Emerging from Anonymity: The First Generation of Writers of Songs and Drama in Mid-Ming Nanjing

This article traces the first generation of writers of songs and drama in Nanjing who emerged from the anonymous context of early Ming court entertainment and established their name and reputation in the second half of the fifteenth century. These writers—Shi Zhong (1437-after 1516), Chen Duo (1454?-1507?), and Xu Lin (1462-1538)—represented a different mode of writing songs and drama. For them it was no longer a professional occupation, as in the case of the court performers, but became part of their cultural and social life. The extent to which our knowledge of these first generation qu writers depends on local sources and on acts of remembrance by later Nanjing authors is also examined

Streaming Codes for Channels with Burst and Isolated Erasures

We study low-delay error correction codes for streaming recovery over a class of packet-erasure channels that introduce both burst-erasures and isolated erasures. We propose a simple, yet effective class of codes whose parameters can be tuned to obtain a tradeoff between the capability to correct burst and isolated erasures. Our construction generalizes previously proposed low-delay codes which are effective only against burst erasures. We establish an information theoretic upper bound on the capability of any code to simultaneously correct burst and isolated erasures and show that our proposed constructions meet the upper bound in some special cases. We discuss the operational significance of column-distance and column-span metrics and establish that the rate 1/2 codes discovered by Martinian and Sundberg [IT Trans.\, 2004] through a computer search indeed attain the optimal column-distance and column-span tradeoff. Numerical simulations over a Gilbert-Elliott channel model and a Fritchman model show significant performance gains over previously proposed low-delay codes and random linear codes for certain range of channel parameters