Identification of a New Spinel-Rich Lunar Rock Type by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M (sup 3))

The canonical characterization of the lunar crust is based principally on available Apollo, Luna, and meteorite samples. The crust is described as an anorthosite-rich cumulate produced by the lunar magma ocean that has been infused with a mix of Mgsuite components. These have been mixed and redistributed during the late heavy bombardment and basin forming events. We report a new rock-type detected on the farside of the Moon by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) on Chandrayaan-1 that does not easily fit with current crustal evolution models. The rock-type is dominated by Mg-spinel with no detectible pyroxene or olivine present (<5%). It occurs along the western inner ring of Moscoviense Basin as one of several discrete areas that exhibit unusual compositions relative to their surroundings but without morphological evidence for separate processes leading to exposure

Gamelyn’s Place among the Early Exemplars for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11061-012-9315-3Application of standard techniques from natural language processing on N-gram models of spelling enables quantification of the similarity between Middle English texts despite their lexical differences. Three studies employing similarity metrics confirm that a scribe’s spelling always is biased in the direction of his exemplars. This bias opens up a window on the number of scribes behind the exemplars for a text executed in a single hand, when other variables such as authorship and poetic form are held constant. A fourth study addresses nine manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem the Canterbury Tales with early textual contents. A one-way ANOVA/Tukey’s Range Test shows that none of these manuscripts is based on exemplars written in more than three hands, when allowance is made for variation due to poetic form. The results point to unified exemplars for the full text as the normal format for the poem’s transmission. The discussion suggests that the final tale ordering found in the first manuscripts is a product of collaboration between the poem’s first two scribes, probably working after Chaucer’s death and spuriously adding the Tale of Gamelyn

Initial position in the Middle English verse line

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in English Studies in July 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0013838X.2014.924275This paper establishes that spelling forms collected from initial position in the Middle English verse line have unique characteristics, and it discusses why this is so. The paper first addresses scribal copying practices, before describing the utility of letter-based N-gram models in objectively comparing scribal copies in terms of their spelling. Testing of models trained on a corpus totalling ten manuscripts demonstrates that initial position regularly prompted scribes to suppress their tendency to introduce their own spelling forms in favour of replicating those encountered in their exemplars. The discussion attributes this behaviour to the operation of two mechanisms. One mechanism is psycholinguistic in origin, while the other is rooted in manuscripts’ production and so implies a codicological dimension to spelling variation