Perchance to Dream: Art, Mathematics, and Shakespeare

Visual representation of textual works has often aided in the understanding of sophisticated concepts. In the Digital Age this is particularly true, given the advent of natural language processing, the ubiquity of general programming languages, and the maturation of digital visualization. In this article, we eschew the traditional disciplinary boundaries to view and analyze Shakespeare’s works in various ways. Our point of departure is Hamlet, where we first examine the play as a unity — both graphically and analytically. We then focus on Act III, Scene 1, where we analyze one of the most famous passages in English Literature: Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. We study this passage with a sequence of progressively sophisticated content analysis software packages, each of which renders a useful artistic visual representation of the text. In these studies, we have gathered preliminary sets of context-free content data which allow us to give illustrations of a wide range of analytic tools. Throughout our explorations, we use new modes of linguistic exploration, synthesized from elements of philosophy, literature, mathematics, computer science, psychology, and the arts. Many of the methods, which help to form these new modes of exploration, may appear individually as Cartesian in nature, yet when collectively synthesized into a holism, form a fundamentally phenomenological study of human creativity

Union Warriors at Sunset: The Lives of Twenty Commanders After the War

Reviewer Daniel E. Cone writes that Allie Stuart Povall departs from traditional biographies of Civil War generals by orienting Union Warriors at Sunset around their postwar lives. Union Warriors at Sunset, Cone concludes, is an easy, casual read that serves well for those seeking to know more about the postbellum lives of Civil War generals, without having to flip to the back parts of an assortment of two, three, or four-hundred page biographical tomes

REGULATION OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM BY SYNTHETIC POLYNUCLEOTIDES : III. ACTION ON ANTIGEN-REACTIVE CELLS OF THYMIC ORIGIN

Polyadenylic-polyuridylic acid complexes, a potent adjuvant to the immune response, were tested for action on thymic-influenced and bone marrow-derived lymphocytes in model systems deficient in one or the other of these cells. Adult mice, thymectomized at birth or mice treated with heterologous antithymocyte serum produced 90–95% fewer splenic rosette-forming cells than normal mice in response to an injection of sheep erythrocytes. Intravenous injection of complexes of homoribopolynucleotides, polyadenylic and polyuridylic acids, poly A:U with SRBC restored immunologic competence to NTx- or ATS-treated mice such that they produced normal or near normal levels of splenic RFC. In addition, injection of poly A:U enabled NTx mice to reject allogeneic skin grafts at the same rate as control mice with an intact thymus. Further reduction in residual thymocytes by combining neonatal thymectomy with ATS treatment reduced the number of anti-SRBC RFC induced by poly A:U. Lethally irradiated mice which received SRBC, excess bone marrow cells, and as few as 40,000 thymic lymphocytes were stimulated by poly A:U to produce RFC. No adjuvant effect was observed when irradiated mice received excess thymic lymphocytes and low doses of bone marrow cells with poly A:U. The results suggested that the adjuvant action of poly A:U was exerted on the thymic-influenced, antigen-reactive cell and that restoration of immunocompetence to NTx- or ATS-treated mice was caused by amplification of a small number of residual antigen-reactive cells which were influenced by the thymus in utero before thymectomy, or which survived treatment with ATS

Predicting Acdemic Success among Student-Athletes

This paper examined various measures that may be useful in predicting graduation among student-athletes. Rather than simply focus on the most·commonly used measures (SAT scores and high school grade point average) four groups of variables were utilized: demographics, high school prepara-tion, university-related variables, and athletic participation fpr 105 student records at one institution. Both bivariate and multivariate measures indicated that demographic and high school preparation variables were the most beneficial in predicting success among student-athletes. Perhaps the most significant finding was that when included in the regression analysis with other high school preparation variables, SAT scores were not significantly related to graduation. The most significant variables were high school grade point average and the number of college preparatory math classes taken