"To Make a Show of Concealing": The Revision of Satire in Earle Birney’s "Bushed"

From its first draft – which has never before been analyzed – to its final version, Earle Birney’s celebrated poem “Bushed” moves between the two extremes that Northrop Frye suggests are central themes in Canadian poetry: satire and tragedy. Although critics frequently label Birney a satirist, and the first draft of “Bushed” is clearly satirical, the final version published in Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952) has more in common with tragedy. Birney’s extensive revisions to “Bushed” are illuminated in light of his condemnatory view of satire as the adolescence of irony, most clearly expressed in his criticism on Chaucer. Revealing Birney’s highly negative attitude toward satire may help resolve a peculiar pattern in Birney criticism wherein he is celebrated as a satirist even as the quality of his satires is questioned

A vision-based system for inspecting painted slates

Purpose – This paper describes the development of a novel automated vision system used to detect the visual defects on painted slates. Design/methodology/approach – The vision system that has been developed consists of two major components covering the opto-mechanical and algorithmical aspects of the system. The first component addresses issues including the mechanical implementation and interfacing the inspection system with the development of a fast image processing procedure able to identify visual defects present on the slate surface. Findings – The inspection system was developed on 400 slates to determine the threshold settings that give the best trade-off between no false positive triggers and correct defect identification. The developed system was tested on more than 300 fresh slates and the success rate for correct identification of acceptable and defective slates was 99.32 per cent for defect free slates based on 148 samples and 96.91 per cent for defective slates based on 162 samples. Practical implications – The experimental data indicates that automating the inspection of painted slates can be achieved and installation in a factory is a realistic target. Testing the devised inspection system in a factory-type environment was an important part of the development process as this enabled us to develop the mechanical system and the image processing algorithm able to perform slate inspection in an industrial environment. The overall performance of the system indicates that the proposed solution can be considered as a replacement for the existing manual inspection system. Originality/value – The development of a real-time automated system for inspecting painted slates proved to be a difficult task since the slate surface is dark coloured, glossy, has depth profile non-uniformities and is being transported at high speeds on a conveyor. In order to address these issues, the system described in this paper proposed a number of novel solutions including the illumination set-up and the development of multi-component image-processing inspection algorithm

INTERNET ADOPTION AND USE OF E-COMMERCE STRATEGIES BY AGRIBUSINESS FIRMS IN ALABAMA

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is relatively new to the agricultural industry, and affects such aspects of the organization as its strategy, processes, customer relationships, information technology, and business culture. This paper analyzes the factors influencing agribusiness firms' desire or need to adopt the Internet and employ e-commerce strategies. The relationship between the factors driving the choice of distribution channel and Internet usage for e-commerce will empirically be estimated. This study will also assess how Internet adoption and the use of e-commerce strategies impact rural development and the overall sustainability paradigm.Agribusiness,

Balanced canonical forms for minimal systems: A normalized coprime factor approach

AbstractCanonical forms are derived for the set of minimal systems of given order from a canonical form for a class of coinner transfer functions. One of these canonical forms is in terms of so called Riccati balanced coordinates. The application of this work to model reduction is discussed

A framework for identifying suitable cases for using market-based approaches in industrial data acquisition

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Library and Information Statistics Unit, Loughborough University via http://dx.doi.org/ https://idimc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/idimc2014_proceedings1.pdfVarious researchers have suggested concepts for the application of market-based techniques for data management and data acquisition. However, very few concepts have successfully been implemented and shown a positive practical impact. This can partially be attributed to the lack of existing techniques in identifying appropriate scenarios. Using knowledge from existing successful market implementations in data acquisition, data management and related areas, this paper aims to close this gap. It develops a framework for identifying scenarios applicable for a market-based data acquisition approach. It finds that a heterogeneous environment with distributed decision-making based on partial information combined with assumptions about the users knowledge about the data he is using, can give a good indication for the application of market-based data acquisition approaches. The developed framework is applied towards two sample scenarios

Numerical simulation of the thermal effects of localized fires

The thermal effects of a localized fire bellow a concrete slab with the length of 10 m and the thickness of 30 cm is simulated. The nonlinear equation of heat transfer was solved by finite differences using an implicit scheme. The appropriate mesh size in the direction corresponding to the heat flux resulting from the fire was defined. The temperature results of the two dimensional simulation does not depend on the dimension of the mesh size in the horizontal direction (perpendicular to the heat flux)

Predicting Hidden Links in Supply Networks

Manufacturing companies often lack visibility of the procurement interdependencies between the suppliers within their supply network. However, knowledge of these interdependencies is useful to plan for potential operational disruptions. In this paper, we develop the Supply Network Link Predictor (SNLP) method to infer supplier interdependencies using the manufacturer’s incomplete knowledge of the network. SNLP uses topological data to extract relational features from the known network to train a classifier for predicting potential links. Using a test case from the automotive industry, four features are extracted: (i) number of existing supplier links, (ii) overlaps between supplier product portfolios, (iii) product outsourcing associations, and (iv) likelihood of buyers purchasing from two suppliers together. Naïve Bayes and Logistic Regression are then employed to predict whether these features can help predict interdependencies between two suppliers. Our results show that these features can indeed be used to predict interdependencies in the network and that predictive accuracy is maximized by (i) and (iii). The findings give rise to the exciting possibility of using data analytics for improving supply chain visibility. We then proceed to discuss to what extent such approaches can be adopted and their limitations, highlighting next steps for future work in this area

Production of intense, coherent, tunable narrow‐band lyman‐alpha radiation

Nearly transform limited pulses of 1216 Å radiation have been generated by sum frequency generation in 0.1 to 10 torr of mercury vapor. The summed input beams, consisting of photons at 3127 Å and 5454 Å originate in 1 MHz band‐width ring‐dye laser oscillators. The beams are amplified in pulsed‐dye amplifiers pumped by the frequency doubled output of a Nd:YAG laser. The 3127 Å photons are tuned to be resonant with the two‐photon 61S to 71S mercury transition. The VUV radiation can be tuned by varying the frequency of the third non‐resonant photon. We have also observed difference frequency generation at 2193 Å and intense fluorescence from the 61P state at 1849 Å. We have studied the intensity and linewidth dependence of the 1849 Å fluorescence and 1216 Å sum frequency signals on input beam intensity, mercury density, and buffer gas pressure and composition.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87716/2/49_1.pd