John Macrone: Victorian publisher

I do not delude myself that even colleagues in English literature will be excited by the detailed chronicle of the fall of a minor Victorian publisher. But I shall be grateful for any general reaction to the larger project of which the following essay is part. It is widely agreed that we know too little about the publishers who were partners (if sometimes sleeping partners) in the production of nineteenth century literature. He need, as one Dickensian critic recently put it, a "magisterial" book on the subject. There isn't any such work in prospect. Nor is there any comprehensive history of British publishing (even more urgently needed) under way. Either of these tasks would exceed the power of any single critic, in my opinion. But it is possible to make some contribution -- even at this preliminary stage -- to what will eventually be (as I expect) a collaborative venture. What I intend is to publish a series of articles which will profile the fiction-publishing activities of leading Victorian houses. What follows, on John Macrone, is the first in the series. I am writing another at the moment on Henry Colburn (the principal purveyor of "silver fork" romance to early and mid- Victorian circulating libraries). After that, have sketched out a study of Chapman and Hall's fiction-publishing policy 1836-64 (when the feeble Fred Chapman took over); a piece on Bradbury and Evans and the production of serialized fiction; a short house history of Tinsley Eros. {who largely succeeded Colburn as suppliers of three deckers to the libraries in the 1860. and 70s), and so on. It is fairly easy to devise and plan these essags, and to anticipate their final connected design. There remains the immediate problem of placing them. Editors, generally, do not like purely expository contributions; especially if they are liberally accompanied by lists, tables and business history. The one journal which would suit, Publishing History, seems moribund. ~ Library and PBSA are obvious first choice journals. Thereafter, one will have to publish where one can, presumably. (The fincrone piece will appear in Dickens Studies~, sometime over the next three years.

What is Computational Intelligence and where is it going?

What is Computational Intelligence (CI) and what are its relations with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? A brief survey of the scope of CI journals and books with ``computational intelligence'' in their title shows that at present it is an umbrella for three core technologies (neural, fuzzy and evolutionary), their applications, and selected fashionable pattern recognition methods. At present CI has no comprehensive foundations and is more a bag of tricks than a solid branch of science. The change of focus from methods to challenging problems is advocated, with CI defined as a part of computer and engineering sciences devoted to solution of non-algoritmizable problems. In this view AI is a part of CI focused on problems related to higher cognitive functions, while the rest of the CI community works on problems related to perception and control, or lower cognitive functions. Grand challenges on both sides of this spectrum are addressed

Fog-enabled Edge Learning for Cognitive Content-Centric Networking in 5G

By caching content at network edges close to the users, the content-centric networking (CCN) has been considered to enforce efficient content retrieval and distribution in the fifth generation (5G) networks. Due to the volume, velocity, and variety of data generated by various 5G users, an urgent and strategic issue is how to elevate the cognitive ability of the CCN to realize context-awareness, timely response, and traffic offloading for 5G applications. In this article, we envision that the fundamental work of designing a cognitive CCN (C-CCN) for the upcoming 5G is exploiting the fog computing to associatively learn and control the states of edge devices (such as phones, vehicles, and base stations) and in-network resources (computing, networking, and caching). Moreover, we propose a fog-enabled edge learning (FEL) framework for C-CCN in 5G, which can aggregate the idle computing resources of the neighbouring edge devices into virtual fogs to afford the heavy delay-sensitive learning tasks. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to jointly processing sensed environmental data, dealing with the massive content statistics, and enforcing the mobility control at network edges, the FEL makes it possible for mobile users to cognitively share their data over the C-CCN in 5G. To validate the feasibility of proposed framework, we design two FEL-advanced cognitive services for C-CCN in 5G: 1) personalized network acceleration, 2) enhanced mobility management. Simultaneously, we present the simulations to show the FEL's efficiency on serving for the mobile users' delay-sensitive content retrieval and distribution in 5G.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magzine, under review, Feb. 09, 201