William Shakespeare as a Purveyor of Re-Productions: Understanding Shakespeare’s Plays as Profitable Products

This project, “Recasting William Shakespeare in The Business of Playwriting,” works to reinvigorate the value gained by reading Shakespeare by: Beginning with espousing the importance of reading Shakespeare as a practical businessman first, instead of the mythological literary genius that men decades and now centuries after Shakespeare marketed and herald him as. Although this is not the primary focus of this paper, it is an important framework that begins to enable us to shift our presumptions of the canonical text, Romeo and Juliet . The next section sets the backdrop, i.e. the environment, in which Shakespeare used an emerging profession to recreate literature and runs through the “ancestry” of the star-crossed lovers archetype. Finally, the main section of this project identifies and explicates particular loci where Shakespeare transformed the original text in order to target and appeal to the audience of the times; in particular to Romeo & Juliet , this includes that of the creation of suspense, tragedy in relation to comedy, and an interrogation of love at first sight. This project concludes with a quick review of other proof of audience recognition within Shakespeare’s corpus that can lead to further investigations and close readings of other texts, Shakespearean or not, for financial motivations. All of which will help readers of Shakespeare come away with a greater business appreciation of his work and possibly force readers to think about the economic constraints and incentives shaping literature

A New Class of Index Coding Instances Where Linear Coding is Optimal

We study index-coding problems (one sender broadcasting messages to multiple receivers) where each message is requested by one receiver, and each receiver may know some messages a priori. This type of index-coding problems can be fully described by directed graphs. The aim is to find the minimum codelength that the sender needs to transmit in order to simultaneously satisfy all receivers' requests. For any directed graph, we show that if a maximum acyclic induced subgraph (MAIS) is obtained by removing two or fewer vertices from the graph, then the minimum codelength (i.e., the solution to the index-coding problem) equals the number of vertices in the MAIS, and linear codes are optimal for this index-coding problem. Our result increases the set of index-coding problems for which linear index codes are proven to be optimal.Comment: accepted and to be presented at the 2014 International Symposium on Network Coding (NetCod

Linear Codes are Optimal for Index-Coding Instances with Five or Fewer Receivers

We study zero-error unicast index-coding instances, where each receiver must perfectly decode its requested message set, and the message sets requested by any two receivers do not overlap. We show that for all these instances with up to five receivers, linear index codes are optimal. Although this class contains 9847 non-isomorphic instances, by using our recent results and by properly categorizing the instances based on their graphical representations, we need to consider only 13 non-trivial instances to solve the entire class. This work complements the result by Arbabjolfaei et al. (ISIT 2013), who derived the capacity region of all unicast index-coding problems with up to five receivers in the diminishing-error setup. They employed random-coding arguments, which require infinitely-long messages. We consider the zero-error setup; our approach uses graph theory and combinatorics, and does not require long messages.Comment: submitted to the 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT

Stringy Stability of Dilaton Black Holes in 5-Dimensional Anti-de Sitter Space

Flat electrical charged black holes in 5-dimensional anti-de Sitter space have been applied to the study of the phase diagram of quark matter via AdS/CFT correspondence. In such application it is argued that since the temperature of the quark gluon plasma is bounded away from zero, the dual black hole cannot be arbitrarily cold, but becomes unstable due to stringy instability once it reaches sufficiently low temperature. We study the stringy stability of flat dilaton black holes with dilaton coupling $\alpha=1$ in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space and show that unlike the purely electrically charged black hole, these dilaton black holes do not suffer from stringy instability.Comment: Published in Proceedings of the Conference in Honor of Murray Gell-Mann's 80th Birthday, p.583-590, World Scientific, 2010, Singapor