, their representation, real presence, worship and theological truth could be integrated into fictitious tale narratives about Jews to locate and define the Christian response to images at any given time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The last decade in Malawi has been one characterized by a rise in the number of resuscitated ethnic groups. For instance, the Ngoni, the Chewa, and the Yao all seem to have regrouped to revive their common ethnic identities. One other ethnic group that has followed a similar route and suddenly risen to a position of prominence is that of the Lomwe, commonly found in Southern Malawi. Such a rise to prominence has seen the group form an organization called Mulhako wa Alomwe and indeed construct its own national headquarters in Mulanje District. This paper thus discusses factors that had for long time hindered the Lomwe's rise to a position of prominence and also those that have shaped and consolidated the ethnic group to express its ethnic consciousness in the manner it has done. The paper argues that the contemporary Lomwe atavism has largely been driven by material rather than merely common historical forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article previews the web site new Founders Online from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

This paper explores the dynamic interface of state-water users' relationships in large-scale surface irrigation in India and China, to inquire to what extent the issues encountered in large-scale irrigation management and governance are independent of regime characteristics. Though operating in very different overall political regimes, China and India exhibit strong similarities in the way a central state has attempted to relate with local water users, in the types of policy instruments deployed to shape that relationship, and in the problems encountered. Both China and India have a long history of state involvement in irrigation management. Both saw massive expansion after the late 1940s. The state then tried to extend its control in response to 'underutilisation' of the created infrastructure, revenue shortfalls and perceived inefficiencies and yield gaps. In recent decades the policy approaches have, at least rhetorically, emphasised water users' self-management and governance, including financial self-management/cost recovery. In both countries the instrument for this has been Water User Associations. Results have been mixed, to say the least, on all counts. Larger institutional and policy characteristics adhering to the problematic of the state-user interface subvert stated reform objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article discusses the history of paperback books. It notes that they were invented by publisher Robert Fair de Graff, who convinced the publishing company Simon & Schuster to launch its Pocket Books line in May of 1939. The author notes the anxiety of elites over the popularity of genres including mysteries, detective stories, and westerns. Comparisons are made to modern miniature tablet computers and electronic readers (e-readers).

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a systemic philosophy of history, which, to the author's knowledge, is new in the study of history. As such this is an innovation into the study of history. Design/methodology/approach – The question studied is: What constitutes a systemic approach to the philosophy of history? In this study the author first develops the systemic hypothesis and the relationship between history and the past, then develops a systemic perspective on ontology and epistemology. Findings – The materialism, idealism debate is discussed and an answer given to the question, why study history from a systemic perspective? Originality/value – The paper presents five reasons for studying history and the historical process itself. A systemic approach to history views history as a long-term perspective contrasted with spectacular events. This results in individuals and exceptional events being examined in their social context as part of a social system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Announces the 1997 Winterthur Conference's invitation for proposals for research papers that will assess the influence of race and ethnicity as formative factors in American material life from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Potential themes; Deadline.

Unveiling 30-year-old Cabinet papers have provided a fascinating glimpse behind the secrecy drawn over the deliberations of a generation-old government.

We highlight the contributions of Dr. Paul Schaufelberger, who arrived to Costa Rica in 1929, contracted by the government, to teach geology at the Liceo de Costa Rica, Colegio Superior de Señoritas and Escuela Nacional de Agricultura. He was the director of the department of Geology and Mineralogy of the Centro Nacional de Agricultura located at San Pedro de Montes de Oca in what is now Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio. In his work Schaufelberger contributed scientific and disclosure papers about geology as known in his time. He wrote many papers that served as guidance for the lessons related to the subject of Geology in Costa Rica. He left the country in 1939 hired by the Federación de Cafetaleros de Colombia with the purpose of performing geologic field studies intended for the betterment of the Colombian coffee industry. Schaufelberger died in 1976 in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces the history of the city of Montreal in Quebec. Information on a document signed by city founder Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve which relinquished his rights to the city in April 1668; Background on the foundation of the city in May 1642; Acquisition of the island and the territory of Montreal from the founder by the Sulpicians in 1663.

Presents an update on several issues concerning British education as of July 12, 2002. Controversies regarding the private tuition of the children of British Prime Minister Tony Blair; Observations on the increase in the interest of university students in history courses.

An essay is presented of Australian football, Marngrook. It outlines debates over the history and intellectual credibility of the Indigenous game introduced by its pioneer Tom Willis. An overview the recollection of Mukjarrawaint man Johnny Connolly on the game depicted in the personal papers of ethnographer A. W. Howitt is also presented.

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]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to target the problem of awareness of the history of cybernetics as a field with different actors inside and outside cybernetics. It provides a short overview on research and literature during the last two decades and pleads for a multiplicity of historical views. Design/methodology/approach – Historical research, review of literature. Findings – While it can be found that there was a growing historical interest in cybernetics, this cannot be claimed for the history of the American Society of Cybernetics (ASC) as an organization and a productive network. One reason seems to be the lack of archival sources. The article provides a proposal to reconstruct such an archive for the history of the ASC. Originality/value – Stimulation of historical awareness for and in cybernetics. [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]

Provides an overview of the `Southern Illustrated News,' a publication of the South during the American Civil War. Distinction from illustrated papers from the North; Readers' response to the publication; Publishing problems encountered; Challenges in reporting battles; Criticisms against the paper; Adaptation of Northern newspapers' editorial cartoons.

In July 1899, the New York City newsboys formed their own union and went out on strike against Joseph Pulitzer's "World" and William Randolph Hearst's "New York Journal." A confederation of children challenged the two most powerful publishers in the US. The newsboys were in the enviable position of being irreplaceable as the newspapers' major distributors. These newsboys were different from the earlier generations of street waifs. The wholesale price increase in Hearst's "Journal" and Pulitzer's "World" lead to the strike. The first reported events of the strike were in Long Island City when newsies discovered the deliveryman had been cheating them and giving them a short count on their bundles of papers. Morris Cohen may have led the strike in Manhattan. The newsboys prevented the delivery wagons from leaving with papers. The "Journal" and "World" were reluctant to take the strike seriously at first.

Opinion. Focuses on the consultation process advocated by the British government as exemplified in the 1988 Education Reform Act. History of nonconsultation in the legislative process; Inner London Education Authority; Six stages of the consultative process; Former Education secretary Kenneth Baker.

The article presents a profile of Chinese ink on paper painting. Topics addressed include an overview of the historical tradition of the art form, which emerged as early as the 2nd century B.C., mention of several ongoing exhibitions of works from the genre running as of March 2015, and discussion of contemporary collecting practices of the works.

This paper shows a series of self-critical reflections of the reality of Latin American volcanology, from an analysis of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) held in February 2008 in Antigua, Guatemala. Before the analysis, an account of the efforts made to unite the Latin American volcanological community is presented, up to the formation of an association (the Latin American Association of Volcanology, ALVO according to its Spanish acronym) that will strengthen and promote partnerships between Latin American volcanologists and their institutions for the benefit of society, particularly during eruptive crisis of the numerous active volcanoes in the Latin American region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history, forms and nature of oral and musical discourses contained in interactive radio programmes and, in parallel, internet chat forums that have come to the fore with the breaking up of the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation's (MBC) monopoly after the onset of 'multi-party' rule in 1994. It attempts to demonstrate how they have been exploited, first, by broadcasters both to entertain and foster a feeling of 'freedom of speech' and, secondly, by various institutional, social and political actors to foster this feeling of freedom of speech as well as for their own class needs. Although appearing to give equity of voice to all, the modes of entry into 'direct' talk radio are determined by infrastructural factors like the internet, internet cafes, fixed and mobile phones and possession of 'phone units'; as well as peoples' political, cultural or religious views. Before a piece of music can be broadcast it has to be 'composed, recorded, promoted and requested', an 'indirect' process that brings in a conflicting mix of promoters, patrons, musicians and, often, disc jockeys' preferences and politics. Similarly access to internet chat forums and newspapers requires access to internet technology (IT). After examination using a number of case studies, the commonalities in interactive talk, music radio programmes and internet media in relation to powerful and not so powerful forces whether personal, institutional or national, against the disparities and specifics of class, culture and urbanity, it is concluded that, in the case of Malawi, the proliferation of media has separated the social classes even further, with different sections 'chattering unto themselves'. This, it is suggested, is an impediment to a participatory developmental democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the popularity of adult coloring books in the U.S. in 1962. Topics include the political and satirical aspects of 1960s adult coloring books, the therapeutic intent of adult coloring books as of 2016, and the relation of 1960s interest in adult coloring books to psychoanalysis. The history of widely available crayons is addressed.

The article presents the author's comments as a citizen scientist working on the Old Weather Navy web-based project for deciphering climate data recorded in antique ship logbooks. Topics include the use of historical data in climate modeling, the transcription of weather data recorded in ship logs, and the volunteer model for transcription and climatology data collection by the Old Weather Navy.

This paper traces representations and contestations of colonial and postcolonial Malawian identities through artistic and cultural discourses. I argue that the relevant identities were produced in several phases: first by pre-colonial dynamics; second by the colonising process producing an economic migrant population; third, by the post-independence Cabinet Crisis of 1964 and Dr Banda's dictatorship producing marginalised exiled dissidents and, by association, a marginalised Malawi Diaspora; and finally the po st-1994 largely economic migration facilitated by globalisation and the freedom of movement. I will contend that a significant section of domiciled² elite, as opposed to rural Malawians, consider that 'M alawians', in the sense of citizenship rights, are only those domiciled in Malawi. Most Diaspora Malawians, however, consider themselves Malawian but face marginalisation through distance, denial of Malawi political and cultural rights as well as the questioning of their Malawian identity. This denial of rights, with aspects traceable to the colonial period, became sequentially more focused with the end of the Federation, attainment of independence, and as Dr Banda used it as a way of excluding troublesome political elements. This pattern of marginalising Diaspora Malawians has persisted despite economic ties and the 'unity of purpose' between domiciled and Diaspora opposition elements during the 1991 - 1994 transition to multiparty rule. Political, poetic, linguistic, musical, artistic and other cultural discourses are used to define and perpetuate the marginalisation. Though former long-term exiles. Dr Banda and Dr Mutharika recruited cultural discourses to marginalise external opponents. Paradoxically, any Diaspora Malawians who distinguish themselves in the arts, business, sport or other activities abroad is accorded 'Malawian-ness'. The most significant relationship between domiciled and Diaspora Malawians remains economic and intellectual. Malawians in the Diaspora remit significant amounts of financial and intellectual resources and those domiciled in Malawi control all access to citizenship rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the use of Montreal, Quebec as a base for clandestine Confederate meetings during the U.S. Civil War. It looks at how Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent former Cabinet member Jacob Thompson to Montreal to organize a secret service that would raid the northern U.S. Thompson's plots included destabilizing the Union economy by converting paper money into gold, bioterrorism with yellow fever, and kidnapping President Abraham Lincoln.

We consider online learning in finite stochastic Markovian environments where in each time step a new reward function is chosen by an oblivious adversary. The goal of the learning agent is to compete with the best stationary policy in hindsight in terms of the total reward received. Specifically, in each time step the agent observes the current state and the reward associated with the last transition, however, the agent does not observe the rewards associated with other state-action pairs. The agent is assumed to know the transition probabilities. The state of the art result for this setting is an algorithm with an expected regret of O(T^2/3\ln T). In this paper, assuming that stationary policies mix uniformly fast, we show that after T time steps, the expected regret of this algorithm (more precisely, a slightly modified version thereof) is O(T^1/2\ln T), giving the first rigorously proven, essentially tight regret bound for the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of the article "A History of the Past: Life Reeked With Joy," compiled by Anders Henriksson, which appeared in the Spring 1983 issue of "Wilson Quarterly," is presented. It is comprised of humorous excerpts from student papers on world history, in which malapropisms and factual errors feature heavily. Topics include the Middle Ages, the Reformation, World War I, and Nazi leader Adolph Hitler.

The archives of the Polanyis, a distinguished family of intellectuals of Hungarian-Jewish origins, are today divided between two continents and three countries. The article traces the history of the family's archives, highlighting the way in which the multiple -- and in their respective contents distinct -- collections of documents testify to the family's history since the late nineteenth century and the intellectual refugee experience at large. Documents of the family's flight from Hitler's Europe, preserved in the Eva Zeisel Papers, shed light on the details of a little-known episode of the intellectual migration from Nazi-ruled Europe to the United States and help integrate the international network of physics and the Ukrainian Physico-Technological Institute in the Soviet Union in the networks of émigré artists and intellectuals. The article also considers the constructed nature of family archives and the shifting perception of what families consider private or public in their own history and legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subsystems that are coupled due to dynamics and costs arise naturally in various communication applications. In many such applications the control actions are shared between different control stations giving rise to a control sharing information structure. Previous studies of control-sharing have concentrated on the linear quadratic Gaussian setup and a solution approach tailored to continuous valued control actions. In this paper a three step solution approach for finite valued control actions is presented. In the first step, a person-by-person approach is used to identify redundant data or a sufficient statistic for local information at each control station. In the second step, the common-information based approach of Nayyar (2013) is used to find a sufficient statistic for the common information shared between all control stations and to obtain a dynamic programming decomposition. In the third step, the specifics of the model are used to simplify the sufficient statistic and the dynamic program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes environmental protests against rain forest industrial logging on the Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada in 1993. The local environmental group Friends of Clayoquot Sound established a Peace Camp at a clearcut logging site, resulting in the arrests of 856 activists for blocking lumbering roads. The protests promoted sustainable forestry policy, directed market campaigns at wood and paper companies, and protection of unlogged areas.

Many observers were surprised by the scope of the bicentennial celebrations of the war of 1812-1814 organized by the Conservative government. This paper approaches this enterprise as part of an attempt to reconstruct Canada 's national and international identity around a neo-conservative and neocontinentalist world-view. However, an examination of the centennial celebration of this same war, scheduled for 1915, shows that the Harper government 's project is not unique and that this conflict has been previously reinterpreted in order to promote an alternative vision of Canada 's place in the world, this time around liberal values. Indeed, the plans laid out by the Canadian Peace Centenary Association aimed at celebrating the community of identity uniting the "English-speaking peoples" and the peace that North America experienced thanks to rational methods of conflict resolution, notably through a program of popular education. As such, the CPCA was a vehicle for an alternative conception to the imperialist ideas that dominated at the time, and H prefigures the emergence of a more nationalist conception of Canada 's place in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North Caucasus has long been one of the most turbulent regions in Eurasia. Events such as the secessionist conflicts in Chechnya in the 1990s, the growing radicalization and the spread of insurgency groups across the region, and most recently discussions over the prospects for, and the security of, the hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics alongside rising local Circassian nationalism on the ground in Sochi have grabbed the headlines both in Russia and internationally. These events are set against a background of a general rise in nationalism and ongoing anti-Caucasian sentiment in Russia. This paper investigates the roots causes of these complex developments, and the impact that this region is likely to have on Russian and regional politics in the next decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]