Portrait of a Miner in a Landscape

Mining is one of the core elements of the proof-of-work based cryptocurrency economy. In this paper we investigate the generic landscape and hierarchy of miners on the example of Ethereum and Zcash, two blockchains that are among the top 5 in terms of USD value of created coins. Both chains used ASIC resistant proofs-of-work which favors GPU mining in order to keep mining decentralized. This however has changed with recent introduction of ASIC miners for these chains. This transition allows us to develop methods that might detect hidden ASIC mining in a chain (if it exists), and to study how the introduction of ASICs effects the decentralization of mining power. Finally, we describe how an attacker might use public blockchain information to invalidate the privacy of miners, deducing the mining hardware of individual miners and their mining rewards

A new “Romen” Empire : Toni Morrison's love and the classics

An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction

Medvedkine

Chris Marker’s portrait of Alexandre Medvedkine in the 1993 film Le tombeau d’Alexandre/The Last Bolshevik is highly instructive of his own relationship to Soviet cinema. Most especially, this difficult or troubled rapport with the antecedents to cinéma vérité in the West (and its protean formal properties, in terms of structure and often satirical-critical commentary) comes forth in the figures he assembles to comment upon Medvedkine’s life work. When Medvedkine’s Scast’e (Le Bonheur/Happiness) (1934) leaked to the West (c.1967), sent like an “SOS” in multiple bottles to various film archives (one by one from deep within the Soviet film world), Marker and SLON received a copy by way of Jacques Ledoux (curator of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, in Belgium). The film opened the floodgates of a retrospective survey of Soviet filmmaking repressed and forgotten other than by remote and distant figures (partisans) who somehow survived the Stalinist purges of the 1930s

A Common Law for the Statutory Era: The Right of Publicity and New York\u27s Right of Privacy Statute

This note compares New York\u27s privacy statute with the common law right of publicity. The article first traces the history of each law, then goes on to compare their effects. The author argues that exploitation of persona warrants judicial recognition of a common law right of publicity in New York, despite the argument that the creation of such a right should be left to the discretion of the legislature

Change the Regime – Change the Money: Bulgarian Banknotes, 1885-2001

The money we use has symbols and images on it that communicate information. One part of this are pictorial and symbolic elements that draw attention to aspects of the country that issuer is proud of and that convey the message that it wishes to convey. As one would expect, as regimes change, so do the banknotes. Bulgaria has a rich history of change having gone from being a (nominally) Ottoman principality to an independent Kingdom, an agrarian socialist state, a quasi-fascist Monarchy, a People’s Republic, and most recently, a Parliamentary Republic.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39894/3/wp509.pd

Book Reviews

The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Earl Miner) (Reviewed by William Kerrigan, University of Virginia)The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Ruth R. Wisse) (Reviewed by Allen Guttmann, Amherst College)Edmund Wilson (Leonard Kriegel) (Reviewed by William Alexander, University of Michigan)Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals (Catherine Juanita Starke) (Reviewed by Jean Fagan Yellin, Pace College)A Scrupulous Meanness: a Study at Joyce\u27s Early Work (Edward Brandabur) (Reviewed by David Hayman, University of Iowa)Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Morris Beja) (Reviewed by David Hayman, University of Iowa)The Ordeal at Stephen Dedalus: The Conflict of the Generations in James Joyce\u27s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Edmund Epstein) (Reviewed by David Hayman, University of Iowa)Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Daniel Hoffman) (Reviewed by Henry Golemba, Wayne State University

Practicing Hope

In this essay, I consider how the theological virtue of hope might be practiced. I will first explain Thomas Aquinas’s account of this virtue, including its structural relation to the passion of hope, its opposing vices, and its relationship to the friendship of charity. Then, using narrative and character analysis from the film The Shawshank Redemption, I examine a range of hopeful and proto-hopeful practices concerning both the goods one hopes for and the power one relies on to attain those goods. In particular, I show how the film’s picture of the role friends and friendship play in catalyzing hope is a compelling metaphor for Christian hope’s reliance on Go

Spot the Miner: Do Clothes Really Make the (Wo)man?

Coal mining is an industry that is associated with hard physical labor and harsh mental conditions. Modern artistic projects involving portraits of miners evolve as artists' responses to political and economic changes in the mining industry, which is currently in decline, and place a major focus on miner communities, rather than individual miners. This article presents an overview of relevant selected artistic projects, and supplements them with a small mini-gallery sketched by the author. The mini-gallery viewers have been invited to test their perception of miners based on a series of charcoal portraits representing men and women dressed in mining workwear and everyday clothes. Who in this mini-gallery is a miner, what serves as the basis for the respondents' guesswork, and, overall, how different is today’s perception of miners from those of the past centuries? Three main factors are outlined as potentially relevant for identifying miners: mining workwear, gender, and facial expression. The readers can compare their intuitive reactions with the results from an online experiment, which was presented in Norwegian, Russian, and English and collected 136 responses. Although the presence of mining workwear and male gender still carry a strong association with miners, the results reveal certain differences across Norway, Russia, and the United States. The article is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of art history, social studies and psychology with an artistic project