Plotting regression coefficients and other estimates

Graphical display of regression results has become increasingly popular in presentations and in scientific literature because graphs are often much easier to read than tables. Such plots can be produced in Stata by the marginsplot command (see [R] marginsplot). However, while marginsplot is versatile and flexible, it has two major limitations: it can only process results left behind by margins (see [R] margins), and it can handle only one set of results at a time. In this article, I introduce a new command called coefplot that overcomes these limitations. It plots results from any estimation command and combines results from several models into one graph. The default behavior of coefplot is to plot markers for coefficients and horizontal spikes for confidence intervals. However, coefplot can also produce other types of graphs. I illustrate the capabilities of coefplot by using a series of examples.

«Einige Zeit aufs Singen verwendet». Musik als Kernressource dörflicher Kultur am Beispiel des schweizerischen 18. Jahrhunderts

Dealing with popular music in premodern times historical research usually focuses on so called “Volksmusik”. But already in the 18th century researchers were disappointed to find only few traces of imaginary “traditional” music in Switzerland. They unfortunately overlooked that common people kept on with their own stubborn musical culture: Beginning with the Reformation the authorities encouraged the communities to employ schoolmasters who were able to teach music. Their goal was that everybody should be able to participate in liturgical music actively. Over generations even people with no special musical talent adopted their own repertoire of psalms plus techniques of reading music and polyphonic singing. Spontaneous choral singing evolved into a common everyday practice. The most ambitious and brightest teachers even taught instrumental lessons at home on their proper pianos and chamber organs or encouraged the villagers to build new prestigious organs in their churches. The financial burden of such instruments weighted heavily on the communities. Some of them received financial support from the government, albeit unwillingly because it was obvious to the rulers that the villages just wanted to overtop each other. Homemade music was the most important issue in the cultural life of most parishes. Rich communes spent a lot of money to win the best voices on-site for their church choirs. Belonging to an elitists’ singer association paved the way to the farmer-village’s highlevel sociability.

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler, Beatrix Busse, and Wietse de Boer The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England.

Refractions of Canada in European Literature and Culture

Ever since the first exploratory expeditions in the early modern period, North America has epitomized to Europeans a promise and the hope for the fulfilment of great expectations, be it of more freedom, greater wealth, social liberation or religious tolerance. While numerous features in this dialogic intercontinental relationship will hold true for North America in its entirety, the vast northern territories which we know as Canada today began to emerge early on as a specific iconic location in European mind-maps, and they definitely acquired a distinctive profile after the formation of the USA. As a rich source of cultural exchange and an important partner in political and economic cooperation Canada has come to occupy an important position in the cultural discourses of many European nations. It is these refractions and images of Canada which this volume thoroughly explores in European literature and culture. The contributions include literature, philosophy, language, life-writing and the concept of 'Heimat' (homeland) as well as the cultural impact of the World Wars. While there is an emphasis on literary texts, other fields of cultural representation are also included.

Nonlesions, misdiagnoses, missed diagnoses, and other interpretive challenges in fish histopathology studies: a guide for investigators, authors, reviewers, and readers.

Differentiating salient histopathologic changes from normal anatomic features or tissue artifacts can be decidedly challenging, especially for the novice fish pathologist. As a consequence, findings of questionable accuracy may be reported inadvertently, and the potential negative impacts of publishing inaccurate histopathologic interpretations are not always fully appreciated. The objectives of this article are to illustrate a number of specific morphologic findings in commonly examined fish tissues (e.g., gills, liver, kidney, and gonads) that are frequently either misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed, and to address related issues involving the interpretation of histopathologic data. To enhance the utility of this article as a guide, photomicrographs of normal and abnormal specimens are presented. General recommendations for generating and publishing results from histopathology studies are additionally provided. It is hoped that the furnished information will be a useful resource for manuscript generation, by helping authors, reviewers, and readers to critically assess fish histopathologic data.

Information-centric communication in mobile and wireless networks

Information-centric networking (ICN) is a new communication paradigm that has been proposed to cope with drawbacks of host-based communication protocols, namely scalability and security. In this thesis, we base our work on Named Data Networking (NDN), which is a popular ICN architecture, and investigate NDN in the context of wireless and mobile ad hoc networks. In a first part, we focus on NDN efficiency (and potential improvements) in wireless environments by investigating NDN in wireless one-hop communication, i.e., without any routing protocols. A basic requirement to initiate informationcentric communication is the knowledge of existing and available content names. Therefore, we develop three opportunistic content discovery algorithms and evaluate them in diverse scenarios for different node densities and content distributions. After content names are known, requesters can retrieve content opportunistically from any neighbor node that provides the content. However, in case of short contact times to content sources, content retrieval may be disrupted. Therefore, we develop a requester application that keeps meta information of disrupted content retrievals and enables resume operations when a new content source has been found. Besides message efficiency, we also evaluate power consumption of information-centric broadcast and unicast communication. Based on our findings, we develop two mechanisms to increase efficiency of information-centric wireless one-hop communication. The first approach called Dynamic Unicast (DU) avoids broadcast communication whenever possible since broadcast transmissions result in more duplicate Data transmissions, lower data rates and higher energy consumption on mobile nodes, which are not interested in overheard Data, compared to unicast communication. Hence, DU uses broadcast communication only until a content source has been found and then retrieves content directly via unicast from the same source. The second approach called RC-NDN targets efficiency of wireless broadcast communication by reducing the number of duplicate Data transmissions. In particular, RC-NDN is a Data encoding scheme for content sources that increases diversity in wireless broadcast transmissions such that multiple concurrent requesters can profit from each others’ (overheard) message transmissions. If requesters and content sources are not in one-hop distance to each other, requests need to be forwarded via multi-hop routing. Therefore, in a second part of this thesis, we investigate information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. First, we consider multi-hop broadcast communication in the context of rather static community networks. We introduce the concept of preferred forwarders, which relay Interest messages slightly faster than non-preferred forwarders to reduce redundant duplicate message transmissions. While this approach works well in static networks, the performance may degrade in mobile networks if preferred forwarders may regularly move away. Thus, to enable routing in mobile ad hoc networks, we extend DU for multi-hop communication. Compared to one-hop communication, multi-hop DU requires efficient path update mechanisms (since multi-hop paths may expire quickly) and new forwarding strategies to maintain NDN benefits (request aggregation and caching) such that only a few messages need to be transmitted over the entire end-to-end path even in case of multiple concurrent requesters. To perform quick retransmission in case of collisions or other transmission errors, we implement and evaluate retransmission timers from related work and compare them to CCNTimer, which is a new algorithm that enables shorter content retrieval times in information-centric wireless multi-hop communication. Yet, in case of intermittent connectivity between requesters and content sources, multi-hop routing protocols may not work because they require continuous end-to-end paths. Therefore, we present agent-based content retrieval (ACR) for delay-tolerant networks. In ACR, requester nodes can delegate content retrieval to mobile agent nodes, which move closer to content sources, can retrieve content and return it to requesters. Thus, ACR exploits the mobility of agent nodes to retrieve content from remote locations. To enable delay-tolerant communication via agents, retrieved content needs to be stored persistently such that requesters can verify its authenticity via original publisher signatures. To achieve this, we develop a persistent caching concept that maintains received popular content in repositories and deletes unpopular content if free space is required. Since our persistent caching concept can complement regular short-term caching in the content store, it can also be used for network caching to store popular delay-tolerant content at edge routers (to reduce network traffic and improve network performance) while real-time traffic can still be maintained and served from the content store.