bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Different Men in Strange Times”: The Creation of Cultural Memory in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues
Authors: Cannon Uzzie
Published: July 2015

Utilizing Jan Assmann’s conceptualization of “cultural memory” as a critical tool, this essay explores the ways in which John A. Williams’s novel Clifford’s Blues serves as an iteration of the sociocultural phenomenon. It examines how Williams uses elements from slave narratives, letters, the journal, and music forms to reimagine the life of African American and gay jazz pianist Clifford Pepperidge after the expatriate is forced into the Dachau concentration camp during WWII. It asserts that Williams’s fictional creation of cultural memory through his novel critically documents an otherwise historically unacknowledged African diaspora of violence.
“How come you ain’t got it?”: Dislocation as Historical Act in Hurston’s Documentary Texts
Authors: Wagers Kelley
Published: July 2015

The essay considers Toni Cade Bambara’s little-studied novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), in terms of its representation of testimony as a response to racial violence in the United States. I argue that Bambara’s account of the historical Atlanta Missing and Murdered Children’s Case recommends an expansion of current theories about testimony, in particular, with respect to the entwined historical and political positions of those who “speak out” against traumatic experiences in the context of racial injury. By dramatizing the clash and coherence of various forms of testimony—a mother finds her voice; a son suffers and exercises the power of his silence; and writer and reader conspire to witness without hope of conclusion—Bambara’s book points the way toward a more complex notion of agency and a reformulated theory of testimony that are calibrated to the particular challenges of responding to historical and immediate violence against black Americans. To activate the testimonial practice that Bambara calls for in this epic final work, I argue, one must demand answers without foreclosing questions, speak into history without confirming its frames of reference, and lodge a grievance knowing its insufficiency to ease unending grief.
Crossing the Threshold: Zora Neale Hurston, Racial Performance, and Seraph on the Suwanee
Authors: Hardison Ayesha K.
Published: July 2015

This essay explores Zora Neale Hurston’s evolving discourse on interracial cultural exchanges in her various representations of a black female child artist. It examines her treatment of race, performance, and audience in order to situate her critically neglected novel Seraph on the Suwanee within her writing trajectory. Whereas Hurston’s earlier works maintain the black female performer’s artistic integrity despite her racial and sexual vulnerability, her final novel Seraph on the Suwanee punctuates her discourse on racial performance by deconstructing white male mastery’s and pedestal white femininity’s dependence on black folk bodies. Reading across Hurston’s fiction and autobiographical writing not only enables a more comprehensive understanding of her efforts to promote black folk culture during the New Negro Renaissance, but it also acknowledges her postwar attempts to rewrite and reconcile the problematic of the black female artist.
“Don’t Turn Back”: Langston Hughes, Barack Obama, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Authors: Miller W. Jason
Published: July 2015

Martin Luther King, Jr. consistently allotted Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” a significant place in his public speeches and sermons from 1956 to 1967. Charting no less than thirteen overt references to this poem reveals that it has been overlooked despite the fact that it even appears in King’s dramatic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on August 28, 1963. In addition to tracing the trajectory of this poem within King’s speeches, this article also documents the political tensions that persuaded King to alter between referencing Hughes’s poem overtly and submerging his words quietly through allusion. These clear and abrupt shifts result in part from false yet potent communist accusations against both Hughes and the civil rights movement. Charting King’s use of this poem provides the means to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s poetry became a measurable inflection in the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Because of King’s repeated use of this poem, this essay’s conclusion locates and then briefly discusses an inadvertent allusion to “Mother to Son” in Barack Obama’s Presidential nomination acceptance speech delivered at the 2008 Democratic Convention. This speech provides an opportunity to revisit both the continuing effect the House Un-American Activities Committee had on Hughes’s reputation well into the mid-1960s and the rhetorical courage King demonstrated by continuing to embed Hughes’s poems in his speeches.
African Past or American Present?: The Visual Eloquence of James VanDerZee’s Identical Twins
Authors: Siddons Louise
Published: July 2015

This article proposes multiple and sometimes contradictory iconographical analyses of a 1924 portrait photograph by Harlem photographer James VanDerZee in order to demonstrate how VanDerZee and his sitters engaged in what Henry Louis Gates calls Signifyin(g). This layered and polyvocal photograph communicates a rich sense of African American identity between the two World Wars: simultaneously modern, modernist, Africanizing, and participating in the creation of a so-called "usable past" for black
people in the United States.
Reading Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
Authors: Nisetich Rebecca
Published: July 2015

Toward the end of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), the protagonist Irene Redfield imagines how her friend Clare Kendry’s racist husband might react if he discovers his wife’s “true” racial identity: “What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case.” This essay argues that what seems like a casual reference to a contemporary event actually underscores a central theme of the novel: the Rhinelander case and Passing both illustrate the problematic ways Americans sought to categorize mixed-race individuals in the 1920s, but while the Rhinelander verdict denies the existence of a middle ground between racial absolutes, the novel affirms it. Larsen directly references the Rhinelander case only once, but its themes echo throughout the text of Passing, which challenges the visibility of race and the conception of racial identity as intimately connected to one's essential self. Irene's reference calls to mind a very public trial that forced Americans to question their understanding of racial difference. In Passing , Larsen explores the conceptions of race as a real physical fact and as an imagined social construct, and challenges the logic of “common knowledge” and visibility in assigning racial identity to individuals.
David Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Logic of Sentimental Terror
Authors: Pelletier Kevin
Published: July 2015

This essay departs from the scholarly tradition that equates black violence with revolutionary selfhood in order to return to the rhetoric of terror that is so emblematic of Walker’s Appeal . By situating slave rebellion within an eschatological framework (and not a revolutionary one) and insisting that acts of insurrection were part of apocalyptic prophecy in which God commissions violent retribution against slaveholders, Walker attempts in the Appeal to inspire a profound sense of fear that would motivate Southern readers to take action against slavery. Indeed, fear operates as a powerful organizing sentiment in Walker’s text, and the strategic deployment of apocalyptic terror is central to the political and ethical interventions it undertakes. Surprisingly, this particular use of terror aligns Walker’s text with an unexpected tradition: sentimentality. In fact, as I will argue, the Appeal is a foundational text within a particular style of nineteenth-century sentimentality that is rooted in the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening and that emphasizes fear as an essential affective dimension of moral reform. Scholars who take for granted that nineteenth-century sentimentalism is based exclusively on sympathetic love and compassion or who maintain that the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition grows solely out of the Scottish Enlightenment and as such is antagonistic to Calvinism, overlook sentimentalism’s indebtedness to early nineteenth-century Calvinist ideas. Within the nineteenth-century culture of sentiment, Calvinist warnings of apocalypse were used to accomplish many of the same reform goals that love and compassion were meant to achieve, including the inducement of sympathy, the breakdown of social hierarchies, the intensification of familial bonds, and, in the case of antislavery writing, the humanization of Negro slaves. I read Walker’s Appeal , then, as an influential prototype for later sentimental writers working within an abolitionist context whose accounts of sentimentality are as dedicated to apocalyptic fear as they are to sympathetic Christian love.
Brutality and Brotherhood: James Baldwin and Prison Sexuality
Authors: Plastas Melinda , Raimon Eve Allegra
Published: July 2015

This essay situates Baldwin’s writing within the political climate of the early 1970s and within a period discourse that understood prisons as important sites of political struggle. We show that, for Baldwin, prisons elucidate the historic and intimate interplay of masculinity, sexuality, and race. They constitute at the same time sites of homosexual/homosocial closeness and love, as well as masculine violence and hate. We argue that Baldwin’s writing about prison in the early 1970s, and particularly his direction of Canadian playwright John Herbert’s Fortunes and Men’s Eyes in Istanbul, served as vehicles for contemplating sexual alterity and for imagining a morally and politically renovated social order.
“The mind is a strange and terrible vehicle”: Fractured Time and Multidimensional Sound in No Name in the Street
Authors: Mathes Carter
Published: July 2015

In this essay I examine the presence of sound as a means of expanding the literary and political dimensions of James Baldwin’s 1972 text, No Name in the Street . I argue that Baldwin extends his ideas of blues aesthetics as a window into black political consciousness, and that he more broadly attends to the acoustic qualities of his prose in an effort to critically diagnose a darkening post-civil rights reality marking the late 1960s and early ’70s.
The Good Ship Jesus : Baldwin, Bergman, and the Protestant Imagination; or, Baldwin’s Bitter Taste
Authors: Kenan Randall
Published: July 2015

On a number of occasions James Baldwin talked about and wrote about an ambitious novel of epic proportions tracing slavery from the middle passage up through the civil rights movement. Baldwin ends his 1959 profile of Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, with a meditation on his unwritten novel (“Talking at the Gates”/“House Nigger”). Bergman and Baldwin shared a great many attributes as artists and as men, some obvious, some not so obvious, but all illuminating to contemplate. Both men were brought up by punitive, Protestant clergymen; both men plumbed their personal lives for their fictional material; both men were haunted by Christianity.
“Britain is no longer white”: James Baldwin as a Witness to Postcolonial Britain
Authors: Waters Rob
Published: July 2015

Baldwin’s rise to celebrity in the U. S. was mirrored by an equally strong public presence in Britain. In his role as a public interpreter of American race relations, Baldwin took an opportunity to deliver a few home truths to his British hosts. By considering his developing black Atlantic perspective, and re-reading his essay “Stranger in the Village” for the commentary it provides on the effects of decolonization in Europe, Baldwin’s public pronouncements on Britain are interpreted for the means they provided Britain to face the reality that, as he told the Daily Mail in 1965, “Britain is no longer white.”
James Baldwin and Black Women’s Fiction
Authors: Thorsson Courtney
Published: July 2015

Uses of music, silence, complex sexuality and a resistance to terms for identity all find their way from James Baldwin to contemporary women writers. Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison put these strategies to new uses, turning their gaze away from Baldwin’s male interracial relationships, instead looking toward the limits and possibilities of intraracial female coalescence. Communities in their novels succeed or fail depending on their ability to make room for romantic relationships among women.
Resisting the Temptation to Give Up: James Baldwin, Robert Adams, and the Disavowal of the American Way of Life
Authors: Mirakhor Leah
Published: July 2015

Reading James Baldwin’s selected writings alongside the works of the photographer of the American West, Robert Adams, this essay examines the critiques of whiteness, the American Dream, and mass consumerism in the postwar era. By engaging Baldwin’s works alongside Adams’ photographs that document the alienation and destruction of land in the American suburbs in the 1960s and ’70s, this piece extends the salient geographic and theoretical scope of Baldwin’s prescience about the cataclysmic consequences of the American way of life.
The North Star and the Atlantic 1848
Authors: Fagan Benjamin
Published: July 2015

Focusing on the news writing, editorials, and correspondence that filled the pages of the North Star , along with the institutional and material features of the newspaper, this article recovers an African American perspective on the events of 1848. In the pages of Douglass’s newspaper, the 1848 revolutions encompassed not just the uprisings in Europe but also the struggles for freedom occurring throughout the Atlantic world. Ultimately, the North Star mapped out the multiple routes of an Atlantic 1848, an international movement whose pathways crisscrossed, overlapped, and at times collided, yet nevertheless moved towards the common destination of liberation.
White Surveillance of the Black Arts
Authors: Nielson Erik
Published: July 2015

This essay explores the complex relationship between white authority and the Black Arts Movement. Conceived as a radical break from white traditions, the Black Arts Movement was intended to create a creative space, independent of white influence, through which artists could speak directly to the needs and aspirations of the black community. However, as this essay argues, the attempts to clear white presence from black art only succeeded in bringing it closer, with the radical verse of poets like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez triggering the same mechanisms of repression that have long been employed to suppress black resistance. One of the results is that in the poetry itself, a tension emerges between the rhetoric of defiance and the performance of acquiescence, a tacit acknowledgment of the enduring relationship between white authority and black art in the U. S.
“These things took the shape of mystery”: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as American Romance
Authors: Pratt Casey
Published: July 2015

This article argues that, in addition to being a trustworthy personal history, Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, may be read alongside some of America’s well-known fiction writers as working within the Romance tradition. Jacobs’s narrative goes far beyond a strict retelling of events, and incorporates important literary techniques, as an effort to articulate not only the objective horrors of historical American slavery, but also to provide readers with a profound and transcendent “inner” view of the lived experience of slavery.
Van Go’s Pharmakon : “Pharmacology” and Democracy in Percival Everett’s Erasure
Authors: Ridley Chauncey
Published: July 2015

Long overdue are scholarly close readings that shed light on the irreverent homage to the Ralph Ellison pervading Percival Everett’s Erasure , a novel less about Everett than about Ellison’s democratic aesthetics. Narrator/protagonist, “Monk” Ellison, keeps faith with his esteemed precursor’s aesthetic idealism until his writing career is on the verge of collapse, his ensuing disillusionment perverting his idealism into vengeful, comically villainous malice against an American public that confines black novelists to the role of feeding its addiction to the “drug” of bestial black stereotypes—a poison not a remedy to an ailing democratic body according to Ellison.
Garveyism and Its Involutions
Authors: Eburne Jonathan P.
Published: July 2015

This paper studies the formal—rather than strictly political or ideological—significance of the life and thought of Marcus Garvey. Heeding the deeply ambivalent and often paradoxical reception of “Garveyism” by black intellectuals and writers since the early 1920s, it examines the intellectual significance of Garvey’s speculations. In particular, the essay focuses on the historical forms upon which Garvey’s business practices and organizations were based, from the formation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to the establishment of the Black Star Line and his subsequent imprisonment for mail fraud. I study how Garvey’s achievements derive from metahistorical and narrative structures that he appropriated from other pan-Africanist thinkers. By instrumentalizing such structures as the speculative basis for new black institutions, Garvey inaugurated a powerful mode of historical speculation whose impact continues to resonate throughout diasporic black literature and thought. I thus make a case for considering Garveyism as a procedural as well as ideological phenomenon in twentieth-century black thought, a form of speculative thinking that derives its transhistorical, even metaphysical charge from the historically specific conditions of Garvey’s life and work, themselves dedicated to redressing deep historical crises of slavery, exploitation, and the legacy of the middle passage.
The Transcultural Intertextuality of George Elliott Clarke’s African Canadianité : (African) American Models Shaping George & Rue
Authors: Fraile-Marcos Ana María
Published: July 2015

Acknowledging the richness and variety of George Elliott Clarke’s “polyphonic poetics,” this essay brings to the foreground the so far unattended (African) American intertextuality in Clarke’s novel George & Rue , where the author rereads William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966) in a Canadian context, and revises Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in his rendition of Africadian black masculinity, history, and voice. I situate my discussion in the context of what Daniel Coleman labels “wry civility,” or an ethical stance that is aware and critical of the historical project of normative white civility in Canada that Clarke’s novel contests and challenges with its transnational and transcultural aesthetics.
Black Nationalist Hokum: George Schuyler’s Transnational Critique
Authors: Goyal Yogita
Published: July 2015

This essay reads George Schuyler’s transnational fantasies— Black Empire, Ethiopian Fictions, and Slaves Today —as a sustained critique and parody of the era’s pan-Africanism, especially of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of black Zionism and Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. In refusing to imagine a global black community linked by racial or political identification, Schuyler denaturalizes race and makes visible the blind spots of current transnational approaches which continue to make the same romantic assumptions about race as a global binding force that he undermined.
Haunting the African Diaspora: Responsibility and Remaining in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River
Authors: Bellamy Maria Rice
Published: July 2015

In Crossing the River , Caryl Phillips explores African complicity in the transatlantic slave trade and white exploitation of the children of the African Diaspora in order to model how those who initiated and benefit from this history can take responsibility for their treatment of its victims, restore their humanity through representation, and celebrate their survival. Refusing to offer easy solutions for this complex history, Phillips places his black characters in a precarious space between trauma and death and challenges his readers to enter that space and reckon their responsibility to carry this history forward.
The Importance of Neglected Intersections: Race and Gender in Contemporary Zombie Texts and Theories
Authors: Brooks Kinitra D.
Published: July 2015

In this essay, I focus my attention on the survivors of the zombie apocalypse, rather than the sociocultural implications of the zombies themselves. It is the life-and-death choices of the survivors and what these characters specifically choose to cull from their recent pasts in the rebuilding of a new post-apocalyptic civilization that I find most interesting. What worlds are constructed after the initial attack that brings on the zombie apocalypse? What power dynamics continue? Does Western hegemony continue? I choose to stay within the sphere of contemporary zombie horror because I believe it remains pregnant with opportunities to explore modern race and gender relations, for Kim Paffenroth insists that zombie movies are deeply psychological dramas, that “the real enemy is the group, with the fear and ignorance that tears them apart and sets them against one another.” Finally, this particular piece focuses on the intricacies of the construction of black female survivors within contemporary zombie texts, reading their experiences within the context of black feminist theory. I begin with a retracing of the critical work that has been done on gender and race within the genre of horror itself, later focusing on the subgenre of zombie horror texts.
Ralph Ellison’s Marxism: The Lumpenproletariat, the Folk, and the Revolution
Authors: Mills Nathaniel
Published: July 2015

This article examines Ralph Ellison’s time as a writer on the Communist left in the 1930s and identifies the distinct structures of his thought in this understudied phase of his career. Situating Ellison’s social, political, and institutional theories in relation to Communist discourse, the work of Richard Wright, and the later innovations of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, I present Ellison as an inventive Marxist theorist. Particularly, I delineate how his understanding of revolutionary politics revises the neglected Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat. Aspects of Ellison’s 1930s’ Marxism continued to influence his work even after his postwar break from the left.
Queering Personhood in the Neo-Slave Narrative: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories
Authors: Lewis Christopher S.
Published: July 2015

This article uses the explorations of antebellum black gender and sexuality in Jewelle Gomez’s neo-slave narrative The Gilda Stories (1991) to reconsider what Hortense Spillers has called the “neuter-bound” status of black gender and sexuality during slavery. Spillers’s work finds whiteness to be enacted through penetration of the enslaved and blackness to be neuter/neutered, meaning both gender indeterminate and incapable of penetration. Unfortunately, this schema conflates gender indeterminacy with impotency and lack of agency, thereby framing gender indeterminacy as a social condition incompatible with liberation. My reading of The Gilda Stories seeks to move critical conversation of antebellum gender and sexuality into queer- and transpositive territory by disentangling gender-indeterminacy from its associations with impotency and reframing it as a powerful resource of resistance and survival not only for enslaved people, but for postbellum African Americans as well.
Phillis Wheatley: A Muslim Connection
Authors: Harris Will
Published: July 2015

This essay contends that Phillis Wheatley’s work can be understood best by interpreting her work from an African Muslim rather than a Christian standpoint (as over two hundred years of Western criticism has done). To support this view, the article employs African Muslim slave demographics from the Americas, African Muslim slave statements and narratives, colonial historical documents, Wheatley’s biographical material, her poems, and Qur’anic references. As a result of this research, the essay concludes that the progenitor of African American literature probably was Muslim, and suggests ways that this perspective challenges mainstream—and even prevailing African American—criticism concerning Wheatley.
Otherwise Lost or Forgotten: Collecting Black History in L. S. Alexander Gumby’s “Negroana” Scrapbooks
Authors: Gilger Kristin
Published: July 2015

This essay examines the scrapbook collection of Harlem socialite and rare-book collector L. S. Alexander Gumby. Arguing against the idea that scrapbooking is an act of preservation rather than creation, as well as the logic that puts preservation at odds with creation, this essay demonstrates how Gumby’s scrapbooks piece together stories of black history and experience out of early twentieth-century ephemera, and by calling upon collage as the aesthetic practice best suited to acts of commemoration and remembrance, represent and enact diverse collective identities across different spheres of black America.
Wheatley, Dante, and the Latin Question
Authors: Shields John C.
Published: July 2015

We can now establish that Phillis Wheatley actually knew Dante’s La Divina Commedia in a Latin translation. While a complete English translation of the Commedia did not appear until after 1800, Father Carlo d’Aquino’s Latin translation was published in 1728. Also, Wheatley had access to d’Aquino’s Latin version, as is demonstrable in her borrowings from this Latin version as they appear in her extant œuvre. Whereas others have written insistently that Wheatley only knew classical myths from the few English mythology handbooks of her period, I believe that this investigation proves unquestionably that Wheatley knew Latin rather well.
“We Don’t Need Another Hero”: Agent 355 as an Original Black Female Hero in Y: The Last Man
Authors: Mafe Diana Adesola
Published: July 2015

This article reads the comic-book series Y: The Last Man as a subversive articulation of critical race and feminist discourses despite the guise of Eurocentricity and the pretext of a white male “protagonist.” I argue that the true protagonist of the series is the black female character Agent 355, an unconventional hero who complicates stereotypical representations of race, gender, class, and so on. Despite a post-apocalyptic setting where the male species is largely extinct, 355 (rather than the sole human male survivor) is also the narrative’s driving force and the most powerful, albeit unattainable, object of desire.
“A Curious Study”: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man , Pedagogy, and the Post-Plantation Imagination
Authors: Hinrichsen Lisa
Published: July 2015

This essay analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) as a text centrally concerned with modes of reading, writing, and education. Playing with structures of self-analysis and anthropological, literary, and ethnographic modes of knowing, Johnson delivers multiple ruminations on education as an experience of shame, mystery, and oppression, while investigating institutionalized modes of critical thinking and being that transmit modes of self-mastery and self-control directly tied to modes of white mastery and taste.
Neo-Hoodoo Dramaturgy: Robert Johnson on Stage
Authors: Schroeder Patricia R.
Published: July 2015

Legendary bluesman Robert Johnson has become famous not just for his music, but also for the legend that he sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for musical prowess. Two plays and one screenplay scripted by African American authors all present the legend of Johnson’s deal with the devil, but unlike the mostly white commentators on Johnson, they collectively challenge the assumption that Johnson needed supernatural agency to develop his talent. Adrienne Kennedy, in an unpublished 1983 screenplay entitled Robert Johnson , and Bill Harris, in a 1995 play Trick the Devil , both refute the legend as demeaning to Johnson’s talent and artistry. In contrast, Robert Earl Price, in his 2006 production Come on in My Kitchen , suggests that African Americans (especially in the twenty-first century) can achieve success only by selling some part of their souls. Collectively, these three dramatists function as Neo-Hoodoo writers, preserving African American cultural traditions and keeping them alive and viable.
An efficient numerical technique for the solution of nonlinear heat equation via spectral method
Authors: Askaripour Lahiji Mohammadreza , Ghanbari Mahdi , Panj Mini Hassan
Published: July 2015

Nonlinear wave equations are more difficult to study mathematically, and no general analytical method exists for their solution. It is found that the Exponential Time Differencing (ETD) scheme requires the steps to achieve a given accuracy, offers a speedy method in calculation time, and has exceptional stability properties in solving a nonlinear equation. This article solves the diagonal example of nonlinear heat equation via the exponential time difference Runge-Kutta 4 methods (ETDRK4). Implementation of the method is proposed by short Matlab programs.
Surviving history: Kate Chopin
Authors: Baysal Kübra
Published: July 2015

Bearing witness to the colonial and anti-feminist atmosphere of 19th-century America, Kate Chopin created her works against a background of all kinds of repression reigning over social life. Likewise, Désirée’s Baby focuses mainly on a young woman’s marital life and the social/familial problems she confronts because of her personal background and imperial and gender-based oppression surrounding her life. Through a new historicist reading, the story has several humane elements to be taken into account. Reflecting the periphery and the repressed, Désirée’s Baby is a significant anticanonical writing with an inspiring human touch and a historically excluded work which depicts the dramatic existential problems of the time
Decoding Samuel Beckett’s language in Imagination Dead Imagine
Authors: Kiššová Mária , Ščerbák Ľubomír
Published: July 2015

The study focuses on the short prose text Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). It argues that while at first sight Beckett’s text appears to be a chaotic verbal blend with no coherence, a close reading discloses an actual underlying pattern (mandala) which gives the text a structure and enables the reader to “understand” it. The authors of the paper claim that mandala, as the structural pattern of the text, represents an attempt to find a resolution of the existential and universal conflict within man. On one hand, there is spiritual alienation (exemplified here by the dissolution of the language) and, on the other hand, one’s desire to be integrated with unity and return to the centre
On reconstructing unknown characteristics of a nonlinear system of differential equations
Authors: Kuklin Alexander , Maksimov Vyacheslav , Nikulina Natalia
Published: July 2015

Problems of dynamical reconstruction of unknown characteristics for nonlinear equations described the process of diffusion of innovations through results of observations of phase states are considered. Solving algorithms, which are stable with respect to informational noises and computational errors, are designed. The algorithms are based on the principle of auxiliary models with adaptive controls.
Model of time-varying linear systems and Kolmogorov equations
Authors: Krumov Assen V.
Published: July 2015

In the paper an approximate model of time-varying linear systems using a sequence of time-invariant systems is suggested. The conditions for validity of the approximation are proven with a theorem. Examples comparing the numerical solution of the original system and the analytical solution of the model are given. For the system under the consideration a new criterion giving sufficient conditions for robust Lagrange stability is suggested. The criterion is proven with a theorem. Examples are given showing stable and non stable solutions of a time-varying system and the results are compared with the numerical Runge-Kutta solution of the system. In the paper an important application of the described method of solution of linear systems with time-varying coefficients, namely analytical solution of the Kolmogorov equations is shown.
Influence of Loading Time of a Load Plate and Sample Size on the Measurement of Physical Properties of Resilient Materials
Authors: Kim Kyoung-Woo , Yeon Jun-Oh , Yang Kwan-Seop , Kim Myung-Jun
Published: July 2015

This study investigates several factors that have not been specified in the standard for dynamic stiffness, compressibility, and long-term deformation; these factors can be used to evaluate the acoustic and physical performances of resilient materials. The study is intended to provide basic data for deriving the factors that need to be additionally reviewed through the standards. Since magnitude of dynamic stiffness changes with an increase in loading time, it is necessary to examine the setting of the loading time for a load plate under test conditions. Samples of size 300×300 mm, rather than 200×200 mm, yielded more reliable results for compressibility measurement. Since the test to infer long-term deformation of resilient materials after a period of 10 years in some samples showed variation characteristics different from those specified in the standards, it is recommended that the test method should be reviewed through ongoing research.
Deep Belief Neural Networks and Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory Hybrid for Speech Recognition
Authors: Brocki Łukasz , Marasek Krzysztof
Published: July 2015

This paper describes a Deep Belief Neural Network (DBNN) and Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) hybrid used as an acoustic model for Speech Recognition. It was demonstrated by many independent researchers that DBNNs exhibit superior performance to other known machine learning frameworks in terms of speech recognition accuracy. Their superiority comes from the fact that these are deep learning networks. However, a trained DBNN is simply a feed-forward network with no internal memory, unlike Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) which are Turing complete and do posses internal memory, thus allowing them to make use of longer context. In this paper, an experiment is performed to make a hybrid of a DBNN with an advanced bidirectional RNN used to process its output. Results show that the use of the new DBNN-BLSTM hybrid as the acoustic model for the Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) increases word recognition accuracy. However, the new model has many parameters and in some cases it may suffer performance issues in real-time applications.
Study of Noise Propagation for Small Vessels
Authors: Weryk Mateusz , Kozaczka Eugeniusz , Grelowska Grażyna
Published: July 2015

The paper presents the results of the noise propagation analysis in ship structures tested in a number of AHTS (Anchor Handling Tug Supply) vessels. Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) based on numerical model developed specially for the purpose of this numerical investigation were conducted. This numerical model enabled the analysis of both the structural elements and the acoustic spaces. For the detailed studies 47 points fixed at various ship locations were selected. Prediction results with use of the numerical model were compared with the experimental results carried out in six identical AHTS vessels. Experimental studies were performed in accordance with the requirements of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Resolution A.468 (XII). As a result one presented a comparison of the model analysis and experimental tests results.
Mutually Orthogonal Golay Complementary Sequences in Synthetic Aperture Imaging Systems
Authors: Trots Ihor
Published: July 2015

The main objective of this study is to improve the ultrasound image by employing a new algorithm based on transducer array element beam pattern correction implemented in the synthetic transmit aperture (STA) method combined with emission of mutually orthogonal complementary Golay sequences. Orthogonal Golay sequences can be transmitted and received by different transducer elements simultaneously, thereby decreasing the time of image reconstruction, which plays an important role in medical diagnostic imaging.

The paper presents the preliminary results of computer simulation of the synthetic aperture method combined with the orthogonal Golay sequences in a linear transducer array. The transmission of long waveforms characterized by a particular autocorrelation function allows to increase the total energy of the transmitted signal without increasing the peak pressure. It can also improve the signal-to-noise ratio and increase the visualization depth maintaining the ultrasound image resolution.

In the work, the 128-element linear transducer array with a 0.3 mm pitch excited by 8-bits Golay coded sequences as well as one cycle at nominal frequencies of 4 MHz were used. The comparison of 2D ultrasound images of the phantoms is presented to demonstrate the benefits of a coded transmission. The image reconstruction was performed using the synthetic STA algorithm with transmit and receive signals correction based on a single element directivity function.
Incentive Contracting with an Independent Underwriter: Does It Benefit Insurers?
Authors: Gao Siwei , Plehn-Dujowich Jose M.
Published: July 2015

In this article, we propose a model consisting of an insurance distribution channel compensation scheme, paying special attention to the insurer’s choice of distribution system in both single-period and multi-period settings. We find that the risk factor is the key element in both the insurer’s choice of distribution channel and the distribution channel compensation scheme. The advantage of having an independent underwriter is mainly manifested in lines of business that are more risky. Our analysis suggests that a profit-sharing contingent-commission scheme serves as a risk-sharing mechanism and is especially effective with risky business lines.
Comparative Analysis of Pine Needles and Coal for Electricity Generation using Carbon Taxation and Emission Reductions
Authors: Dhaundiyal Alok , Chandra Tewari Pramod
Published: July 2015

Mitigating global climate change via emission control and taxation is promising for strengthening the economic benefits of bioenergy generation and utilization. This study examines the cost effectiveness of pine needles as an alternative fuel for off-grid electricity generation in India. We first examined the changes of prices in coal for electricity generation due to CO2 emission reductions and taxes using experimental data of gasification plants. The time value of money and depreciation scale were used to find out the real levellized cost of electricity generation of gasification plants. Then, the costs of electricity generation fuelled by pine needles and coal were estimated using the cost analysis method. Our results indicate that pine needles would have more competitive edge than coal if emission had taxed at about an emission tax INR 525.15 Mg-1 of CO2 (US$ 8.4), or higher would be needed for pine needles at a yield of 202.176 dry Mg hm-2 yr. The price of coal used for electricity generation would have significantly increased if global CO2 emission had abridged by 20% or more. However, pine needles were found a much better fuel source with an increasing yield of 5.05 Mg hm-2 yr (with respect to power generation) and 2.335 Mg hm-2 yr (with respect to feedstock production).
Verification of Conditions for use of Combustion Products‘ Heat
Authors: Kažimírová Viera , Čerešňa Vladimír
Published: July 2015

Presented contribution deals with the verification of conditions for use of combustion products‘ heat, generated by combustion of wood in a fireplace used in a household. It is necessary to know the temperature behaviour of the fireplace to determine the adequacy of the technical solution for using combustion products‘ heat. The combustion products‘ temperature at the upper part of the chimney is 80-120 °C. The dew point value was established to be below 51 °C. The average observed value of combustion product velocity is 1.6 m s-1. The volume flow rate of combustion products is 12 m3 h-1. Measured values allow for effective solution of the use of combustion products‘ heat.
Immunoassays for the detection of IgA antibodies to tissue transglutaminase: significance of multiples of the upper limit of normal and inter-assay correlations
Authors: Suh-Lailam Brenda B. , Davis K. Wayne , Tebo Anne E.
Published: July 2015

The presence of IgA antibodies to tissue transglutaminase (anti-tTg) is associated with variable risk for celiac disease. The use of common multiples of the upper limit of normal (ULN) has been suggested to optimize diagnostic pathways as well as improve harmonization between assays.

The characteristics of four anti-tTG IgA assays relative to endomysial IgA (EMA) by indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA) as reference test were assessed. Commutability between anti-tTG immunoassays and/or EMA based on manufacturer’s recommended cut-off values and three common multiples of ULN (3×, 5× and 10×) was also investigated. Sera from 200 patients and 100 healthy individuals were analyzed.

At manufacturer’s cut-off; the sensitivities for the tTG assays ranged from 72.5% to 98.6% and specificities from 60.3% to 99.2%. The percent positive agreements between any anti-tTG and EMA or any two anti-tTG immunoassays varied from 56.7% to 98.0% and 46.7% to 100.0%, respectively. At 3×, 5× or 10× ULNs, the inter-rater reliability as measured by Cohen κ between any two anti-tTG assays were quite variable and ranged from 0.28 to 0.96, 0.26 to 0.89 or 0.13 to 0.78, respectively. Furthermore, the percent positive agreements between any two anti-tTg IgA immunoassays ranged from 83.1% to 98.2%, 92.0% to 100%, or 100%, at 3×, 5× or 10×, respectively.

Commutability between tTG IgA immunoassays or tTG IgA and EMA is kit-dependent and common multiples of the ULN are not sufficient to correct for inter-assay variations. Many factors influence the performance of anti-tTG IgA assays which limit their commutability.
Analysis of Compressed Data Stream Content in HEVC Video Encoder
Authors: Stankowski Jakub , Karwowski Damian , Grajek Tomasz , Wegner Krzysztof , Siast Jakub , Klimaszewski Krzysztof , Stankiewicz Olgierd , Domański Marek
Published: July 2015

In this paper, a detailed analysis of the content of the bitstream, produced by the HEVC video encoder is presented. With the use of the HM 10.0 reference software the following statistics were investigated: 1) the amount of data in the encoded stream related to individual frame types, 2) the relationship between the value of the QP and the size of the bitstream at the output of the encoder, 3) contribution of individual types of data to I and B frames. The above mentioned aspects have been thoroughly explored for a wide range of target bitrates. The obtained results became the basis for highlighting guidelines that allow for efficient bitrate control in the HEVC encoder.
Automated On-Demand Generation Of Patient Summary Documents
Authors: Krauss Oliver , Franz Barbara , Schuler Andreas
Published: July 2015

Patient summary documents provide crucial information about a patient, like allergies and adverse reactions, which are necessary for an efficient and safe treatment and offer a quick overview of the patients health status. Automatically generating patient summaries from Electronic Health Records (EHR) reduces the workload of medical personnel. Nevertheless, existing approaches do not take several challenges that occur in live operation into account. Based on a health standard-compliant approach, a system for on-demand generation of patient summaries was implemented and evaluated using real data. This work shows several problems which could be identified. Those problems are not covered sufficiently by current research. Possible approaches to a solution are suggested, which have to be further investigated in future work.
Synthesis of the Magnetic Field Using Transversal 3D Coil System
Authors: Garda Bartłomiej , Galias Zbigniew
Published: July 2015

Magnetic field is usually generated using magnets realized as a set of simple coils. In general, those magnets generate magnetic field with nonzero components in all directions. Usually during the design process only one component of the magnetic field is taken into account, and in the optimisation procedure the currents and positions of simple coils are found to minimize the error between the axial component of the magnetic field and the required magnetic field in the ROI. In this work, it is shown that if the high quality homogeneous magnetic field is generated then indeed one may neglect non-axial components. On the other hand, if the obtained magnetic field is not homogeneous either due to design requirements of too restrictive constrains, then all other components may severely deteriorate the quality of the magnetic field. In the second part of the paper, we show how to design a 3D transversal coil system to solve problems which are intractable in the 1D case.
Semi-PROPELLER Compressed Sensing Image Reconstruction with Enhanced Resolution in MRI
Authors: Malczewski Krzysztof
Published: July 2015

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction algorithm using semi-PROPELLER compressed sensing is presented in this paper. It is exhibited that introduced algorithm for estimating data shifts is feasible when super-resolution is applied. The offered approach utilizes compressively sensed MRI PROPELLER sequences and improves MR images spatial resolution in circumstances when highly undersampled k-space trajectories are applied. Compressed sensing (CS) aims at signal and images reconstructing from significantly fewer measurements than were traditionally thought necessary. It is shown that the presented approach improves MR spatial resolution in cases when Compressed Sensing (CS) sequences are used. The application of CS in medical modalities has the potential for significant scan time reductions, with visible benefits for patients and health care economics. These methods emphasize on maximizing image sparsity on known sparse transform domain and minimizing fidelity. This diagnostic modality struggles with an inherently slow data acquisition process. The use of CS to MRI leads to substantial scan time reductions [7] and visible benefits for patients and economic factors. In this report the objective is to combine Super-Resolution image enhancement algorithm with both PROPELLER sequence and CS framework. The motion estimation algorithm being a part of super resolution reconstruction (SRR) estimates shifts for all blades jointly, utilizing blade-pair correlations that are both strong and more robust to noise.
Entropy Coder for Audio Signals
Authors: Ulacha Grzegorz , Stasinski Ryszard
Published: July 2015

In the paper an effective entropy coder designed for coding of prediction errors of audio signals is presented. The coder is implemented inside a greater structure, which signal modeling part is a lossless coding backward adaptation algorithm consisting of cascaded Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), three Normalized Least Mean Square (NLMS), and prediction error bias correction sections. The technique performance is compared to that of four other lossless codecs, including MPEG-4 Audio Lossless (ALS) one, and it is shown that indeed, on the average the new method is the best. The entropy coder is an advanced context adaptive Golomb one followed by two context adaptive arithmetic coders.