Hybrid LZW compression

The Science Data Management and Science Payload Operations subpanel reports from the NASA Conference on Scientific Data Compression (Snowbird, Utah in 1988) indicate the need for both lossless and lossy image data compression systems. The ranges developed by the subpanel suggest ratios of 2:1 to 4:1 for lossless coding and 2:1 to 6:1 for lossy predictive coding. For the NASA Freedom Science Video Processing Facility it would be highly desirable to implement one baseline compression system which would meet both of these criteria. Presented here is such a system, utilizing an LZW hybrid coding scheme which is adaptable to either type of compression. Simulation results are presented with the hybrid LZW algorithm operating in each of its modes

La nef des sorcières (1976) : l’écriture d’un théâtre expérimental au féminin

La création au Théâtre du Nouveau Monde de La nef des sorcières, pièce composée de sept textes d’auteures différentes, est reconnue comme un moment capital dans l’émergence du théâtre féministe militant au cours des années 1970 et 1980. En ce qui concerne la réception de ce spectacle et du texte publié, l’attention du public et de la critique se dirigeait surtout vers la thématique féministe véhiculée par la pièce et le commentaire qui s’y faisait sur le fonctionnement du patriarcat dans la vie privée des femmes. Cependant, l’objectif des auteures et des comédiennes dépassait largement le simple commentaire social. Ce n’était pas leur intention de réduire la scène théâtrale à une simple tribune politique. Luce Guilbeault, qui initia le projet et s’y engagea comme metteure en scène, auteure et comédienne, voulait avec les autres, en plus de susciter des discussions, ébranler les fondements sexistes du théâtre, élargir l’espace de l’imaginaire collectif, transformer la symbolique masculiniste de la culture québécoise, et élargir l’horizon d’attente de l’auditoire. Quand son Actrice en folie subit un trou de mémoire et enlève son costume dès son entrée en scène, c’est une ouverture remarquable au spectacle expérimental et à l’invention d’une nouvelle théâtralité au féminin qui se fait jour. C’est alors que commence la remise en cause radicale des pratiques, des codes, des règles et des conventions du jeu, des langages et de la forme canoniques du théâtre qui permettent depuis des millénaires l’esthétisation par le théâtre des idéologies et des fantasmes dominants sexistes.The creation at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde of La nef des sorcières, a play comprising texts by seven authors, is recognised as a key moment in the emergence of militant feminist theatre during the 1970s and 1980s. The reception of the show and the published text shows that the attention of the public and critics was directed particularly toward the feminist themes conveyed by the play and the commentary it contained about the workings of patriarchy in women’s private lives. However, the objective of the authors and actors was much broader than simple social commentary. It was not their intention to reduce the space of theatre to a mere political platform. Luce Guilbeault, who initiated the project and was involved as director, author and actor, wanted like the others, in addition to stirring discussion, to shake up theatre’s sexist foundations, enlarge the space of the collective imaginary, transform the masculinist symbolic order of Québec culture, and open wide audience’s horizons of expectations. When her Actrice en folie suffers a loss of memory and tears off her costume at the time she first comes on stage, it is an opening onto an experimental show and the invention of new kinds of theatricality in the feminine. It is a radical interrogation of the canonical practices, codes, rules, languages, and conventions for acting and structuring theatre. These traditions have been functioning for millennia to make possible the aestheticisation of dominant sexist fantasies and ideologies

The Uses of Art: Medieval Metaphor in the Michigan Law Quadrangle

Within the architectural diversity of Michigan\u27s Ann Arbor campus, a campus with a spread and a variety as extended as that of the university community itself, there is a place apart: the Cook Law Quad. The distinct ambiance created by the quad\u27s buildings seems at variance with the melange that marks the rest of the campus where the free growth of the university over a long period of time has resulted in structures of various styles and uneven levels of distinction. Yet the quad\u27s special character is not simply a matter of its architectural unity, as is often claimed. There are a number of other quadrangles on the Ann Arbor campus that have single styles but lack its expressive force. The Law Quad\u27s special capacity to function well and delight the eye while also expressing the ideals it is meant to embody is rare. Its ability to evoke a sense of place imbued with the spirit of collegiality while also suggesting a place where the intellect might be harbored, nurtured, and even elevated is striking. As they function, the buildings form a coherent and complete ensemble, allowing the manifold activities of a large law school to operate in a single center where students, faculty, and distinguished visitors of the legal profession can reside, dine, study, develop professional competence, and carry out broad-ranging research in an academic environment very like an academy or in the manner of the old English Inns of Court. The single architectural mode of the Cook Law Quad certainly enhances the cohesiveness of such academic goals, but there are also other, more intangible factors that affect its expression of ideals, such as the scale, disposition, and design of its structures; the articulation of these with color, texture, and decorative amenities such as ornamentation and inscriptions; and, finally, the massing of the forms, their impact on the spaces about them, and the associations conjured up by them. All of these contribute to the quad\u27s art and to its ultimate effect

Beacon Island Hotel

Until the First World War the luxury of vacation and travel had been the prerogative of the privileged. Today, however, with cheaper and faster means of travel, most of our transport difficulties have been solved, making such a luxury economically possible for the average person; while holidays are brought within the reach of practically everybody by the universal acceptance of the fact that a complete change of environment and occupation is essential to man's physical and mental health. Today, the holiday and tourist industry plays an important part in national economy, and as such should be planned on a national basis. Many countries have in fact done this by publicity and by encouraging a higher standard of holiday amenities. This has been found particularly necessary since World War II with the influx of tourists from all over the world and the realisation of the fact that the holiday amenities provided in South Africa are not up to the standard they should be. The main factors relating to these amenities are hotels and transport facilities. A country which possesses natural scenic and climatic advantages has the basic essentials of the holiday industry. If, in addition, its hotels and transport facilities bear a good reputation among its own people, it will inevitably attract tourists from other countries. South Africa has always had the first of these requirements - a good climate and magnificent scenery. To publicise these attractions and to raise the standard of the hotels and other facilities is the task of those concerned in making the holiday and tourist industry of the future one of national benefit

1996

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139675/2/objects.ziphttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139675/4/metadata.zi

A Penalty Method for the Numerical Solution of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) Equations in Finance

We present a simple and easy to implement method for the numerical solution of a rather general class of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations. In many cases, the considered problems have only a viscosity solution, to which, fortunately, many intuitive (e.g. finite difference based) discretisations can be shown to converge. However, especially when using fully implicit time stepping schemes with their desirable stability properties, one is still faced with the considerable task of solving the resulting nonlinear discrete system. In this paper, we introduce a penalty method which approximates the nonlinear discrete system to first order in the penalty parameter, and we show that an iterative scheme can be used to solve the penalised discrete problem in finitely many steps. We include a number of examples from mathematical finance for which the described approach yields a rigorous numerical scheme and present numerical results.Comment: 18 Pages, 4 Figures. This updated version has a slightly more detailed introduction. In the current form, the paper will appear in SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysi