Pre-computer Era Research Articles

THE LANGUAGE OF PEACE AND WAR: UKRAINIAN FANDOM ON THE WAY TO SELF-IDENTIFICATION

The article discusses the peculiarities of the functioning of Ukrainian fantasy fandom as well as its transformations related to two main aspects: 1) from “the old” fandom to the new one and 2) from the ordinary forms of existence during the peaceful times to existence during the wartime after Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine in February 2022.The article indicates the general transformation of the scholarly research of the fandom in the Western academic context. It is possible to present it as the flow from an “ethnographic” or external interpretation of the fandom as a part of the mass culture that depends on the specifics of the popular culture production, to the “internal” or integrated descriptions of the fandom functioning as a separated sphere of social activity.The article argues that there are two stages of the existence of Ukrainian fantasy-related fandom. “The old” fandom emerged in the pre-computer era and was based on the Soviet fandom, which influenced its peculiarities. For instance, there are such aspects as statelessness, the absence of national representation (and the dominance of Russo-centrism as the common cultural platform), the importance of direct interpersonal contacts, distancing from contact with authorities, and the tendency to reduce the presence of the fandom in the shared urban space.Unlike “the old” fandom, “the new” one is developing under the influence of new communicational technologies, which erases the barriers to entering the fandom for new members, enlarges the zones of potential contacts, eliminates geographic and territorial barriers, etc. Moreover, “the new” fandom is more integrated into the urban space and is more available for communications. For the Ukrainian fandom, the transition from “the old” fandom to the “new one” means focusing on domestic cultural issues as the fandom becomes Ukraine-centric.Russian military aggression against Ukraine, from annexing Crimea in 2014 to the full-scale invasion in 2022, became the inner catalyst for the development and transformation of the Ukrainian fandom. The external existential threat led to the transformation of the practices, implemented by the fandom and to the rise of the Ukrainian popular culture, which is closely related to the fandom. During the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian fandom, preserving its core responsibilities (communication and social activity around popular culture functioning), spreads its new topical responsibilities: apart from the domestic volunteer work, which unites the majority of Ukrainian communities, it includes the educational activity, gaining subjectivity during international communication with the foreign fandom of Europe and the USA, charitable activity, etc.

The history of UK weather forecasting: the changing role of the central guidance forecaster. Part 1: the pre‐computer era

This is the first in a series of papers in which we review how the role of the weather forecaster has evolved from before the use of computers, through to the present day, with increasing reliance on numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and powerful computer workstations. In this paper, we focus on forecasting in the United Kingdom (UK) during the pre-computer era, when forecasting relied on applying empirical techniques and much of the skill depended upon the experience and flair of individual forecasters.

Plasma Diagnostics in the Era of Integral Field Spectroscopy

To understand the physical conditions of various gaseous systems, plasma diagnostics must be performed properly. To that end, it is equally important to have extinction correction performed properly, even before performing plasma diagnostics. This means that the physical conditions of the target sources—the very quantities to be derived via plasma diagnostics—must be known even before performing extinction correction, because the degree of extinction is determined by comparing the observed spectra of the target sources with their theoretically predicted counterparts. One way to resolve this conundrum is to perform both extinction correction and plasma diagnostics together by iteratively seeking a converged solution. In fact, if these analyses are performed self-consistently, a converged solution can be found based solely on well-calibrated line intensities, given the adopted extinction law and the RV value. However, it is still rare to find these analyses performed numerically rigorously without unnecessary analytical approximations from start to finish. In this contribution for the APN 8e conference, we would like to review this convoluted problem and sort out critical issues based on the results of our recent experiments. It appears that the convoluted theoretical and observational progresses exacerbated by the highly numerical nature of these analyses necessitated a number of analytical simplifications to make the problem analytically tractable in the pre-computer era and that such analytical simplifications still remain rampant in the literature today, even after ample computational resources became readily available. Hence, the community is encouraged to do away with this old habit of sidestepping numerical calculations that was a necessary evil in the past. This is especially true in the context of spatially-resolved 2-D spectroscopy, which obviously conflicts with the uniformity assumption often blindly inherited from 1-D spectroscopy.

Adaptive Geological Modelling and Its Application for Petroleum Reservoir Conditions

The article discusses the difference between the adaptive geological model and the traditional deterministic one, which is based on the manual work of geologists in the pre-computer era. Today, the deterministic approach to modelling has outlived its usefulness. Computer simulations use other methods. Therefore, it is necessary to break away from the deterministic tradition in order to move on. The adaptive geological model is a mathematical function, the purpose of which is not at all to display actual information about the structure of a petroleum reservoir as accurately as possible, but to predict its structure in undrilled zones. The adaptive approach proves that it is not necessary to obey the facts for a successful forecast. This is often even harmful, since the geological structure of the petroleum reservoir at the points where the wells are drilled is known without modelling. Just as in the regression analysis, it is not at all necessary that the function passes exactly through all the actual points, it is not necessary for the geological model of the petroleum reservoir to fully reproduce the actual data. This is the fundamental feature of the adaptive geological model.

Corrections to standard state in combustion calorimetry: An update and a web-based tool

Combustion calorimetry is the predominant method for determination of enthalpies of formation for organic compounds. Both initial and final states of the calorimeter deviate significantly from the standard conditions. Correction of the obtained results to the standard state must be applied as accurately as possible to determine the combustion energy with an acceptable uncertainty, which is typically a few hundredths of a percent. The correction procedures in their current form were introduced in 1956 with simplifications to allow application in a pre-computer era. In this work, the procedures have been updated with respect to both the equations and reference values. The most reliable data sources are identified, and the updated algorithm is presented in the form of a Web-based tool available through the NIST TRC Web site.

Project of the Russian Historical and Cultural Reference Institute of P. K. Simoni: scientific information network in the precomputer era

The subject of this article is the project of the “Russian Historical and Cultural Reference Institute” proposed by the philologist and historian of the Russian booklore P. K. Simoni for consideration by the Academic Council of the Russian Historical Museum in May 1917. The October Revolution triggered the major changes in the infrastructure of historical science. Dozens of scientific and cultural establishments were restructured or ceased their activity, and dozens opened up. The project of P. K. Simoni was one of many in this series of transformations. It was developed by a practicing scholar in the humanities, who knew firsthand about all the difficulties of research work, which defines the uniqueness of this project. This fact makes this document a valuable historical source on the history of the Russian humanities in the late XIX – early XX centuries. Although the project of P. K. Simoni has been previously mentioned in the special literature, this is the first detailed analysis on the topic. The conducted analysis allowed revealing the challenge faced by scholars in the humanities of the late XIX – early XX centuries in their research activity, as well as outlining the possibilities for establishment of a new institution to resolve them. The author described the similar in their concept projects, which inspired P. K. Simoni in his work, as well as determined the similarities and differences of the proposed solutions. The conclusion was made that the Russian scientific community requires an institution that would solve the tasks of information support for the humanities, since the 1820s. Such need was formulated, clarified and modified over time, and yet does not fully meet the demands.

Changes in the Style and Contents of Abstracts from The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology between the 1960s and the 2010s

This study was conducted to examine changes in the style and content of abstracts from the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology across time. Characteristics examined were word commonness, word activation, word pleasantness, sentence length, abstract length, mentions of inferential statistics and mentions of drugs (both street drugs and pharmaceuticals). Abstracts (N=510) were downloaded from volumes published before the wide introduction of computers (1968-9) and from those published in more current years (2016-17). Scores for word pleasantness and word activation were assessed with the Dictionary of Affect in Language. Word commonness was scored in comparison to a corpus of everyday English, and sentence length and abstract length were measured in terms of number of words. There were several strong and significant differences between abstracts from the pre-computer era and those from the 21st century, including greater length, more mentions of inferential statistics and more mentions of drugs in the later time period. A stepwise discriminant function analysis was able to correctly predict the origin (early or pre-computer versus 21st century) of 98% of the abstracts on the basis of the characteristics measured (canonical correlation=.89).

Cracking PURPLE: cryptanalysis of the Angooki Taipu B switch tables

Eighty years after the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) cracked PURPLE, the famous WWII-era Japanese cipher machine, there still has been little technical information published about how it was done. This paper offers a detailed description of how SIS could have done it. The techniques described here would all have been available to SIS in their pre-computer era of the early 1940s, and are based on cryptanalysis using plaintext and matching ciphertext. This paper derives the system architecture, determines the sixes and twenties switch tables, shows how to convert them to wiring diagrams, explains how to handle the complication of the plugboards, extends the information that can be mined from the famous patterns in PURPLE data, corrects a deficiency in the usage of the one published algorithm for cryptanalysis of the twenties, and shows that neither the sixes nor the twenties switch tables are unique.

Quantile-Quantile plot for the generalised gamma distribution

The aim of the paper is to propose a new method of creating a Q-Q plot using the density function of order statistics as well as to compare it with the classical methods.The most popular distributions for statisticians are those flexible ones which have easily estimated parameters. In the pre-computer era Quantile-Quantile plot (Q-Q plot) can be constructed only for distributions of reversible cumulative distribution functions (CDF) such as the exponential distribution and the Weibull distribution. The CDF of generalised gamma distribution (GGD) is not only analytically irreversible, but also has no analytical form. However, at present, owing to advanced computer technology, this problem can be solved. The CDF of GGD can be inverted by using different computing environment, i.e. Microsoft Excel, Mathcad, R language.

Slouching toward Student-Centered Assessment

Everyone in the history department offices heard the ibm Selectric typewriter crashing down the stairwell, shattering on the stone steps as it fell. Was it an accident or vindictive sabotage? The professor carrying the typewriter down the stairs maintained that the drop was an accident, but in a department rife with personal and professional discord, the loss of the only electric typewriter available for faculty use in that precomputer era became yet another source of backbiting, recrimination, and rumors. Like any other group of humans joined in time and space, the history department at the State University of New York (suny) College at Plattsburgh has its own unique history, and the typewriter incident symbolizes one important component of that history.1 Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, our department became mired in the kind of teaching and research turf wars, personality clashes, grudges, and feuding over everything from curriculum to university resources (such as the only electric typewriter) that too often occur in academia. Severe economic pressures on the New York State university system added to the tensions. In the late 1990s, after some retirements and resignations and with the opportunity for new hires, the senior members of the department resolved to prioritize collegiality, refusing to subject their new colleagues to the same kind of treatment they had suffered. In 1997, at the first of many departmental retreats, they also chose to frame faculty lines thematically rather than by traditional geographic chronology, which lessened friction surrounding research and teaching overlap among professors. This is not to say that we do

Трансформация художественного сознания в век компьютерных технологий

The present stage of sociocultural development is inextricably linked with the development of information society. Computer technologies are radically changing the structure of the cultural consciousness, including art. With a growing amount of information there is a problem of finding new methods of its analysis and synthesis. That leads to the transformation of the ways of learning and discovering the world, to the change in the way of thinking, to the birth of modern algorithms of creative consciousness. New features of the artistic consciousness are manifested at different levels of development of modern art. Most clearly, they represent different branches of technological and computer art. The creative practice of using technological possibilities of the information age shapes new principles of artistic vision, creates objectless art, and sets current possibilities of artistic communication corresponding to the postmodern worldview paradigm. Our analysis of some trends in 20th century art suggests that the principles of artistic consciousness of the information age have arisen in the precomputer era. Some representatives of the rationally oriented art (B. Riley, J.R. Soto, J. le Parc, F. Morellet) have turned to the use of the algorithm for creating art that would form the basis of computer art practices by mid20th century. In this article, we have focused on the theoretical perspectives and creative practice by V. Vazarely, one of the prominent representatives of European op art (optical art). We explain the birth of artistic thinking in accordance to the cultural consciousness of the modern information society in the era before the spread of computer technology. The analysis showed that the development of 20th century art reflects the objective laws of the evolution of artistic vision. The era of widespread use of computer technology has been prepared by the logic of the structural transformations of the cultural consciousness, fully identified in today’s culture.

On Bakhtin, Philosophy, and Philology: Two Essays

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935-2005) was one of the greatest and most prolific russian literary scholars of the twentieth century.Though associated with the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Gasparov's writings were so diverse and multifaceted—and his scholarly personality so distinct—as to elude categorization.Gasparov's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when measured against the rigid Marxist-Leninist paradigms that ruled humanities education and scholarship in the Soviet Union. A philologist with a special interest in verse form, he managed to sidestep the procrustean bed of Soviet ideology, building instead on the barely tolerated work of the Russian formalists and structuralists. He embraced and developed their goal of turning literary study into an exact science by applying statistical analysis and probability theory to poetics. Gasparov's scholarship was based on unprecedented amounts of data, which he painstakingly compiled in the precomputer era. However, he was never satisfied with the data as such; he used them to reach profound and unexpected conclusions.

The Continuing Relevance of Paul Otlet, the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Documentation, and the Documentation Movement for Information Science and Studies

This article discusses the historical legacy and present-day impact of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two of the earliest pioneers of the documentation movement, and the organization they founded in 1895, known originally as the International Institute for Bibliography (IIB), later as the International Federation for Documentation (FID). Otlet, La Fontaine, and the FID are remembered for their bold, positivist vision of creating a complete, accurate, objective master database of all human knowledge in the pre-computer era—a vision partially expressed in the Mundaneum, a massive collection of hard-copy data assembled in their home country of Belgium in the early twentieth century. Predictably, this ambitious project failed. Yet, as this paper explains, Otlet, La Fontaine, and their organization nevertheless had a lasting and significant impact on the evolution of modern information science, identifying both goals and problems for later information theorists that remain relevant even in the digital age. Their prewar documentalist movement, inquiring into the fundamental nature of documents and of information, paved the way for the work of postwar documentalists including Suzanne Briet and S. R. Rangathan, among others; in turn, the work of the postwar documentalists overlaps with and impacted the rise of computer-based information theory and science and the dawn of the digital age from the 1950s onward. The FID itself persisted as an active organization into the 1990s, convening conferences, publishing books, and generally promoting international bibliographic research and standardization as well as international scholarly cooperation—which relates to the wider legacy of Otlet and La Fontaine as early pioneers of international peace, trans-national institutional cooperation, and global pooling of information to confront human problems. Their activities were direct precursors of, for instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Even as to their positivist presumptions which ultimately led to failure, the example of Otlet and La Fontaine remain relevant—for humans generally, and scientists, social scientists, and other professionals in particular, remain all too prone to positivistic fallacies of perfect and objective knowledge, notwithstanding the warnings against such presumptions from postmodernism.

Hardware Design and Software Simulation for Four Classical Cryptosystems

The classical Cryptosystems are very old cryptosystems that were primarily used in the pre-computer era. They are considered weak nowadays and too easy to break, especially with computers. However, these simple cryptosystems give a good illustration of several of the important ideas of the cryptography and cryptanalysis's Systems. They are considered as the heart of cryptography science and it's good to start with. In this paper, we are going to design several cryptosystems using Java programming language such as shift cipher, affine cipher and others. In addition, we will practice on several number theory algorithms especially the modular arithmetic and prime numbers as well as on decomposing a large problem into modules and testing a circuit that is too large to test exhaustively. The software can be used then to send and receive an encrypted messages using the email systems. Moreover, a hardware design for Caesar and Affine Ciphers will be simulated via Multisim software and implemented using the logic gates and circuits and the skills learned from digital logic design course.

Prolog to the Section on Mass Storage and Data Retrieval

The centenary of the Proceedings of the IEEE is celebrated with achievements in data storage and data retrieval research, development, and application. Masaru Kitsuregawa and his colleagues at The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, are studying data storage and data management for more than three decades, working in parallel database management systems, web-scale applications, and intelligent massive data storage systems. They present a brief history of data storage technology from the precomputer era to the latest trends in this area. They also report their firsthand experiences in archiving the World Wide Web for more than ten years. Mark Sanderson and Bruce Croft give an expert view on the chronicled development in information retrieval.

The Nodal Closet

The synthesis of this text comes from a contemporary appraisal of the term “the closet” and its current place in culture since the advent of cybernetics. The authors’ assertion is that this metaphor, one that is rooted in the iconography of the late-capitalist home, is in a moment of transition and constant redefinition. In this paper, the authors explore and assess three basic modern manifestations of the homosexual rite of passage and how they have been rendered obsolete, adapted, or in some respects, catalyzed by new media and mobile technology. The charting of these changes is evaluated as a ’nodal’ phenomenon within queer culture and is paired with Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia to better explore the spatial qualities of this shifting circumstance. The closet term is part of a continuum; one marked by intersecting moments of connectivity. In this article, the authors assess the term mainly in relation to a pre-computer era, a personal computer era and a mobile computer/smartphone era.

Evidence-Based Medicine Databases: Changing Needs Along the Path From Physician Assistant Student to Clinician

their clinical questions. INTRODUCTION A common question we get from our students is, “What’s the best electronic medical database that will help me answer questions during PA school?” Common to our role as medical educators, our usual response is “it depends.” This conundrum brings to mind the choice we faced as students three decades ago when deciding whether to reach for a voluminous Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine or the concise and timely Lange Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment. In the precomputer era, the choices were perhaps simpler, but less satisfying from an evidence standpoint. A recent study identified more than 30 databases available free or by subscription to students.1 They range from the unscreened, open access breadth of PubMed to carefully appraised and highly clinicianfriendly DynaMed and Essential Evidence Plus. Our noncommittal answer is driven by the need to choose the right tool for the right job. And that job evolves throughout the educational process. The educational and clinical evidence needs of PA students change depending on their stage of training and the depth of their foundational knowledge. The requirements of didactic year students preparing for a gastroenterology final or a problembased learning module differ from those of a student sitting in an examination room with a patient. As a result, it may be prudent for educators responding to this question to be mindful of matching the tool to the student’s stage of training and the setting where the learning takes place.

Water, strong ions, and weak ions

The constant SCO2 (solubility factor 1⁄4 0.03 mm litre mm Hg or 0.23 mm litre kPa) allows conversion of PCO2 into [CO2]. Acid–base disturbances could now be classified as respiratory or non-respiratory but this had limitations. For pH to be determined by CO2 and bicarbonate, these two had to be independent of each other, which is not possible. In addition, the equation did not take into account non-volatile weak acids present in the body. To overcome these limitations, Siggard-Anderson proposed PCO2-independent indicators of acid–base disturbances. These include standard bicarbonate, buffer base and base excess/deficit. However, these approaches do not take into account PCO2 and do not differentiate between different causes of nonrespiratory acid–base disturbances. In the 1980s, Stewart proposed a physicochemical approach to acid–base physiology. The complex calculations involved in this approach were not possible in the precomputer era but are easily done today. He wrote of this approach having ‘revolutionized our ability to understand, predict and control what happens to hydrogen ions in living systems’. Definitions

Book Reviews

The mathematics of Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Lewis Fry Richardson (1881–1953), and Andrei Nikolaevitch Kolmogorov (1903–1987) are subjects of book reviews in this issue. A number of other reviews concern textbooks one might want to consider and monographs one might profitably learn from. The feature review describes how an Irish meteorologist has redone the British Quaker Richardson's calculations from during the First World War to show that they would have been accurate if he had only initialized the data appropriately. In this highly recommended read, you'll learn all about how numerical weather prediction has developed since that precomputer era. As usual, our reviewers are somewhat opinionated, so I hope you'll appreciate their attempts to convince you what's worth reading.

Best k-digit rational approximation of irrational numbers: Pre-computer versus computer era

The best k-digit rational approximation for a given irrational number, where the numerator has k digits, is presented. Such an approximation allows better error-free computation in the real-world scenario than that permitted by the k-digit decimal approximation of the irrational number. It is pointed out that such a best k-digit rational approximation, though exponential, has been made possible due to current high-speed computation performed by a digital computer. To appreciate the importance of such an approximation, we have also focused on the rational approximation – not always the best one – of some of the famous irrational numbers such as the π and the exponential function e by the ingenuity of super-mathematicians in several parts of the world during the pre-computer era spanning over centuries.