Revelation in Discovery

The green and amber patches of grass stretch from the sedate black enameled fence which envelopes the front yard to the sturdy, but well-loved back yard fence. This wrought iron guardian is fancifully decorated with sprigs of greenery and a few red berries which impart to it just a touch of dignified color and give the passerby an impression of loftiness. For it is the sentinel which stands guard against all intruders who might trespass into the private domain of liquid green velvet expanse

Fostering Change: Evaluating Digital Scholarship for Professional Credit

As the field of digital humanities becomes an ever more important facet of both research and teaching, we need to find means for ensuring that the work is properly evaluated and that credit is given to the scholars who engage in it. The problems associated with developing this are complex, and new modes of research and publication have proven difficult to incorporate into disciplines that have traditionally put high value on print. Scholarly societies have an important role to play in encouraging creative thought and action about how best to accommodate these new modes within our disciplines

Speaking relatively: a history of incest and the family in eighteenth-century England

Incest was not prohibited in eighteenth-century English society, or so the examination of statute law would lead one to think. This was not due to a lack of interest. In literary texts as varied as Moll Flanders, Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines, incest played crucial roles. Nevertheless, historians have either overlooked its significance its significance, or have assumed the universality of its prohibition. In fact, the eighteenth century had no concept of universal taboo, and the law did not specifically prohibit sexual relations within the nuclear family. All of these factors: the lack of an idea of universal taboo, the complexity of the law, and its importance in literature are focuses of this thesis. This investigation of a hidden phenomenon has utilised a wide range of texts: imaginative productions; church and temporal court records; newspaper accounts; biblical commentary; and legal tracts. Unlike socially oriented studies of the family, all of these sources are read as produced texts in which incest provides a unique lens for viewing attitudes towards relationships between individual and collective identities. The mother who slept with her son, the father who raped his daughter, the brother and sister overcome by desire all contributed to the contemporary understanding of family life. The ability of incest to reveal underlying fault lines in ideas about authority, sexual relations and kinship ties makes it a promising topic. The exploration of legal conceptions of incest examines contemporary prohibitions and their origin in biblical law. Intertwined with the legal discourse on the family were conceptions of natural law. The operation of the church law in the consistory courts and the temporal law in London's Old Bailey provides insight into the relationship between legal understandings and social practice

Prioritizing IT Projects: An Empirical Application of an IT Investment Model

Information Technology projects are organizational investments that anticipate positive returns. When viewed as such, the development of a diversified “portfolio” of projects helps reduce risk from a single project failure, and results in an overall positive return. Positive returns on IT projects are usually indirect, since they have value only insomuch as they enable the accomplishment of larger organizational goals. We present here a model that integrates elements of risk, cost, and internal rate of return that can be applied to individual IT projects. The model produces a numerical score that can be used to rank potential IT projects. Projects with higher scores return more value to the organization, and therefore should be given a higher priority. We apply the model using the IT project portfolio of a large state-charterd credit union. The results indicated that the credit union was prioritizing projects with more visibility but lower returns that other projects with less visibility but that offered greater returns. The implications of applying the model in other organizational settings are discussed

Interactive calculator for use with multi-dimensional netCDF files

The interactive exploration of numerical results and observations has become increasingly difficult as the size of these data sets becomes larger. The scientist needs to be able to easily extract subsets of very large data sets and use these subsets in algebraic expressions to test hypotheses about the relationships between variables. The netCDF calculator (nccalc) satisfies many of these needs by providing several built-in functions and a framework that helps the scientist manipulate four dimensional data sets written using the netCDF data format