Free Library Research Articles

Milton’s Shakespeare: Gentle Will, Spare John, and Plump Jack

ABSTRACT In the mid-twentieth century, a short but seminal article demonstrated that a volume of Pindar’s poetry long accepted as John Milton’s did not in fact fit his readerly profile. It thereby articulated fresh criteria for determining Miltonic provenance. These same criteria now allow us to accept with confidence that Milton did indeed annotate the copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio held at the Philadelphia Free Library. Milton’s editorial interventions and marginal notations reveal his persistent artistic engagement with metaphors by which Shakespeare registers spatial, chronological, and atmospheric setting. They also indicate Milton’s generic focus on songs and masque-like entertainments contained in the plays, which suggests the artistic pertinence of Shakespeare to Milton’s poetic development during the 1630s. Shakespeare’s Henry IV tetralogy may also have had personal resonance in that decade as Milton struggled to avoid a career in the Church of England and instead establish an independent poetic vocation.

Preface: Shakespeare and Milton

Preface: Shakespeare and Milton

Milton’s Hamlet: The Tragedy of Adam Unparadized

ABSTRACT Shakespeare’s Hamlet was one of seventeenth-century England’s most popular plays, and, as the First Folio of the Philadelphia Free Library confirms, it was a Shakespearean drama with which Milton was deeply engaged. With Hamlet in mind, this article examines the degree to which Shakespearean tragedy qualifies Milton’s classical understanding of the genre and, more importantly, allows us insight into the relationship between tragedy and grace. What emerges is the profoundly agonistic but creative relationship between such influences as Shakespeare and Luther at the climax of Paradise Lost—so much so that without them Milton’s great work of art would have neither the same affective nor epistemological power. The argument falls into two parts: the first focuses on a specific network of contexts for Milton’s representation of the Fall as a tragedy, and the second on Adam and Eve’s response to that tragedy.

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

A Tutorial on Fuzzy Time Series Forecasting Models: Recent Advances and Challenges

Abstract: Time series forecasting is a powerful tool in planning and decision making, from traditional statistical models to soft computing and artificial intelligence approaches several methods have been developed to generate increasingly accurate forecasts. Fuzzy Time Series (FTS) methods have been introduced in the early 1990’s to handle data uncertainty and to undercome the statistical assumptions of linearity. Many studies have been reporting their good accuracy, simplicity, potential for interpretability and reduced computational complexity. This paper presents a tutorial for FTS methods. First, a review of the relevant literature is made, offering a foundation on the main concepts and FTS-based models for different time series and different types of forecasts. Then, the current challenges and possible solutions, are discussed alongside a timeline of the research developed in this area by the authors that aims at filling some of these gaps. Finally, a tutorial on the pyFTS library is presented. PyFTS is an open and free library coded in Python programming language that was developed by the MINDS Lab (Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Data Science) and, also provides a set of transformation functions for pre-processing time series and a set of metrics and databases for benchmarking, in addition to implementing several FTS models in the literature.

Median algorithm for estimating the variance of intrinsic noise when detecting a signal with an unknown initial phase

The article presents the finding of the dispersion of intrinsic noise distributed according to Rayleigh's law to find a signal with an unknown initial phase according to the Neumann- Pearson criterion. This algorithm is used for primary signal processing. The practical significance of the work is the study of the basics of programming in C and Python, comparison and identification of the advantages of this algorithm in comparison with the evaluation by the average value method. It also shows the finding of the threshold at which a decision is made to detect a useful signal. In this work, the integrated programming environment Visual studio was used – a popular environment for writing, debugging and compiling code. It also contains most of the libraries used, which simplify the writing of code. And Anaconda is a distribution for the Python programming language, which includes a set of free libraries, which is also freely available. Using the C language, the task of calculating data and filling it into an array was performed, Python was used for modeling, constructing histograms and comparing the results obtained with theoretical ones. This work can be used for teaching students of higher educational institutions for the purpose of familiarization. The optimal method is considered. Familiarization and study of these programming languages are conducted within the walls of one of the leading engineering universities of the Russian Federation, the Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

Digital processing of satellite images using neural network algorithms

The article discusses the system, the basis of which can be divided into two parts, hardware and software. The hardware part is a single-board computer and software using, which includes the use of neural network algorithms. This system is able to extract the necessary information from the photo and/or video frame specified by the parameters when receiving images from the satellite. This possibility is relevant, because at the moment the trend is that large enterprises want to have at least a few small spacecraft on their account and in this regard they face a number of problems associated with limited mass and size of payload devices. Due to these certain limitations, the processing of satellite frames takes place on Earth, and not on the device itself. Image processing on the spacecraft makes it possible to send only individual fragments of data and not clog the transmission channel, which saves traffic and time. Also, it makes it possible to process data on the spacecraft itself 24/7. This becomes possible thanks to the Python programming language and the trained convolutional neural network. The neural network is connected through the free library TensorFlow. The purpose of this work is to describe the features for solving the problem of classification of objects (pattern recognition).

КОМУНІКАЦІЙНІ ПЛАТФОРМИ ДЛЯ ФАХІВЦІВ ІЗ КАДРОВОГО ДІЛОВОДСТВА ЯК ЧИННИК ФОРМУВАННЯ ГАЛУЗЕВОГО КОМ’ЮНІТІ

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The purpose &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;of the study is to analyze communication platforms for HR specialists and office management specialists as a factor in the formation of the industry community.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Research methodology.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; In the course of the study, a theoretical methodological case was used: a classification method (types of communication formats, tools), a system-value approach (analysis of the organization of the industry community as a factor of effective communication through the prism of compliance with the key value of «organizational health» and «corporate culture»). &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Results.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; The article highlighted the tools of forming the industry community, its functional potential, communication requests, including using examples of effective communication cases, in particular the international employment service Jooble, which in 2020 created a Facebook page Jooble Recruitment Club – a closed industry community for Ukrainian recruiters and HR managers for development, exchange of experience, knowledge and ideas; community for managers of cultural and creative projects «Mutual». The trends of the organization of the industry community – websites, social networks, professional publications, services, video resources, libraries of questions and answers, etc. – were analyzed on the examples of communication platforms in the field of personnel administration «KadrEX», «Kadrovyk-01», «Kadry Expert». &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The scientific novelty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt; in the identified need for the development of the industry community, in particular in the field of personnel administration, as a factor of effective communication in the conditions of martial law, when crisis circumstances require quick and high-quality operation of provisions of legislative norms, recommendations for the use of technical means of electronic communications, work with personnel, use of personnel potential based on the management of all components of the human factor.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The practical meaning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;. of the article and the perspective of the analysis of the community phenomenon in the context of creating strong brands, brand ambassadors of the industry, etc., is evidenced by the analyzed experience of communication platforms in the field of personnel administration, in particular «KadrEX», which includes the magazines «Kadrovyk Ukrainy» and «Zarabitna Plata», the first in Ukraine's personnel monthly newspaper «Kadrovyk Consultant», «KadrEX. Community» – a free library of answers to practical questions and situations, «Personnel Video Platform No. 1» from the company «Kadroland.com», «KadroLand – personnel channel No. 1», «KadroLIVE» (Instagram page), as well as official Viber, Facebook, Telegram pages, sending letters to participants' e-mails; the «Kadrovyk-01» platform with the powerful video service «Kadrovyk TV» and other offers, the expert system «Kadrovyk Expert». The top cases of effective communication for the professional community in personnel administration are outlined, which is extremely relevant and in demand in wartime conditions. &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Key words: &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;industry community, personnel administration, community manager, communication platform, cases of effective communication.&lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

What’s in a book exchange: Examining contents in relation to steward intentions, geography, and public library collections

In the last decade, book exchanges, most prominently those registered with the Little Free Library® network, have attracted the interest of researchers and media alike. Very little is known about what types of books are available in these book exchanges and how their collections compare to those in public libraries. To address this gap in knowledge, we selected a random sample of 42 Little Free Libraries across eight Seattle neighborhoods to inventory their contents. We interviewed the stewards about their stocking and weeding practices. Our inventory shows that most of the books available in Little Free Libraries are children’s, mystery, suspense, self-help/health, and scifi/fantasy books published in the last 10–30 years. Neighborhoods in our sample ranged in socioeconomic and racial diversity measures, but there were no significant differences in LFL contents related to those measures. We also compared our inventory to the collections of nearby public library branches and found Little Free Libraries offer a complementary rather than competitive selection scenario: books in LFLs are generally older, with a lesser proportion of children’s books and higher proportion of fiction books.

Turning a Silk Purse into a Sow's Ear: A Speculative Note on Humay and Humayun in Philadelphia

AbstractThe Rare Books department at the Free Library of Philadelphia owns a deluxe manuscript of Sa'di's Kulliyat, originally produced in mid-sixteenth century Shiraz and substantially modified in more modern times. Among the alterations was the insertion of a copy of the famous Timurid painting “Humay and Humayun in a garden”, belonging to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. The Philadelphia version of the Paris painting was likely based on either a published reproduction or a photograph taken of the original composition when it was on view at the ground-breaking 1910 exhibition “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst” in Munich. That photographic reproductions could result in pictorial replicas reveals once again the market forces behind the great interest in, demand for, and production of classical Persian painting during the early twentieth century.

AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF SURFACE DEFECTS OF CERAMIC TILES

Ceramic tiles are one of the most demanded finishing materials, and the areas of their use are constantly expanding. The production of ceramic tiles is quite well automated, but the control of manufactured tiles for defects is usually not automated, that limits its speed and does not guarantee the necessary quality. The algorithm for detecting the main surface defects of ceramic tiles, namely, mechanical (scratches, cracks, etc.), geometric (chips on the corners, gouges or protrusions on the edges), color defects (blobs, spots, etc.) is proposed in the paper. It based on digital image processing of tiles and was implemented using the free library of algorithmic primitives OpenCV. The algorithm does not require the presentation of reference tiles. At the same time, a high speed of classifying monochrome tiles into fresh and defective ones is ensured and allows to organize the automatic control of plain tiles on the conveyor in real time with the probability of correct detections 97 %.

Programming the Relley distribution

The article describes programming algorithms for finding and processing a signal. The practical significance of the work is the study of the basics of programming in C and Python. Getting to know the Visual studio integrated programming environment is a popular environment for writing, debugging and compiling code, available for download in the public domain. It also includes most of the libraries used, which simplify writing code. And Anaconda is a distribution for the Python programming language, which includes a set of free libraries, which is also freely available. The interaction of C and Python languages is demonstrated by the example of constructing random variables distributed according to Relley's law using probability theory. Using the C language, the task of calculating data and filling it into an array was performed, Python was used for modeling, constructing histograms and comparing the results obtained with theoretical ones. This work can be used to train students of higher educational institutions for the purpose of familiarization, as well as further used to determine a false alarm used in finding an adaptive threshold for primary signal processing in radar. The syntax of each language and their strengths are considered. Familiarization and study of these programming languages are conducted within the walls of one of the leading engineering universities of the Russian Federation, the Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

Machine Learning Algorithms: An Experimental Evaluation for Decision Support Systems

Decision support systems with machine learning can help organizations improve operations and lower costs with more precision and efficiency. This work presents a review of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for binary classification and makes a comparison of the related metrics between them with their application to a public diabetes and human resource datasets. The two mainly used categories that allow the learning process without requiring explicit programming are supervised and unsupervised learning. For that, we use Scikit-learn, the free software machine learning library for Python language. The best-performing algorithm was Random Forest for supervised learning, while in unsupervised clustering techniques, Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering Using Hierarchies and Spectral Clustering algorithms presented the best results. The experimental evaluation shows that the application of unsupervised clustering algorithms does not translate into better results than with supervised algorithms. However, the application of unsupervised clustering algorithms, as the preprocessing of the supervised techniques, can translate into a boost of performance.

Virtual Prediction of Material Properties

To start working with materials, it is most important to determine the properties to ensure its suitability but sometimes it is not only difficult but also time consuming and costly affair to arrange an experimentation with the materials. To overcome this problem some free libraries of python like pymatgen, matminer etc. are used with Materials Application Programming Interface (API)to gather and process datasets and when combined with Machine learning libraries like Sklearn, a machine Learning Model can be built. In the present work, with the aid of glass_ternary_hipt dataset, a metallic glass formation dataset for Co-Fe-Zr, Co-Ti-Zr, Co-V-Zr and Fe-Ti-Nb ternary alloy systems, a Support Vector Machine Classifier, is built as an example to predict the glass forming ability of the alloys. The accuracy of the model is checked and a heatmap is generated to show the correlation between the features and the target. The development of these program is very intuitive with these packages and python for prediction of material properties virtually.

Geolocation Mobile Application to Create New Routes for Cyclists

In Peru in recent decades it has undergone unex-pected changes, often generating chaos among the population, such as the excess of vehicles that travel daily on the roads generating pollution. This has led people to seek alternatives, such as the use of bike, as a means of transportation. The objective is develop a mobile application for the creation of alternative routes for cyclists. For them we have carried out a survey of 50 people dedicated to the field of cycling as well as people who do not exercise it in order to collect data, analyze it and create mechanisms that help these users. This application was developed in Android Studio implementing free libraries to achieve its geolocation in a way that provides all the facilities for the cyclist to move. For the process of creating this application, the Scrum methodology was used, the design of the prototype is done in Adobe Photoshop. It was obtained as results of the investigation carried out in the survey that 75% of the people are satisfied with the use of the application, 60% responded defining it as very good and 100% answered yes they would recommend the application.The investigation is of importance, since it would allow as future work the reduction of environmental contamination.

The Reading Circle in the Tomsk Province in the Second Half of the 19th — Early 20th Centuries

The article is devoted to study of the reading circle of various population groups in the Tomsk Province in the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries. The book, as an important attribute of the spiritual realization of society, took a leading place in the system of cultural values of the era, became the most important means of human communication. A great contribution to the development of the cultural life of the Altai district was made by the technical and scientific activities among the poor. The study of book collections of exiles, their activities in opening libraries, which were based on private collections, contribute to the expansion of ideas about the nature and scope of their versatile activities. The end of the 19th — early 20th centuries is characterized in Siberia by the social activity of various segments of the population, an increase in the need of society for a printed word. Thanks to the active work of the «Society for the Promotion of the Construction of Rural Free Libraries», in the Tomsk Province, free rural libraries began to open. They completed their main task in distributing the book in the remote settlements of the Tomsk Province. In Siberia, there is a change in the traditional way of peasants in connection with the heyday of the cooperative movement, the alleged dissemination of the theoretical and practical knowledge. The cooperatives began to organize libraries. The important qualitative changes in reading preferences are gradually taking place: classical literature, specialized books and periodicals are in increasing demand.

Wykorzystanie turystyczne budynków przeciętych granicami państw – trzy studia przypadków: Wolna Biblioteka i Opera Haskell, Hotel Arbez oraz schronisko Purtschellerhaus

The aim of the paper is to show the meaning and symbolism of the state border crossing individual buildings. To achieve this goal, three facilities were selected, located in different parts of the world: two in Europe (including one on the internal EU border – the Purtschellerhaus mountain hut, and the other on a specific, external border – the Arbez Hotel) and one in North America (the Haskell Free Library and Opera House). The main two methods used in the study were literature analysis and field research (in 2017–2019, at least one unstructured in-depth interview was conducted in each of the facilities). An additional element was also the analysis of the content of websites of the researched objects and available marketing materials. It was found that among many objects – of a different scale and importance – crossing the state border, small point objects have local significance. Their belonging to two countries shows the specificity of international relations on a microscale. These facilities are of great importance in shaping cross-border relations, they are important centers of local culture and important tourist attractions.

“The Little Strangers at Our Gate”: Toronto Public Library’s Experimentation with the Settlement House Movement, 1910s–1930s

This article is a case study of Toronto Public Library’s (TPL) early collaboration with social workers through its participation in the settlement house movement from the 1910s through the 1930s. While the image of the public library as a social equalizer is often attributed to its origins in the free libraries movement, and while the first chairman of its board characterized TPL as a “literary park” for “the rich and poor alike,” historical efforts to extend the public library into social work–like activities remained short-term, ad hoc experiments that failed to generate transformational change. This article presents the challenges faced by a large Canadian urban public library as it attempted to position itself not only as an educational institution but also as a social service. TPL’s activities in settlement neighborhoods reinforced rather than subverted the cultural status quo largely because it had no intentions to make radical program departures.

PVcheck—A Software to Check Your Photovoltaic System

Having a photovoltaic (PV) system raises the question of whether it runs as expected. Measuring its energy yield takes a long time and the result still contains uncertainties from varying weather conditions and possible shading of the modules. Here, a free software PVcheck to measure the peak power of the system is announced, using the power data of a single sunny day. The software loads a data file of the generated power as a function of time from this day. This data file is provided by typical inverters. The software then simulates this power curve using known parameters like angle and location of the PV system. The assumed peak power of the simulation can then be adjusted so that the simulated curve matches the measured one. The software runs under Microsoft Windows™ and makes use of the free library pvlib python. The simulation can be refined by importing weather data like temperature, wind speed, and insolation. Furthermore, curves describing the nominal module efficiency as a function of the illumination intensity as well as the power-dependent inverter efficiency can be included in the simulation. First results reveal a good agreement of the simulation with experimental data. The software can be used to detect strong problems in PV systems after installation and to monitor their long-time operation.

Library of 3D Visual Teaching Tools for the Chemistry Classroom Accessible via Sketchfab and Viewable in Augmented Reality

Through the implementation of the free website/smartphone application Sketchfab, we have found a simple means to introduce 3D visual tools into the chemistry classroom. Sketchfab stores 3D models and animations with free cross-platform accessibility. Blender is a free 3D modeling tool that has been used to prepare models and animations for dissemination via Sketchfab. By combining these two tools, we have created and are currently maintaining an ever-growing free library of interactive 3D models on various chemistry topics. Through the Sketchfab smartphone application, these models are viewable in augmented reality on most devices. Topics include molecular motion, isomerism, molecular orbital theory, chirality, and polymerization.