Mucedorus: the last ludic playbook, the first stage Arcadia

This article argues that two seemingly contradictory factors contributed to and sustained the success of the anonymous Elizabethan play Mucedorus (c. 1590; pub. 1598). First, that both the initial composition of Mucedorus and its Jacobean revival were driven in part by the popularity of its source, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Second, the playbook's invitation to amateur playing allowed its romance narrative to be adopted and repurposed by diverse social groups. These two factors combined to create something of a paradox, suggesting that Mucedorus was both open to all yet iconographically connected to an elite author's popular text. This study will argue that Mucedorus pioneered the fashion for “continuations” or adaptations of the famously unfinished Arcadia, and one element of its success in print was its presentation as an affordable and performable version of Sidney's elite work. The Jacobean revival of Mucedorus by the King's Men is thus evidence of a strategy of engagement with the Arcadia designed to please the new Stuart monarchs. This association with the monarchy in part determined the cultural functions of the Arcadia and Mucedorus through the Interregnum to the close of the seventeenth century

Implementing a low-complexity, adaptive, layered video coder for video teleconferencing

Real-time interactive video applications, such as video teleconferencing, present difficult challenges to network designers due to strict quality of service constraints and the limitations of traditional video compression schemes. These limitations reveal themselves notably in two areas: poor error robustness and a lack of flexibility when dealing with multicast scenarios over heterogeneous networks. A more promising approach that improves error robustness while also offering a solution to the network heterogeneity problem is to employ a layered video codec. This thesis presents the implementation of a new layered video coder scheme. Block updating coupled with an aging algorithm is used in this scheme to select macroblocks for transmission. Block updating selects macroblocks that have changed due to scene motion, and the aging algorithm ensures that an entire frame is transmitted within a set time interval. Layering is accomplished through application of the fast Haar transform and/or the discrete cosine transform. Layer assignments are made by grouping bands of coefficients with similar variances. Quantization and encoding for motion video employs both an industry standard and uniform quantization with a custom variable length coding table. For static slides, uniform quantization and a second custom variable length coding table are employed. Rate control is accomplished via the reduction of a four-dimensional operational distortion surface to a one-dimensional optimal curve implemented as a simple table lookup of quantizershttp://www.archive.org/details/implementinglowc00skreLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Nursing values as social practice: a qualitative meta-synthesis

OBJECTIVE: to identify values which structure and guide nursing as social practice. METHOD: qualitative meta-synthesis. RESULTS: three concepts were identified: The tension between technique, organization and ethics in the nurse's practice; Historical carry-overs of the values which run through nursing practice; Attention to ethics, to reform of the health system, and to the humanization of care. These led to the synthesis of the principal variables 'planning' and 'care', which represent, respectively, guiding values of the technical-operative and ethical-moral elements of the social practice of nursing. CONCLUSION: these values are articulated through the prism of ordering so as to care well. Their recognition contributed to a better understanding of the process of health care and nursing care