Strategic Issues, Problems and Challenges in Inductive Theorem Proving

Abstract(Automated) Inductive Theorem Proving (ITP) is a challenging field in automated reasoning and theorem proving. Typically, (Automated) Theorem Proving (TP) refers to methods, techniques and tools for automatically proving general (most often first-order) theorems. Nowadays, the field of TP has reached a certain degree of maturity and powerful TP systems are widely available and used. The situation with ITP is strikingly different, in the sense that proving inductive theorems in an essentially automatic way still is a very challenging task, even for the most advanced existing ITP systems. Both in general TP and in ITP, strategies for guiding the proof search process are of fundamental importance, in automated as well as in interactive or mixed settings. In the paper we will analyze and discuss the most important strategic and proof search issues in ITP, compare ITP with TP, and argue why ITP is in a sense much more challenging. More generally, we will systematically isolate, investigate and classify the main problems and challenges in ITP w.r.t. automation, on different levels and from different points of views. Finally, based on this analysis we will present some theses about the state of the art in the field, possible criteria for what could be considered as substantial progress, and promising lines of research for the future, towards (more) automated ITP

A Petition Written by Ricardus Franciscus

This article identifies Ricardus Franciscus as the scribe of Kew, The National Archives, C 49/30/19, a petition seeking the exoneration of the late Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. (d. 1447). The authors provide a palaeographical analysis of the "flamboyant, spiky script" of the well-known scribe Franciscus in this document, which support the identification, as well as the linguistic features. The authors situate the petition within what is known about this scribe's life, patrons, and his written output. The article sheds more light on the scribes of medieval petitions which had hitherto been lacking

Judith Merril: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography

This Judith Merril bibliography includes both primary and secondary works, arranged in categories that are suitable for her career and that are, generally, common to the other bibliographies in the Center for Bibliographic Studies in Science Fiction. Works by Merril include a variety of types and modes—pieces she wrote at Morris High School in the Bronx, newsletters and fanzines she edited; sports, westerns, and detective fiction and non-fiction published in pulp magazines up to 1950; science fiction stories, novellas, and novels; book reviews; critical essays; edited anthologies; and both audio and video recordings of her fiction and non-fiction

Pageants, processions and plays: Representations of royal and state power and the common audience in early modern England

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis examines certain important aspects of theatrical practice in earlymodern England, as they were manifested in Shakespeare's history plays and pageant literature produced for Queen Elizabeth 1 on procession. This study regards the events marked by these two literary forms as discrete though related theatrical formations, and seeks to examine and question the ways in which Shakespearean criticism and pageant analysis regard both genres as aesthetically equivalent as well as being cultural forms both characterised and linked by their valorisation of state authority. This thesis asserts that such a conceptualisation simplifies the nature of the plays and the pageants as material events, as well as the literature produced for these events. Instead, it argues that a closer examination of the human context in which pageants, processions and plays occurred, and in which the literature for them was performed, enables the construction of an alternative viewpoint. A reprocessing of primary and secondary material while prioritising the fact that a large proportion of audiences who witnessed the pageants, processions and plays were comprised of the common people of early modern England, allows for different perceptions of these cultural events. The presence of these common people has traditionally been either ignored or undervalued and, through a close examination of contemporary records, this thesis proceeds to argue that, as they were the targets of official, dominant ideology, their presence was significant

Rareness Starts Early for Disturbance-Dependent Grassland Plant Species

Ecological communities always contain a few common species and an abundance of rare species. Mechanisms determining commonness and rarity require experimental investigation. Given that most plant mortality occurs in seeds and seedlings, recruitment best predicts plant community assemblage and distributions. In northeastern North America, grassland plant species constitute a sizable portion of the native flora. Approximately 30% of western New York’s threatened and endangered flora are associated with grasslands, apparent leftovers from a post-glacial landscape. I investigated the mechanisms behind grassland species commonness and rarity by examining how habitat type, disturbance and biotic interactions limit seed recruitment for three rare grassland species and their common congeners. If grassland species rarity is determined by habitat suitability, then the rare grassland species will be more responsive to habitat heterogeneity and manipulation than are the common species. Rare species successfully recruited where burning reduced initial competitor density, but otherwise appeared severely limited by interspecific competition. Because both the rare and common plant species survived equally well in the forest and edge habitats, but only common plant species did much better in the meadows, the competition for space may be the limiting factor for rare grassland plants. Pollinator limitation may explain grassland plant rarity, which suggests that small populations may be limited by a lack of pollinator visits. Commoness and rarity are temporal designations that can change as disturbance alters the landscape. The results of this experiment suggest that for rare grassland plants, widespread burning and planting appears to be required, both to create suitable habitat and encourage positive biotic interactions

Money, Wages, and Real Incomes in the Age of Erasmus: The Purchasing Power of Coins and of Building Craftsmen's Wages in England and the Low Countries, 1500 - 1540

This comparative study of money, coinages, prices, and wages in southern England and the southern Low Countries had its origins in a series of appendices and footnotes for the first twelve volumes of the Correspondence of Erasmus (1484-1527), part of the Collected Works of Erasmus, which the University of Toronto Press has been publishing since 1974. The questions first put to me were: can we identify and evaluate the various silver and gold coins that appear in Erasmus's correspondence, and references to his travels over an arc running from England, the Habsburg Netherlands, France, the Rhineland, Switzerland, and Italy? What were these coins in terms of their precious metal contents and exchange rates, with each other, and in relation to the moneys of account of England, France, and the Low Countries? The more economically interesting questions that developed were: (1) What was the purchasing power of these various coins in terms of everyday commodities? (2) What was the real value of the various benefices and stipends that Erasmus received from his benefactors: was he really so ill-paid, as he frequently intimated? (3) How would his 'standard of living' compare with that of skilled master craftsmen -- a mason or carpenter in Oxford and in Antwerp of this era - at least in terms of the purchasing powers of their money incomes? This study covers the Golden Age of Erasmus (1466-1536) in the first four decades of the sixteenth century, an era that also marked the onset of the famous Price Revolution, perhaps the most significant inflationary era in European economic history. It commences with an analysis of the original sources for the price and wage data utilized in this study, and the problem of 'wage stickiness', so that real wages were essentially a function of changes in the price level (rather than in the MRP of the craftsmen). The next part analyses the nature of relative price changes and of inflation during the first decades of the Price Revolution era, discussing the role of both demographic and monetary changes, but offering essentially a monetary explanation of that inflation. Then follows detailed analyses of the actual changes in the gold and silver coinages of England, France, and the Habsburg Netherlands from 1500 to 1540; changes in the coined money supplies and changes in credit, with the origins of a genuine financial revolution in the early 16th-century Netherlands. The rest of this paper focusses on the purchasing power of both coins and of building craftsmen's wages in England and the southern Netherlands over this four-decade period, in terms of the following commodities: wine, butter, beef, herrings, cod fish, eggs, wheat, peas, loaf sugar, paper, tallow candles, woollen, worsted, and linen textiles. For both regions, various estimates of these craftsmen's real wages and real incomes are made: in terms of these commodities and of a more broadly based 'basket of consumables'; and of the price indices derived from them for Brabant (Van der Wee) and England (Phelps Brown and Hopkins, as amended by my own research on their working papers in the LSE Archives). The comparative purchasing power of these wages is made for similar commodities in each region, estimating for which the English craftsmen was the gainer or loser in relation to his counterparts in the Antwerp-Lier-Brussels region. If English craftsmen, suffering a greater degree of wage-stickiness, thus suffered a greater fall in real incomes with the onset of the Price Revolution, they were not necessarily worse off in absolute terms by the late 1530s. The final table 17 compares their incomes with those of Erasmus, in terms of references to his various stipends and benefices mentioned in his correspondence for the year 1526, a tabulation that is far from complete. But that tabulation indicates that these incomes -- when Erasmus had been a Professor of Greek and Divinity at Cambridge -- amounted to the annual wage incomes for 82 Antwerp master masons and carpenters or 93 Oxford masons/carpenters. Today senior professors at the University of Toronto earn about 2.5 times the annual wage incomes of master carpenters. A very golden age for Erasmus indeed.

Ole Miss Track & Field 2017-18 Record Book

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/med_tfxc/1000/thumbnail.jp

A comparison of eye movement measures across reading efficiency quartile groups in elementary, middle, and high school students in the U.S.

This cross-sectional study examined eye movements during reading across grades in students with differing levels of reading efficiency. Eye-movement recordings were obtained while students in grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 silently read normed grade-leveled texts with demonstrated comprehension. Recordings from students in each reading rate quartile at each grade level were compared to characterize differences in reading rate, number of fixations, number of regressions, and fixation durations. Comparisons indicated that students in higher reading rate quartiles made fewer fixations and regressions per word, and had shorter fixation durations. These indices of greater efficiency were also characteristic of students in upper as compared to lower grades, with two exceptions: (a) between grades 6 and 8, fixations and regressions increased while reading rates stagnated and fixation durations continued to decline, and (b) beyond grade 6 there was relatively little growth in the reading efficiency of students in the lower two reading rate quartiles. These results suggest that declines in fixation duration across grades may in part reflect broader maturational processes, while higher fixation and regression rates may distinguish students who continue to struggle with word recognition during their high school years.

Archdeacon Merriman, ‘Caliban’, and the Cattle-Killing of 1856–57

[From the introduction]: Did Archdeacon Merriman accept that Mhlakaza was Wilhelm Goliath? The short answer is that we don’t know. However, historical problems sometimes yield, or at least buckle slightly, when approached from unusual, tangential perspectives.I believe it can be shown that in the terrible aftermath of the Cattle-Killing, Nathaniel Merriman was brooding on his former servant, Wilhelm Goliath, and that evidence of this preoccupation emerges indirectly in a very open and unexpected forum: a public lecture on Shakespeare