Why Ganymede Faints and the Duke of York Weeps: Passion Plays in Shakespeare

This article revisits contemporary critical debates surrounding the presence of cross-dressed boys as women on the early modern stage – in particular the question of whether or to what extent boy-actors could or should be said to represent ‘women’ or ‘femininity’ – through the Shakespearian emblem of the bloody rag or handkercher. In all but one instance, these soiled napkins appear alongside what the plays call ‘passion’ of various kinds. I examine bloody rags on Shakespeare’s stage in the light of early modern anti-theatrical polemics, medical disputes about sex-difference and the conflicted cultural status of printed paper in order to argue that these besmirched tokens bring together early modern ‘passions’ in multiple senses: strong or overpowering, embodied feeling; the fluid dynamics of early modern bodies; the Passion of Christ; erotic suffering; and, crucially, the performance on stage of all of the above

Systems Pharmacology

The slides are from a presentation given by Professor Ravi Iyengar from Mount Sinai School of Medicine at the Drug Forum Meeting #9 that took place in Washington, DC on February 20-21, 2008. The slides describe two projects: one that was published last year, and the other unpublished. These projects used network analysis to explore the relationships between FDA approved drugs and a human protein-protein interaction network

Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which a South Indian, a North Indian "Bollywood" and an Italian teen movie adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy

Copyright, Copyleft, and Shakespeare After Shakespeare

Much critical ink has been spilled in defining and establishing the terms of discussion: appropriation, adaptation, off-shoot, recontextualization, riff, reworking, and so on have been used interchangeably or under erasure. This paper both examines the utility of such nice distinctions, and critiques existing taxonomies. It takes as its starting point the premise that scholars must carefully articulate our reasons for deploying particular terms, so that Shakespearean thinkers, readers, writers, and performers can develop a shared, even if contested, discourse. Ultimately, however, it suggests a new rubric or heading under which to consider Shakespearean appropriations: as transformations. In a US context, to evoke either "adaptation" or "appropriation" is to evoke copyright law. I suggest that Shakespearean appropriations potentially metamorphose or mutate culture, literary form, creativity, pedagogy, and, most provocatively, the market economy, in part because Shakespearean texts antedate current US copyright law and thus any use we make of them is already “transformative.” In particular, Shakespearean appropriations transform creative production and intervene in contemporary commodity culture or the hypermediatized, monetized creative self. Shakespearean transformations in both legacy and emerging media also offer models for the new hybrid creative economies predicted ten years ago by Lawrence Lessig in part because of Shakespeare's "spreadability" (Jenkins', Ford, and Green's term for content that can be remixed, shared, grabbed and so on) and its "stickiness" (a marketing term popularized by Grant Leboff meaning the power to draw repeat users who forge a lasting connection with the source material)

The Impact of Asymmetric Information Among Competing Insurgent Groups: Estimating an 'Emboldenment' Effect

This paper uses asymmetric access to information to test if an insurgency is factionalized. If it is factionalized, regional variation in information should influence attack levels as groups use violence to compete over visibility, resources and support. Using plausibly exogenous variation in satellite access, we show that attacks increased after the release of information on satellite television about US commitment to remain in Iraq. Because insurgents shift attacks toward more difficult (military) targets, the relative increase in attacks is offset by fewer total fatalities. Our findings illustrate that insurgent groups may be decentralized strategic actors subject to competitive forces.Iraq war, asymmetric information, media and violence

A Novel Stochastic Decoding of LDPC Codes with Quantitative Guarantees

Low-density parity-check codes, a class of capacity-approaching linear codes, are particularly recognized for their efficient decoding scheme. The decoding scheme, known as the sum-product, is an iterative algorithm consisting of passing messages between variable and check nodes of the factor graph. The sum-product algorithm is fully parallelizable, owing to the fact that all messages can be update concurrently. However, since it requires extensive number of highly interconnected wires, the fully-parallel implementation of the sum-product on chips is exceedingly challenging. Stochastic decoding algorithms, which exchange binary messages, are of great interest for mitigating this challenge and have been the focus of extensive research over the past decade. They significantly reduce the required wiring and computational complexity of the message-passing algorithm. Even though stochastic decoders have been shown extremely effective in practice, the theoretical aspect and understanding of such algorithms remains limited at large. Our main objective in this paper is to address this issue. We first propose a novel algorithm referred to as the Markov based stochastic decoding. Then, we provide concrete quantitative guarantees on its performance for tree-structured as well as general factor graphs. More specifically, we provide upper-bounds on the first and second moments of the error, illustrating that the proposed algorithm is an asymptotically consistent estimate of the sum-product algorithm. We also validate our theoretical predictions with experimental results, showing we achieve comparable performance to other practical stochastic decoders.Comment: This paper has been submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on May 24th 201