The Dramatic Function of the Gravediggers\u27 Scene in Hamlet

It is unfortunate that one of the scenes most often cut from contemporary productions of Hamlet is the first scene of Act V, the gravediggers\u27 scene. The scene is, after all, static; it is merely a lyrical passage which seems, at first, to delay the movement of the drama, and, at all events, to add nothing to it. The producer wants swift, forward-moving action, and, certainly, he finds little enough of what he wants in the almost perverse, but always fundamental, deliberateness of this play. Consequently, one of the first scenes to be eliminated is almost invariably this one, despite its trenchant, laconic prose, its macabre humor, and its mordant, cynical philosophy of ultimate disillusion. The scene, in itself, as a separate entity, is probably one of the most famous in Shakespeare. Certainly it contains the most often misquoted line in English literature ( Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio. ), as well as one of the funniest ( \u27Twill not be seen in him there (England); there the men are as mad as he. ). Perhaps the contemporary producer is short-sighted in cutting out the gravediggers\u27 scene; perhaps it does contribute, very definitely, to the tragedy, apart from its intrinsic excellence

Game Theory Meets Network Security: A Tutorial at ACM CCS

The increasingly pervasive connectivity of today's information systems brings up new challenges to security. Traditional security has accomplished a long way toward protecting well-defined goals such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity. However, with the growing sophistication of the attacks and the complexity of the system, the protection using traditional methods could be cost-prohibitive. A new perspective and a new theoretical foundation are needed to understand security from a strategic and decision-making perspective. Game theory provides a natural framework to capture the adversarial and defensive interactions between an attacker and a defender. It provides a quantitative assessment of security, prediction of security outcomes, and a mechanism design tool that can enable security-by-design and reverse the attacker's advantage. This tutorial provides an overview of diverse methodologies from game theory that includes games of incomplete information, dynamic games, mechanism design theory to offer a modern theoretic underpinning of a science of cybersecurity. The tutorial will also discuss open problems and research challenges that the CCS community can address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge between cybersecurity, economics, game and decision theory

Did the market overreact to the mandatory switch to IFRS in Europe?

Despite studies which indicate that mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) reduced the cost of capital for adopting firms and improved analysts’ forecasts, the evidence supporting any improvement in accounting quality is mixed. In a European wide country study, we calculate a broadly based measure of earnings management defined as accruals which are unrelated to current activity or past-current-future cash flows. At the individual country level we find that accounting quality improved only in France, Germany and Netherland, which are categories as ‘legal origin countries’. Moreover, based on an equity valuation model adjusted for earnings quality, we find that, in most European countries, the market overreacted to the impact of mandatory IFRS adoption. Further test shows that investors do not seem to understand the exact components of the financial statements that IFRS will have impact on

Eta-Mesic Nucleus and COSY-GEM Data

The experimental data of the COSY-GEM Collaboration for the recoil-free transfer reaction p (27Al, 3He) \pi - p' X, leading to the formation of bound state of eta (\eta) meson in 25Mg nucleus, is reanalyzed in this paper. In particular, predicted values of binding energy and half-width of the \eta -mesic nucleus 25Mg\eta, given by different theoretical approaches, are compared with the ones obtained from the experimental missing mass spectrum. It is found that the spectrum can be explained reasonably well if interference effect of another process, where \eta is not bound in 25Mg but is scattered by the nucleus and emerge as a pion, is taken into account. The data also indicate that the interaction between N*(1535) and a nucleus is attractive in nature.Comment: Invited talk at the International Symposium on Mesic Nuclei, Krakow, 16 June 201