The Ciris and Ovid: A Study of the Language of the Poem

Introduction: Some twenty-five poems, known as the Vergilian Appendix, and attributed by the ancients to the youthful Vergil, have come down to us in inferior manuscripts, but not in the great Vergilian codices. Among the best known of these poems are three short epics, the Culex, the Aetna and the Ciris. For centuries scholars have been agreed that all the poems of the Appendix are spurious, with the possible exception of one or two very short pieces which are contained in the Catalepton and which purport to give certain personal details. [Note. The present study has been prepared in cooperation with Professor R.S. Radford, of the University of Tennessee, who has generously placed at my disposal his own large acquaintance with Ovid and the Vergilian and Tibullan Appendices, and has made many valuable suggestions both with respect to the literature of the subject and to the most effective methods of treatment. The conclusions to which the present study of the Ciris has led me are in full accord with the views which he has maintained respecting the Ovidian authorship of the whole Vergilian Appendix.] It is usually held, however, that all or nearly all the poems in question belong to the very best period of Roman poetry, the Age of Augustus. In the present study I wish to examine the language of the Ciris, or story of Scylla and Nisus, an epyllion written in the manner of Catullus and of the Greek poets of Alexandria

Reconstructed Intentions in Collaborative Problem Solving Dialogues

We provide evidence that speech act recognition, is 1) difficult for humans to do and 2) likely to misidentify proposals involving reconstructed intentions. We examine the reliability of coding for speech acts in collaborative dialogues and we present an approach for recognizing reconstructed proposals using domain context and other more easily recognized features. 1 Introduction Speech act recognition plays a prominent role in dialogue understanding, in traditional approaches that infer a plan using plan construction operators [PA80], [LA90], [LC91, LC92], and in more recent techniques relying on statistical correlations or finite state machines [RM95, QDL + 97]. Both approaches recognize surface speech acts, using surface form and information provided by the discourse context and the discourse operators, or by a finite state approximation of the planning information. These approaches assume that it is (relatively) simple to recognize speech acts, and that speech acts are a requi..

The world-sheet description of A and B branes revisited

We give a manifest supersymmetric description of A and B branes on Kahler manifolds using a completely local N=2 superspace formulation of the world-sheet nonlinear sigma-model in the presence of a boundary. In particular, we show that an N=2 superspace description of type A boundaries is possible, at least when the background is Kahler. This leads to an elegant and concrete setting for studying coisotropic A branes. Here, apgesan important role is played by the boundary potential, whose precise physical meaning remains to be fully understood. Duality transformations relating A and B branes in the presence of isometries are studied as well.Comment: LaTeX, 32 page

Common Knowledge, Common Attitudes and Social Reasoning

For as long as there have been theories about common knowledge, they have been exposed to a certain amount of skepticism. Recent more sophisticated arguments question whether agents can acquire common attitudes and whether they are needed in social reasoning. I argue that this skepticism arises from assumptions about practical reasoning that, considered in themselves, are at worst implausible and at best controversial. A proper approach to the acquisition of attitudes and their deployment in decision making leaves room for common attitudes. Postulating them is no worse off than similar idealizations that are usefully made in logic and economics

Twenty-Five Years Of Linguistics And Philosophy

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43170/1/10988_2004_Article_5089033.pd

The agreement process: an empirical investigation of human-human computer-mediated collaborative dialogs

this paper, we investigate the empirical correlates of the agreement process. Informally, the agreement process is the dialogue process by which collaborators achieve joint commitment on a joint action. We propose a specific instantiation of the agreement process, derived from our theoretical model, that integrates the IRMA framework for rational problem solving (Bratman, Israel, and Pollack 1988) with Clark's work (1992; 1996) on language as a collaborative activity; and from the characteristics of our task, a simple design problem (furnishing a two room apartment) in which knowledge is equally distributed among agents, and needs to be shared. The main contribution of our paper is an empirical study of some of the components of the agreement process. We first discuss why we believe the findings from our corpus of computer-mediated dialogues are applicable to human-human collaborative dialogues in general. We then present our theoretical model, and apply it to make predictions about the components of the agreement process. We focus on how information is exchanged in order to arrive at a proposal, and on what constitutes a proposal and its acceptance / rejection. Our corpus study makes use of features of both the dialogue and the domain reasoning situation, and led us to discover that the notion of commitment is more useful to model the agreement process than that of acceptance / rejection, as it more closely relates to the unfolding of negotiation

The Importance of Craniofacial Sutures in Biomechanical Finite Element Models of the Domestic Pig

Craniofacial sutures are a ubiquitous feature of the vertebrate skull. Previous experimental work has shown that bone strain magnitudes and orientations often vary when moving from one bone to another, across a craniofacial suture. This has led to the hypothesis that craniofacial sutures act to modify the strain environment of the skull, possibly as a mode of dissipating high stresses generated during feeding or impact. This study tests the hypothesis that the introduction of craniofacial sutures into finite element (FE) models of a modern domestic pig skull would improve model accuracy compared to a model without sutures. This allowed the mechanical effects of sutures to be assessed in isolation from other confounding variables. These models were also validated against strain gauge data collected from the same specimen ex vivo. The experimental strain data showed notable strain differences between adjacent bones, but this effect was generally not observed in either model. It was found that the inclusion of sutures in finite element models affected strain magnitudes, ratios, orientations and contour patterns, yet contrary to expectations, this did not improve the fit of the model to the experimental data, but resulted in a model that was less accurate. It is demonstrated that the presence or absence of sutures alone is not responsible for the inaccuracies in model strain, and is suggested that variations in local bone material properties, which were not accounted for by the FE models, could instead be responsible for the pattern of results

Unprecedented high-resolution view of bacterial operon architecture revealed by RNA sequencing

We analyzed the transcriptome of Escherichia coli K-12 by strand-specific RNA sequencing at single-nucleotide resolution during steady-state (logarithmic-phase) growth and upon entry into stationary phase in glucose minimal medium. To generate high-resolution transcriptome maps, we developed an organizational schema which showed that in practice only three features are required to define operon architecture: the promoter, terminator, and deep RNA sequence read coverage. We precisely annotated 2,122 promoters and 1,774 terminators, defining 1,510 operons with an average of 1.98 genes per operon. Our analyses revealed an unprecedented view of E. coli operon architecture. A large proportion (36%) of operons are complex with internal promoters or terminators that generate multiple transcription units. For 43% of operons, we observed differential expression of polycistronic genes, despite being in the same operons, indicating that E. coli operon architecture allows fine-tuning of gene expression. We found that 276 of 370 convergent operons terminate inefficiently, generating complementary 3′ transcript ends which overlap on average by 286 nucleotides, and 136 of 388 divergent operons have promoters arranged such that their 5′ ends overlap on average by 168 nucleotides. We found 89 antisense transcripts of 397-nucleotide average length, 7 unannotated transcripts within intergenic regions, and 18 sense transcripts that completely overlap operons on the opposite strand. Of 519 overlapping transcripts, 75% correspond to sequences that are highly conserved in E. coli (>50 genomes). Our data extend recent studies showing unexpected transcriptome complexity in several bacteria and suggest that antisense RNA regulation is widespread.Ye