The Lost Fortune of the Virginiaman: Analyzing the History of the Beale Ciphers Using Historical Land Grants

Since the mid-19th century, the mystery of the Beale ciphers has confounded cryptanalysts, intelligence agencies, historians, and treasure hunters alike. Countless works of scholarship have analyzed the story, the ciphers, and possible locations for the massive buried treasure allegedly in rural Bedford County, Virginia. However, prior methodology applied to historiography on the subject has been unsuccessful in making headway in an understanding of the history and location of the Beale treasure. In examining prior scholarship in conjunction with recorded land grants and associated archaeological scholarship, this paper proposes a new direction for research into the Beale cipher mystery and new locations to search for the treasure. In addition, this paper provides explanations as to potential members of the Beale party as not previously identified. It can be concluded that the Beale treasure has likely been moved from its original location in Virginia, and that Thomas Beale was a real person despite limited records on the matter. It can also be concluded that George Strother and Roger Weightman were most likely members of the Beale party, and these new conclusions are crucial to any future efforts to locate a potential vault

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg

Machine Learning in Sensors and Imaging

Machine learning is extending its applications in various fields, such as image processing, the Internet of Things, user interface, big data, manufacturing, management, etc. As data are required to build machine learning networks, sensors are one of the most important technologies. In addition, machine learning networks can contribute to the improvement in sensor performance and the creation of new sensor applications. This Special Issue addresses all types of machine learning applications related to sensors and imaging. It covers computer vision-based control, activity recognition, fuzzy label classification, failure classification, motor temperature estimation, the camera calibration of intelligent vehicles, error detection, color prior model, compressive sensing, wildfire risk assessment, shelf auditing, forest-growing stem volume estimation, road management, image denoising, and touchscreens

Grant and Johnson, 1865-1869

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, History, 1931

Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91): science and medicine in a seventeenth-century Englishwoman’s writing

Katherine Jones, better known to scholars as Lady Ranelagh, was one of the most eminent, politically influential and intellectually respected women in seventeenth-century England. By the time of her death in 1691, she had the rare honour of having been esteemed by every ruler and his government from Cromwell to William and Mary. She was active in diverse intellectual networks across most of the seventeenth century, including the Great Tew Circle, the Hartlib Circle, and the ‘invisible college’, and was associated with many Fellows of the Royal Society during the first three decades of the Society’s existence. As pious as she was intellectually dexterous, Lady Ranelagh elicited respect and admiration from a group of contemporaries who were remarkably diverse in their political opinions, religious views and social status. Over the past decade, there have been several brief surveys of Lady Ranelagh’s life and works; this, however, is the first doctoral thesis to focus exclusively on her. By drawing on over one hundred of her letters and three receipt books associated with her, together with references to her in the diaries of her contemporaries and extant letters written to her, this study contextualises her medical and scientific writings in contemporary religious and socio-political thought. By manipulating generic conventions and employing a rhetoric of modesty, Lady Ranelagh presented her intellectual contributions in a manner appropriate for a gentlewoman. Her extant manuscripts make Lady Ranelagh a representative case study of how women could participate in the radical medical and scientific advances of seventeenth-century England. This interdisciplinary approach creates an informed conversation between two subjects which rarely interact — history of science and medicine, and early modern women’s literature — to consider the material practice and social networks of a remarkably important, but hereunto almost ‘lost’, woman

An investigation into Off-Link IPv6 host enumeration search methods

This research investigated search methods for enumerating networked devices on off-link 64 bit Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) subnetworks. IPv6 host enumeration is an emerging research area involving strategies to enable detection of networked devices on IPv6 networks. Host enumeration is an integral component in vulnerability assessments (VAs), and can be used to strengthen the security profile of a system. Recently, host enumeration has been applied to Internet-wide VAs in an effort to detect devices that are vulnerable to specific threats. These host enumeration exercises rely on the fact that the existing Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) can be exhaustively enumerated in less than an hour. The same is not true for IPv6, which would take over 584,940 years to enumerate a single network. As such, research is required to determine appropriate host enumeration search methods for IPv6, given that the protocol is seeing increase global usage. For this study, a survey of Internet resources was conducted to gather information about the nature of IPv6 usage in real-world scenarios. The collected survey data revealed patterns in the usage of IPv6 that influenced search techniques. The research tested the efficacy of various searching algorithms against IPv6 datasets through the use of simulation. Multiple algorithms were devised to test different approaches to host enumeration against 64 bit IPv6 subnetworks. Of these, a novel adaptive heuristic search algorithm, a genetic algorithm and a stripe search algorithm were chosen to conduct off-link IPv6 host enumeration. The suitability of a linear algorithm, a Monte Carlo algorithm and a pattern heuristics algorithm were also tested for their suitability in searching off-link IPv6 networks. These algorithms were applied to two test IPv6 address datasets, one comprised of unique IPv6 data observed during the survey phase, and one comprised of unique IPv6 data generated using pseudorandom number generators. Searching against the two unique datasets was performed in order to determine appropriate strategies for off-link host enumeration under circumstances where networked devices were configured with addresses that represented real-word IPv6 addresses, and where device addresses were configured through some randomisation function. Whilst the outcomes of this research support that an exhaustive enumeration of an IPv6 network is infeasible, it has been demonstrated that devices on IPv6 networks can be enumerated. In particular, it was identified that the linear search technique and the variants tested in this study (pattern search and stripe search), remained the most consistent means of enumerating an IPv6 network. Machine learning methods were also successfully applied to the problem. It was determined that the novel adaptive heuristic search algorithm was an appropriate candidate for search operations. The adaptive heuristic search algorithm successfully enumerated over 24% of the available devices on the dataset that was crafted from surveyed IPv6 address data. Moreover, it was confirmed that stochastic address generation can reduce the effectiveness of enumeration strategies, as all of the algorithms failed to enumerate more than 1% of hosts against a pseudorandomly generated dataset. This research highlights a requirement for effective IPv6 host enumeration algorithms, and presents and validates appropriate methods. The methods presented in this thesis can help to influence the tools and utilities that are used to conduct host enumeration exercises

Chaos and clairvoyance : Apollo in Asia Minor and in the apocalypse

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/2280/thumbnail.jp

Riches, Poverty, and the Faithful: Perspectives on Wealth in the Second Temple Period and the Apocalypse of John

The present study considers the degree to which John’s portrayal of the faithful Christian community in the Apocalypse is informed by Jewish apocalyptic traditions related to wealth in the Second Temple period. Previous studies have attributed the author’s radical stance against wealth and economic participation to an ad hoc response against the idolatry and social injustices of the Roman Empire and imperial cults. This thesis argues that there is reasonable evidence to suggest that the author may have already been predisposed to reject affluence as a feature of the present age for the ideal faithful community based on received tradition. The study begins by delineating the problem in a critical review of how scholars have attempted to deal with this language through either the social world of Roman Asia Minor or the author’s use of the biblical prophets. This discussion demonstrates the need to take a tradition-historical approach that includes an examination of Jewish apocalyptic traditions preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as other Jewish literature not found at Qumran that demonstrate a decided concern over wealth. These Second Temple texts are then examined collectively against the language of wealth and poverty in selected passages of the Apocalypse. The evidence reveals an emphasis on the part of John on the irreversible, eschatological consequences of ethical behaviour directly related to wealth based on a certain cosmological and theological understanding, an emphasis that has close analogies in some Second Temple literature. The study concludes that traditions preserved in the Epistle of Enoch and later Enochic texts have played a formative role in shaping the author’s theological perspective concerning material blessing for the faithful in the present age and the world through which he legitimised the radical stance he imposed on his readers/hearers

Patterns and Signals of Biology: An Emphasis On The Role of Post Translational Modifications in Proteomes for Function and Evolutionary Progression

After synthesis, a protein is still immature until it has been customized for a specific task. Post-translational modifications (PTMs) are steps in biosynthesis to perform this customization of protein for unique functionalities. PTMs are also important to protein survival because they rapidly enable protein adaptation to environmental stress factors by conformation change. The overarching contribution of this thesis is the construction of a computational profiling framework for the study of biological signals stemming from PTMs associated with stressed proteins. In particular, this work has been developed to predict and detect the biological mechanisms involved in types of stress response with PTMs in mitochondrial (Mt) and non-Mt protein. Before any mechanism can be studied, there must first be some evidence of its existence. This evidence takes the form of signals such as biases of biological actors and types of protein interaction. Our framework has been developed to locate these signals, distilled from “Big Data” resources such as public databases and the the entire PubMed literature corpus. We apply this framework to study the signals to learn about protein stress responses involving PTMs, modification sites (MSs). We developed of this framework, and its approach to analysis, according to three main facets: (1) by statistical evaluation to determine patterns of signal dominance throughout large volumes of data, (2) by signal location to track down the regions where the mechanisms must be found according to the types and numbers of associated actors at relevant regions in protein, and (3) by text mining to determine how these signals have been previously investigated by researchers. The results gained from our framework enable us to uncover the PTM actors, MSs and protein domains which are the major components of particular stress response mechanisms and may play roles in protein malfunction and disease