Artemus Ward : The Gentle Humorist

It is generally accepted that during his lifetime, Mark Twain was considered the preeminent American master storyteller and lecturer of humor. The tsunami that is Twain’s literary achievement can easily overwhelm the earlier vast movement of the American literary scene that led to its creation. The “underwater earthquake” of this movement is Charles Farrar Browne, but his more famous pseudonym is Artemus Ward. While there were earlier as well as contemporary humorous writers, Artemus Ward was regarded by William Dean Howells as “the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the humor that characterizes the whole American people” (Pullen 26). In fact, New Jersey’s own American novelist and short story writer Albert Payson Terhune commemorates Ward as “the man ‘who taught Americans to laugh’” (Nock 9). Indeed, in 1862, President Lincoln laughed heartily while he read to his Cabinet passages from Ward’s first book. Ward’s uniqueness in telling a story from the lecture platform enthralled thousands throughout the United States and in Canada; he was also “the first deadpan comedian to take England by storm” (Austin, Ward 19). Despite these views, today Ward’s literary reputation is largely forgotten. Yet he was distinctive and influential in the American tradition of his day and is deserving of study. This thesis will analyze the construction of his literary reputation by showing that what made Ward so popular in his time was that his literary humor was rhetorically gentle. This is seen through his numerous fictitious letters to the Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer. Vanity Fair and reprinted largely throughout the country. The success of his humorous letters was displayed in a character that exuded confidence without conceit, and whose observations of contemporary issues contained neither sarcasm nor malice. He did not allow himself to be emotionally caught up in his humor. His satiric wit was enjoyed by all of its targets. Furthermore, Ward parlayed the success of his nationally published letters into a commercially successful career as the first comedic lecturer to tour the nation. In his time, Ward achieved a fascinating dichotomy with his genial humor. His letters to the Plain Dealer showed a very confident, middle-aged, pot-bellied P.T. Bamum-like character of a traveling tent show of unusual animals and wax figures, and who used humorous misspellings then in vogue to “comment” on a variety of topics. However, his lectures, billed as “Artemus Ward Speaks a Piece,” startled audiences that saw instead the real Charles Ferrar Browne, a gaunt young man of twenty-seven who dressed quite distinctively and spoke very formally in a humorous stream of consciousness with a seriousness of expression (Pullen 46). A full appreciation of Ward’s humor requires this thesis to be divided into three parts, with Parts II and III being the bulk. Part I will be extremely brief, though necessary in the construction of his literary reputation in his short life of thirty-three years, solely as it developed and influenced his humor. This part’s focus will be on historically pertinent references to the native American humor as it affected his humor during his lifetime. During his lifetime, Ward wrote Artemus Ward, His Book (1862) and Artemus Ward; His Travels (1865). His executors published three works posthumously: Artemus Ward in London, and Other Papers (1867), Artemus Ward’s Panorama. (As exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, London! (1869), and The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, (1898). Part II will critically analyze his literary reputation in selected letters from these works and will historicize his rhetorically gentle humor that “commented” on such topics as politics, reform movements, the Civil War, and some of our various human foibles. Part III will examine his lecture techniques as reasons for the commercial success of his humor. Ward’s innate sense of aesthetic humor was natural and was closely allied with his extraordinary rapport with his lecture audiences (Austin, Ward 72). His success as a lecturer included the deliberate uses of “mock gravity, the look of innocent surprise when the audience laughed, the anticlimaxes, pauses, non sequiturs, and wanderings of thought” which delighted his spectators everywhere (Pullen 94). Lastly, though his humor was natural, he altered it for successful appearances on the lecture circuit through deliberate and methodical preparation in delivery

What is the cost of retaining and attracting exceptional talents? Evidence from the Canada Research Chair program

The compensation of a professor who is awarded an internal Canada Research Chair (CRC) increases by 6.3 percent on average in our sample. This gain is large initially but quickly erodes over CRC tenure. The gain is slightly larger for professors who change university to obtain a CRC Chair. Assuming that the CRC program has achieved its goal of attracting and retaining top talents, we infer that the compensation cost of doing so is modest. In addition, only a small fraction of the CRC grants have been passed through to professors as compensation increases. This is despite the fact that universities report spending more than half of the CRC grants on chairholder compensation

An Investigation in Applying Image Retrieval Techniques to X-Ray Engineering Pictures

Using image retrieval techniques in analysing Non-destructive testing reults is a new challenge in both computing science and engineering applications. Objective of this research is to develop an image retrieval system to analyse X-ray images for welding industry. The content based image retrieval has been used in this investigation, particularly in feature vector paradigm and similarity as well as detailed analysis towards single defects. It is found that X-ray images can be digitally analysed qualitatively and quantitatively easily. It concludes that the use of existing CBIR techniques can provide a platform to quickly develop new image analysis tools

BLADE: Filter Learning for General Purpose Computational Photography

The Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution (RAISR) method of Romano, Isidoro, and Milanfar is a computationally efficient image upscaling method using a trained set of filters. We describe a generalization of RAISR, which we name Best Linear Adaptive Enhancement (BLADE). This approach is a trainable edge-adaptive filtering framework that is general, simple, computationally efficient, and useful for a wide range of problems in computational photography. We show applications to operations which may appear in a camera pipeline including denoising, demosaicing, and stylization

Testing static analyzers with randomly generated programs

ManuscriptStatic analyzers should be correct. We used the random C-program generator Csmith, initially intended to test C compilers, to test parts of the Frama-C static analysis platform. Although Frama-C was already relatively mature at that point, fifty bugs were found and fixed during the process, in the front-end (AST elaboration and type-checking) and in the value analysis, constant propagation and slicing plug-ins. Several bugs were also found in Csmith, even though it had been extensively tested and had been used to find numerous bugs in compilers

A predictive model and socioeconomic and demographic determinants of under-five mortality in Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone is among the countries that recorded high under-five child mortality rate in the world. To design and implement policies that can address this public health challenge, the present study developed a predictive model of factors that explained under-five mortality in Sierra Leone using the 2008 and 2013 Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey (SDHS) datasets. LASSO regression technique was used to select the predictors to build the under-five predictive single-level logit and multilevel logit models. Statistical analyses were performed in the R freeware version 3.6.1. About 588 (10.4%) and 1320 (11.1%) children under five were reported dead in 2008 and 2013, respectively. The significant predictors of under-five mortality in Sierra Leone were the total number of children ever born, number of children under five in the household, mother's birth in the last five years, mother's number of living children, and number of household members, household wealth, maternal contraceptive use and intention, number of eligible women in the household, type of toilet facility, sex of the child, and weight of the child at birth. The study identified certain predictors that deserve policy attention and interventions to strengthen the efforts of creating child welfare and survival atmosphere in Sierra Leone