CONTEMPORARY MISOGYNY: LAURA RIDING, WILLIAM EMPSON AND THE CRITICS – A SURVEY OF MIS-HISTORY

This essay examines three books: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and William Empson: Among the Mandarins by John Haffenden. It shows how and why Laura Riding was the original author of the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, which provided the idea of Empson’s understanding of ‘ambiguity’ which in turn was highly significant to the subsequent development of ‘New Criticism’. It examines the history of A Survey of Modernist Poetry since its first publication in 1927, its treatment by critics and reviewers, and its mistakenly being described as a book by Robert Graves up to the present day as epitomized in John Haffenden’s biography. It also indicates that modernist or post-modernist literary criticism from 1927 onwards would have been significantly different had numerous critics, Empson among them, but other poets and authors, too, given more attention to the work of Laura Riding than to Robert Graves

Biocontamination and particulate detection system

A method for determining the characteristics and amount of microscopic contaminants lodged on a photographed surface is disclosed. An image enhanced full color photographic negative and print are taken of the contaminated surface. Three black and white prints are developed subsequently from red, green and blue separation filter overlays of the color negative. Both the color and three monochromatic prints are then scanned to extract in digital form a profile of any contaminant possibly existing on the surface. The resulting profiles are electronically analyzed and compared with data already stored relating to known contaminants

Sentiment Analysis for Words and Fiction Characters From The Perspective of Computational (Neuro-)Poetics

Two computational studies provide different sentiment analyses for text segments (e.g., ‘fearful’ passages) and figures (e.g., ‘Voldemort’) from the Harry Potter books (Rowling, 1997 - 2007) based on a novel simple tool called SentiArt. The tool uses vector space models together with theory-guided, empirically validated label lists to compute the valence of each word in a text by locating its position in a 2d emotion potential space spanned by the > 2 million words of the vector space model. After testing the tool’s accuracy with empirical data from a neurocognitive study, it was applied to compute emotional figure profiles and personality figure profiles (inspired by the so-called ‚big five’ personality theory) for main characters from the book series. The results of comparative analyses using different machine-learning classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost, Neural Net) show that SentiArt performs very well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages. It also produces plausible predictions regarding the emotional and personality profile of fiction characters which are correctly identified on the basis of eight character features, and it achieves a good cross-validation accuracy in classifying 100 figures into ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ ones. The results are discussed with regard to potential applications of SentiArt in digital literary, applied reading and neurocognitive poetics studies such as the quantification of the hybrid hero potential of figures

Jennifer Jacobs Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEPS) travels to England

The UNH’s Center for International Education grant provided financial support to accept a seminar invitation and to meet with colleagues at Nottingham University and Newcastle University, England about climate change and infrastructure. Upon my arrival in Birmingham on November 16, 2015 I was met by Dr. Jo Daniel at the Birmingham Airport. Jo is a colleague in UNH’s Civil and Environmental Engineering, and my research partner in infrastructure and climate research. She was on a Fulbright at Nottingham University since August. From that point forward, we began a whirlwind week of travel, meetings and many opportunities for cultural events

Sonic City: Prototyping a wearable experience

Sonic City is a project exploring mobile interaction and wearable technology for everyday music creation. A wearable system has been developed that creates electronic music in real-time based on sensing bodily and environmental factors - thus, a personal soundscape is co-produced by physical movement, local activity, and urban ambiance simply by walking through the city. Applying multi-disciplinary methods, we have developed the wearable from a scenario-driven, aesthetic and lifestyle perspective. A garment has been crafted for 'trying on' interaction and wearabilty options with users on-site in the city. With this prototype, we have been able to expore and rapidly iterate context and content, social and human factors of the wearable application

Rapid purification of quantum systems by measuring in a feedback-controlled unbiased basis

Rapid-purification by feedback --- specifically, reducing the mean impurity faster than by measurement alone --- can be achieved by making the eigenbasis of the density matrix to be unbiased relative to the measurement basis. Here we further examine the protocol introduced by Combes and Jacobs [Phys.Rev.Lett. {\bf 96}, 010504 (2006)] involving continuous measurement of the observable $J_z$ for a $D$-dimensional system. We rigorously re-derive the lower bound $(2/3)(D+1)$ on the achievable speed-up factor, and also an upper bound, namely $D^2/2$, for all feedback protocols that use measurements in unbiased bases. Finally we extend our results to $n$ independent measurements on a register of $n$ qubits, and derive an upper bound on the achievable speed-up factor that scales linearly with $n$.Comment: v2: published versio