4B1: Recalling the Trenches from the Club Window: Contrasting Perspectives in Dorothy Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse

Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) provide contrasting approaches to the aftermath of World War I within British middlebrow fiction. Both, however, use the institution of London social clubs for gentlemen as a tool for thinking through the consequences of the war for the Victorian social order. Despite its origins in late-seventeenth-century coffeehouses and chocolate houses, the club saw great growth and solidification in the Victorian period, in part as a buttress against the increasing forces of social democratization (Reform, Emancipation, and growing rights for women, for instance). In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the New Humorists, a personal and professional influence on Wodehouse, established jokes about the club as a means of humorously working through the social changes, and Wodehouse and Sayers brought this notion to the post-war period. Dorothy Sayers’s _Murder at the Bellona Club_ (1928) renders a Victorian joke horribly real: that a member has died behind his newspaper and no one has noticed. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s detective, navigates a range of social contexts, using detection as therapy for his shell-shock. The structure of the mystery imposes a sense of order for both Wimsey and perhaps also his readers, yet _Murder at the Bellona Club _also suggests the limits of this kind of containment. The body is discovered on Armistice Day (the anniversary), and the aftermaths of the war loom large in the subsequent investigation. The club and its rules, written and unwritten, become a synecdoche for the pre-war social order. The attempts of some clubmen to proceed as if nothing has changed become the subject of dark humor. Meanwhile, Sayers’ contemporary P. G. Wodehouse largely ignored the war, continuing to depict his humorously bumbling upper-class men, who cluster around the Drones Club, relatively unchanged throughout the Nrst three-quarters of the twentieth century. Sayers is in explicit dialogue with Wodehouse, who was much more prolific (and twelve years older), having her characters directly compare Wimsey to Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. Although critics often underestimate the number of references to the war in Wodehouse’s fiction, none of his major characters are described as having served (in either world war). Nevertheless, the continuity in Wodehouse’s novels itself constitutes a response to the war. Yet both Sayers and Wodehouse also engage in a complex relationship with the club as an institution of exclusivity and friendship. Despite their subversion of the club, they also rely on its structures of feeling. Viewed through the lens of middlebrow fiction, the war was not a straightforward break, as a classic (oversimplified) view of Modernism might have it. The double meanings and polyvocality of humor convey the complex domestic Armistice negotiations

Real-time software electric guitar audio transcription

Guitar audio transcription is the process of generating a human-interpretable musical score from guitar audio. The musical score is presented as guitar tablature, which indicates not only what notes are played, but where they are played on the guitar fretboard. Automatic transcription remains a challenge when dealing with polyphonic sounds. The guitar adds further ambiguity to the transcription problem because the same note can often be played in many ways. In this thesis work, a portable software architecture is presented for processing guitar audio in real time and providing a set of highly probable transcription solutions. Novel algorithms for performing polyphonic pitch detection and generating confidence values for transcription solutions (by which they are ranked) are also presented. Transcription solutions are generated for individual signal windows based on the output of the polyphonic pitch detection algorithm. Confidence values are generated for solutions by analyzing signal properties, fingering difficulty, and proximity to previous highest confidence solutions. The rules used for generating confidence values are based on expert knowledge of the instrument. Performance is measured in terms of algorithm accuracy, latency, and throughput. The correct result is ranked 2.08 (with the top rank being 0) for chords. The general case of various notes over time presents results that require qualitative analysis; the system in general is very susceptible to noise and has a difficult time distinguishing harmonics from actual fundamentals. By allowing the user to seed the system with a ground truth, correct recognition of future states is improved significantly in some cases. The sampling time is 250 ms with an average processing time of 110 ms, giving an average total latency of 360 ms. Throughput is 62.5 sample windows per second. Performance is not processor-bound, enabling high performance on a wide variety of personal computers

Imprisonment without Trial

This article was presented at the 2011 Symposium honoring the Hon. Aharon Barak

Learning from the past: 19th century student perspectives on science education

This talk indicates the central conceit of my research: that we can improve twenty-first-century STEM education through recovering student perspectives from the nineteenth century. In the US, many of the subjects, rationales, and pedagogical techniques in our current classrooms started to appear around the time of the Civil War, and studying the past can therefore tell us about the roots of our current problems of underrepresentation, standardization, and science engagement. Student perspectives are especially important, as they are today, because they provide diverse accounts of the pitfalls and promises of past classes. In this respect, my research looks to unlikely sources for new evidence: doodles, diaries, exhibits, plays, textbook burials, and unofficial ceremonies.https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/techtalks/1013/thumbnail.jp

Privacy in a time of terror

Desde 1967, la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos ha buscado proteger la privacidad de las llamadas telefónicas, requiriendo que el Gobierno obtenga de un juez una orden judicial autorizando la intercepción de una llamada. Para obtener esa orden judicial, el gobierno debía aportar las razones para creer que el objetivo de la intercepción había iniciado o iba a iniciar una actividad delictiva. Este artículo analiza los desarrollos de la era post 11 de septiembre –primero con una Orden del Ejecutivo y luego con una ley del Congreso– que eliminó este requisito y así comprometió la protección de la privacidadStarting in 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States has sought to protect the privacy of telephone calls by requiring the Government to obtain from a judge a warrant authorizing the interception of a call. To obtain such a warrant, the Government would have to set forth the reasons for believing that the target of the interception has engaged or was about to engage in criminal activity. This article traces the developments in the post-9/11 era – first by Executive Order and then by a Congressional Statute – that abrogated this requirement and thus compromised the protection of privacy