Plutarch's 'Lives' and the critical reader

This paper analyses the kind of reader constructed in the Lives and the response expected of that reader. It begins by attempting a typology of moralising in the Lives. Plutarch does sometimes make general 'gnomic' statements about right and wrong, and occasionally passes explicit judgement on a subject's behaviour. In addition, the language with which Plutarch describes character is inherently moralistic; and even when he does not pass explicit judgment, Plutarch can rely on a common set of notions about what makes behaviour virtuous or vicious. However, the application of any moral lessons is left to the reader's own judgement. Furthermore, Plutarch's use of multiple focalisations means that the reader is sometimes presented with varying ways of looking at the same individual or the same historical situation. In addition, many incidents or anecdotes are marked by 'multivalence': that is, they resist reduction to a single moral message or lesson. In such cases, the reader is encouraged to exercise his or her own critical faculties. Indeed, the prologues which precede many pairs of Lives and the synkriseis which follow them sometimes explicitly invite the reader's participation in the work of judging. The syncritic structure of the Parallel Lives also invites the reader's participation, as do the varying perspectives provided by a corpus of overlapping Lives. In fact, the presence of a critical, engaged reader is presupposed by the agonistic nature of much of Greek literature, and of several texts in the Moralia which stage opposing viewpoints or arguments. Plutarch himself argues for such a reader in his How the young man should listen to poems.

Hyper-parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations of Ar adsorption in new models of microporous non-graphitizing activated carbon: effect of microporosity

The adsorption of gases on microporous carbons is still poorly understood, partly because the structure of these carbons is not well known. Here, a model of microporous carbons based on fullerene- like fragments is used as the basis for a theoretical study of Ar adsorption on carbon. First, a simulation box was constructed, containing a plausible arrangement of carbon fragments. Next, using a new Monte Carlo simulation algorithm, two types of carbon fragments were gradually placed into the initial structure to increase its microporosity. Thirty six different microporous carbon structures were generated in this way. Using the method proposed recently by Bhattacharya and Gubbins ( BG), the micropore size distributions of the obtained carbon models and the average micropore diameters were calculated. For ten chosen structures, Ar adsorption isotherms ( 87 K) were simulated via the hyper- parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulation method. The isotherms obtained in this way were described by widely applied methods of microporous carbon characterisation, i. e. Nguyen and Do, Horvath - Kawazoe, high- resolution alpha(a)s plots, adsorption potential distributions and the Dubinin - Astakhov ( DA) equation. From simulated isotherms described by the DA equation, the average micropore diameters were calculated using empirical relationships proposed by different authors and they were compared with those from the BG method.

Mutated bodies: stage performances of Beckett's late prose texts by Mabou Mines (1984) and Gare St. Lazare Players, Ireland (2005)

An exploration of the stage adaptations of Beckett's fictional texts by the New York based Mabou Mines theatre company.

Parallel pipelined array architectures for real-time histogram computation in consumer devices

The real-time parallel computation of histograms using an array of pipelined cells is proposed and prototyped in this paper with application to consumer imaging products. The array operates in two modes: histogram computation and histogram reading. The proposed parallel computation method does not use any memory blocks. The resulting histogram bins can be stored into an external memory block in a pipelined fashion for subsequent reading or streaming of the results. The array of cells can be tuned to accommodate the required data path width in a VLSI image processing engine as present in many imaging consumer devices. Synthesis of the architectures presented in this paper in FPGA are shown to compute the real-time histogram of images streamed at over 36 megapixels at 30 frames/s by processing in parallel 1, 2 or 4 pixels per clock cycle.

A largely intolerable combination of two mainly unconnected texts: 1. Description of the Barefoot in the Head event, at BHQU, NY, 12/11/09; 2. Fictioning and the End

An evaluation of the 'Barefoot in the Head' performance event, I co-curated with Alun Rowlands and Mark Beasley, at Bruce High Quality Foundation University, New York, as part of Performa 09 New York, 12 November 2009 - an examination of my own performance and the other performances occurring simultaneously at the event.

Implementation of Parallel (p,q) Counters for High Speed Digital Multipliers

Both the (5,3) counter and (2,2,3) counter multiplication techniques are investigated for the efficiency of their operation speed and the viability of the architectures when implemented in a fast bipolar ECL technology. The implementation of the counters in series-gated ECL and threshold logic are contrasted for speed, noise immunity and complexity, and are critically compared with the fastest practical design of a full-adder. A novel circuit technique to overcome the problems of needing high fan-in input weights in threshold circuits through the use of negative weighted inputs is presented. The authors conclude that a (2,2,3) counter based array multiplier implemented in series-gated ECL should enable a significant increase in speed over conventional full adder based array multipliers.

Parallel Architectures for High Speed Multipliers

The authors compare various array multiplier architectures based on (p,q) counter circuits. The tradeoff in multiplier design is always between adding complexity and increasing speed. It is shown that by using a (2,2,3) counter cell it is possible to gain a significant increase in speed over a conventional full-adder, carry-save array based approach. The increase in complexity should be easily accommodated using modern emitter-coupled-logic processes.

PMCRI: a parallel modular classification rule induction framework

In a world where massive amounts of data are recorded on a large scale we need data mining technologies to gain knowledge from the data in a reasonable time. The Top Down Induction of Decision Trees (TDIDT) algorithm is a very widely used technology to predict the classification of newly recorded data. However alternative technologies have been derived that often produce better rules but do not scale well on large datasets. Such an alternative to TDIDT is the PrismTCS algorithm. PrismTCS performs particularly well on noisy data but does not scale well on large datasets. In this paper we introduce Prism and investigate its scaling behaviour. We describe how we improved the scalability of the serial version of Prism and investigate its limitations. We then describe our work to overcome these limitations by developing a framework to parallelise algorithms of the Prism family and similar algorithms. We also present the scale up results of a first prototype implementation.

Parallel induction of modular classification rules

The Distributed Rule Induction (DRI) project at the University of Portsmouth is concerned with distributed data mining algorithms for automatically generating rules of all kinds. In this paper we present a system architecture and its implementation for inducing modular classification rules in parallel in a local area network using a distributed blackboard system. We present initial results of a prototype implementation based on the Prism algorithm.

Parallel rule induction with information theoretic pre-pruning

In a world where data is captured on a large scale the major challenge for data mining algorithms is to be able to scale up to large datasets. There are two main approaches to inducing classification rules, one is the divide and conquer approach, also known as the top down induction of decision trees; the other approach is called the separate and conquer approach. A considerable amount of work has been done on scaling up the divide and conquer approach. However, very little work has been conducted on scaling up the separate and conquer approach.In this work we describe a parallel framework that allows the parallelisation of a certain family of separate and conquer algorithms, the Prism family. Parallelisation helps the Prism family of algorithms to harvest additional computer resources in a network of computers in order to make the induction of classification rules scale better on large datasets. Our framework also incorporates a pre-pruning facility for parallel Prism algorithms.