The Nun's Priest's Tale: Entertainment versus Education

This essay is part of a collection of open access articles on Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The articles are written for first-time readers of Chaucer and are designed to supplement the teaching of the Canterbury Tales, particularly in university classrooms. My contribution is focused on the Nun's Priest's Tale, providing an introduction to the tale, a brief critical history, three tools for analysis ("Thinking with Animals," "Farmyard Violence," and "Disputing Women"), an example reading of the text (focusing on medieval rhetoric), questions for discussion, and possible pedagogical projects

Linking Letters: Translating Ancient History into Medieval Romance

In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers. Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the fiction of translatio imperii, in which the power of empire passes from Troy to Rome to Britain. According to Clerk, his translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae provides vernacular readers access to historical truth that had not previously been available to them. Clerk’s assumption of Guido’s history separates his romance from the historiographic tradition of the vastly influential Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia regum Britannie celebrates Britain’s Trojan ancestry and promises future glory to the Britons. Rather than venerate Troy as a font of imperial power, Guido condemns the martial policy of the Trojans that causes their defeat, characterizing Troy as a tainted origin of Western civilization. By comparing Clerk’s text with another translation of Guido’s Historia, John Lydgate’s Troy Book, I argue that Clerk’s translational method, which he calls a ‘linking of letters’, reflects a commitment to connecting a destructive past with an English present

Snow and leverage

Using a sample of highly (over-)leveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings, we show that reducing a debt overhang leads to a significant improvement in operating performance (return on assets, net profit margin). In particular, a reduction in leverage leads to a decrease in overhead costs, wages, and input costs, and to an increase in sales. Changes in leverage in the debt restructurings are instrumented with Unexpected Snow, which captures the extent to which a ski hotel experienced unusually good or bad snow conditions prior to the debt restructuring. Effectively, Unexpected Snow provides lending banks with the counterfactual of what would have been the ski hotel's operating performance in the absence of strategic default, thus allowing to distinguish between ski hotels that are in distress due to negative demand shocks ("liquidity defaulters") and ski hotels that are in distress due to debt overhang ("strategic defaulters")

Estimating Propensity Parameters Using Google PageRank and Genetic Algorithms

Stochastic Boolean networks, or more generally, stochastic discrete networks, are an important class of computational models for molecular interaction networks. The stochasticity stems from the updating schedule. Standard updating schedules include the synchronous update, where all the nodes are updated at the same time, and the asynchronous update where a random node is updated at each time step. The former produces a deterministic dynamics while the latter a stochastic dynamics. A more general stochastic setting considers propensity parameters for updating each node. Stochastic Discrete Dynamical Systems (SDDS) are a modeling framework that considers two propensity parameters for updating each node and uses one when the update has a positive impact on the variable, that is, when the update causes the variable to increase its value, and uses the other when the update has a negative impact, that is, when the update causes it to decrease its value. This framework offers additional features for simulations but also adds a complexity in parameter estimation of the propensities. This paper presents a method for estimating the propensity parameters for SDDS. The method is based on adding noise to the system using the Google PageRank approach to make the system ergodic and thus guaranteeing the existence of a stationary distribution. Then with the use of a genetic algorithm, the propensity parameters are estimated. Approximation techniques that make the search algorithms efficient are also presented and Matlab/Octave code to test the algorithms are available at http://www.ms.uky.edu/~dmu228/GeneticAlg/Code.html

Twelve and a Half Years of Observations of Centaurus A with RXTE

The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer has observed the nearest radio galaxy, Centaurus A, in 13 intervals from 1966 August to 2009 February over the 3--200 keV band. Spectra accumulated over the 13 intervals were well described with an absorbed power law and iron line. Cut-off power laws and Compton reflection from cold matter did not provide a better description. For the 2009 January observation, we set a lower limit on the cut-off energy at over 2 MeV. The power spectral density function was generated from RXTE/ASM and PCA data, as well as an XMM-Newton long look, and clear evidence for a break at 18+10-7 days (68% conf.) was seen. Given Cen A's high black hole mass and very low value of Lx/LEdd, the break was a factor of 17+/-9 times higher than the break frequency predicted by the McHardy and co-workers' relation, which was empirically derived for a sample of objects, which are radio-quiet and accreting at relatively high values of Lbol/LEdd. We have interpreted our observations in the context of a clumpy molecular torus. The variability characteristics and the broadband spectral energy distribution, when compared to Seyferts, imply that the bright hard X-ray continuum emission may originate at the base of the jet, yet from behind the absorbing line of sight material, in contrast to what is commonly observed from blazars.Comment: 56 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables, revised manuscript submitted to The Astrophysical Journa

Digitizing Chaucerian Debate

To encourage classroom dialectic I often turn to the "quitting" structure of "The Canterbury Tales," within which pilgrims offer requitals of previous tales that range from exuberant acclamations to raucous attacks. Within these extremes lie productive forms of correction that emerge as subtle critiques, opposing arguments, and timely (or sometimes untimely) interruptions. The now well known "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog" embodies this spirit of corrective debate. The (then) anonymous author of this blog assumes the voice of Chaucer to “endyte” on topics ranging from the composition of "Troilus and Criseyde" to the death of Heath Ledger. Even the blog’s subtitle, “Take that, Gower!," champions the blogosphere as a quitting space in which incisive commentary is de rigueur. When I first encountered this blog, I suspected that its imaginative role playing and Chaucerian requital could provide a model of interaction for students, which could intensify and enrich students' discussions of difficult texts. Perhaps if I had my students impersonate literary characters, they could fully immerse themselves in their roles and quit each other through the voices of their characters

Social Networking in the Scriptorium

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters of writers that are held in the Rare Books Room of the Boston Public Library. The BPL is a treasure trove of such correspondence, ranging from the stately epistles of Queen Elizabeth to the cryptic scribblings of Emily Dickinson. Much of the course is devoted to handling, describing, and transcribing these fragile texts, all the while characterizing the place of letter writing within the history of the book. As we examine this life of letters, we consider the rhetorical principles that shape authors and audience over time, as well as their implications for our understanding of the past, present, and future of epistolary friendship. Drawing on the innovative methods of the digital humanities, we contextualize our archival research within read-write platforms, such as blogs, wikis, Facebook status updates, and Twitter feeds, in order to identify the shifting character and global significance of written correspondence today

Classical Gluodynamics of High Energy Nuclear Collisions: an Erratum and an Update

We comment on the relation of our previous work on the classical gluodynamics of high energy nuclear collisions to recent work by Lappi (hep-ph/0303076). While our results for the non-perturbative number liberation coefficient agree, those for the energy disagree by a factor of 2. This discrepancy can be traced to an overall normalization error in our non-perturbative formula for the energy. When corrected for, all previous results are in excellent agreement with those of Lappi. The implications of the results of these two independent computations for RHIC phenomenology are noted.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure