Real Coins Research Articles

Идеи, монеты и художники: об изображении монет и печатей в армянских рукописях XIII–XVI вв.

A systematic study of the Armenian manuscripts allowed us to identify in twelve Gospels created in the scriptoria of Cilician Armenia, Siwnik‘ and Vaspurakan from the mid-13th c. to 1592, images of gold coins and state seals. As prototypes for coin images, only gold coins from circulation were used — these were the Byzantine solidus of mid-10th — mid-11th cc., the dinar of Sultan Kay-Khusraw II, the Florentine florin, the dinars of Abu Sa‘id Ilkhanid and the Venetian ducat; but in Vaspurakan, lacking gold coins in monetary circulation during the 14th-15th cc., the images of gold coins were replaced by drawings of state Mongolian seals. The appearance of gold coins in the most important places of the Gospels is explained in Mkhit‘ar Gosh’s Lawcode (completed after 1184), in which gold coins, due to their pure nature, are interpreted in neoplatonical sense as a symbols of Christ’s divinity. A review of the discovered artistic tradition and its comparisons with synchronous traditions of illuminations allows us to indicate that it was in Cilician Armenia that real coins were first depicted, moreover, with such a degree of detail, which makes it possible to unambiguously determine their type. The identification of this artistic tradition significantly expands our understanding of the symbolic role of coins in medieval society.

Blockchain Mobile Wallet with Secure Offline Transactions

There has been an increase in the adoption of mobile payment systems worldwide in the past few years. However, poor Internet connection in rural regions continues to be an obstacle to the widespread use of such technologies. On top of that, there are significant problems with the currently available offline wallets; for instance, the payee cannot verify the number of coins received without access to the Internet. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that some existing systems are susceptible to false token generation, and some do not even permit the user to divide the offline token into smaller portions to be used as change. This paper proposes a blockchain-based wallet system that provides a secure mobile payment service even if a user cannot access a reliable Internet connection. Our approach relies on Bluetooth and digital signatures to establish and build a trust connection between the parties. The proposed solution overcomes the main limitations of existing systems that use offline transactions, such as the generation of fake offline tokens and the indivisibility of offline tokens. The user buys Offline Tokens (OTs) from a server called an Offline Token Manager (OTM) to use them later to perform offline transactions. Each mobile device must store a single, signed offline token transaction to prevent fake tokens. On the other hand, all offline transactions will be kept as a history in a particular local database. Finally, when the receiver becomes online, it will send a convert request to the OTM to change the value of the OTs to the appropriate amount in real coins. This step requires a connection to the Internet. To evaluate the effectiveness of the system, the Solidity programming language was used to develop a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain with a backend application programming interface (API) and an android mobile application. The proposed method has an advantage over other prominent wallets.

“Letter on the Eve” and Other Poems

Letter on the Eve of an Elopementfor S. C.How often do we need remindingMy mother's skin was smooth as eggshell once.My mother's hair was red, like mine, and long,And “I Know Where I'm Going” used to beMy mother's favorite song.With her hat knocked crooked on a summer's nightShe tiptoed up the stairs and brushed alongThe hallway to the danger of the roomWhere her father slept, cheek pressed to palm.All pity like a small girl playing mother,She murmured, turning out the light,“Forgive me if I leave you soon, old lover,But though you seldom sing, I won't assumeThat singing in itself is wrong.”Among the things she chose to pack that night:A wedding photo. There, surprised foreverA bride and groom, as if at a parade,Smiled straight ahead, but not at one another.It was winter where the startled couple stood.The bride looked cold. Her flowers were black and white.And yet she taught my mother that things couldBe more than gray, although she never madeMuch more of her geography and weather.How often do we need reminding,Not that singing in itself is wrong,But that, in our geography and weather,Speech becomes more difficult than song.CodaAlaska has six months of moonlight.It was winter when she wrote“I've seen the aurora borealis.PS Have you seen my coat?”The New Liturgya Calendar1.Love is the song,love is the note,learnt by heart,killed by rote.2.Ashen, ashen, empty day—My mother in the kitchen—monthly, female pain;My father at the window—restless thoughts again.Discontent, the world blurslike ink beneath the rain.3.Beneath my black umbrella,waiting for a train—three pansies by the platform,blinded by the rain.4.Rain among the rushes by the river,where the meat of earth has aged God knows how long,an old professor and six schoolgirls gatherlilies shaped like trumpets in their arms.5.Plum trees laden with blossoms,girls making chains out of flowers—how heavily they bear—the fragrance, the boughs.6.NettlesThirty-six hours hencewe waken in the darkto feel againat ankle and at wristthe burning weltsindistinguishablefrom the real thing.7.Althea's BabyWelcome to the world,tiny, crumpled, wrinkled wadin whose creases is spelled outthe alphabet of God.8.As wine from grapes, for ages aged,from bleeding comes the verb to bless,and all the sweetest fruit and bestis heaped at harvest by the press.The waste of life, the precious waste,that we may learn the taste of things,who in the shining cup beholdrising flames—angels’ wings!9.The bird who sings at the window isthe bird who sings at the end of the worldand the dawn of Eternity.10.Autumn and the leaves on fire—This is the Other Spring, this blaze—of embers breaking open—change!11.Into my childish ear, Beliefhissed superstitiously.Into my nursery creptthe dreaded Tooth Fairy.How cheap his bargain seemed at first—real coin, authentic to the bite,but lately he has takenmy hair, my sight, my life.12.Tell the child: honorthe father and mother.Tell the father and mother:be like the little child.Plant the tree beside the water.Nail the notice to the tree.Make the rich man think it's costly.Let the beggar know it's free.Angel VigilantesI am the one,I am the one,the night the AngelVigilantes come.I am the way,I am the light.I'm the brand-new girl at school,The one you didn't like.I am the rose,I am the thorn.I'm the one who forgothow babies are born.I'm glad if I've got more than you,’til I need more,and then I'm gladif you've got more than me.I am the meek,and my rain check is due.I'm dressed in old valuesdiscarded by you.I am the one,I am the one,the night the AngelVigilantes come.AppleHer heart is red, her seed,a wooden tear,and yet from such a onesprang this whole tree,gnarled and allaclamor with grackles,As freckled as these knuckles,shrieking to keepthe swallows at bay—And I have been an old tree,opening my dooronly a crackle,and I have been a wooden tear,and I have been an apple.

Many exposures to a real-world object without knowing the details: The focus of attention does not include entire objects but only the relevant level of abstraction

Participants frequently fail to remember information (e.g., the identity of a letter) immediately after seemingly processing it (finding the letter in a set of numbers to report its color; Chen & Wyble, 2015). This appears to pose a challenge to the common assumption that an item in the focus of attention is processed and therefore remembered a few seconds later. Chen and Wyble argue that the target identity is encoded but not consolidated into memory, however we have recently suggested that there may be a failure of encoding: some category information is so automatically accessible, identity never needs to be accessed or encoded at all. For example, while membership of the category ‘letter’ may be automatically assessed, membership of category ‘letter from 1st half of the alphabet’ almost certainly requires processing of identity. Consistent with this, we find that in the latter condition, participants accurately remember letter identity, suggesting that when identity is necessary for target identification it is encoded and consolidated into memory. The current study extends these findings to an investigation of the commonly demonstrated long-term memory-based amnesia for details of the US penny (Nickerson, 1979). On every trial, people searched for and found a penny. When participants looked for this penny target among real coin distractors, they had amnesia for penny details (on two surprise trials), despite having seen it thousands of times previously and having searched for it actively on a dozen proceeding trials. However, when fake pennies were included as distractors, this amnesia disappeared. These results argue that the focus of attention is not all-or-none: we can look at and process a penny or a letter, but we do not by necessity process the entire object when we do so. The information required for report causes different levels of processing of the exact same object.

An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain

AbstractMonero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called “mixins,” along with the actual coins they spend. In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Monero’s mixin sampling strategy. First, about 62% of transaction inputs with one or more mixins are vulnerable to “chain-reaction” analysis - that is, the real input can be deduced by elimination. Second, Monero mixins are sampled in such a way that they can be easily distinguished from the real coins by their age distribution; in short, the real input is usually the “newest” input. We estimate that this heuristic can be used to guess the real input with 80% accuracy over all transactions with 1 or more mixins. Next, we turn to the Monero ecosystem and study the importance of mining pools and the former anonymous marketplace AlphaBay on the transaction volume. We find that after removing mining pool activity, there remains a large amount of potentially privacy-sensitive transactions that are affected by these weaknesses. We propose and evaluate two countermeasures that can improve the privacy of future transactions.

Alternator Coins

We introduce a new type of coin: \textit{the alternator}. The alternator can pretend to be either a real or a fake coin (which is lighter than a real one). Each time it is put on a balance scale it switches between pretending to be either a real coin or a fake one. In this paper, we solve the following problem: You are given $N$ coins that look identical, but one of them is the alternator. All real coins weigh the same. You have a balance scale which you can use to find the alternator. What is the smallest number of weighings that guarantees that you will find the alternator?

The Coin Strategy and Charitable Giving

I asked a cooperative charity whose headquarters is located in Seoul, South Korea, to send 16,000 solicitation letters of four different types, with each having a different attachment, in order to better understand the philanthropy initiatives and individuals' social preferences by collecting responses and comparing them by letter type. They received one donation and 381 'active' returns in eight weeks. The real coin attachment, though some charities including UNICEF have used this 'coin strategy,' did not bring a significantly positive effect. A sense of involuntarily indebtedness does not seem to be one of the major driving forces behind reciprocity. The coin attachment appeals to the potential donor's inequity aversion: A significantly larger proportion of mail recipients returned the letter with 100 Korean won than those with no attachment. I also claim that the results from the previous studies should be extrapolated with extra care due to the sample selection bias.

Unpredictability of Coin Tossing in the Most Sensitive Regions of the Phase Space

Detailed calculations reveal that the sensitivity of the dependence of the result of coin toss (head or tail) on the initial state in the phase space is not only very inhomogeneous but also fractal. In the most sensitive regions, the number of turns of the coin is still fluctuating as the initial height changes within the atomic scale. Thus, the predictability of the toss of a real coin fails in these regions. The portion of such unpredictable regions with sub-atomic sensitivity becomes dominant in the phase space with the improvement of the elasticity of the surface. This offers one unique example in the macroscopic physics that macroscopic determinism fails due to the extreme sensitivity. This also helps to understand why the long-time accurate weather report is not possible.

Per la storia della circolazione monetaria nell’Italia nord-occidentale tra l’XI e la prima metà del XII secolo. La testimonianza delle fonti documentarie

On the basis of the evidence offered by the documentary sources, the essay investigates the monetary circulation in the Northern Piedmont and in the Asti territory between the 11th and the first half of the 12th century. The author identifies a rich context of temporal steps and areas of diffusion of different coinages of silver pennies (as real coins and/or money of account). From a period, corresponding to the first part of the 11th century, in which in some of the examined areas (others are not mentioned in the documents) there is a diffusion of the moneys minted in Pavia and Milan – even then, as we know, not aligned between them – we pass, starting from the last decades of that century, to a period of vivacious currencies movements. From the west a transalpine kind of money, the money of Poitou, entered Piedmont, already much weaker than the two currencies cited above, while, starting from the end of the 11th century, the moneys of Pavia and Milan were affected by two successive weakening, spreading in some of the examined areas according to complex dynamics, as the sources allow to grasp. At the end of the studied period in comparison to past monetary history some decidedly new facts can be registered: the spread of a “feudal” coin westward, minted by the counts of Savoy in Susa, and the establishment of communal money in the Asti territory.

Surface Flaws Detection Using AC Magnetic Field Sensing by a Thin Film Inductive Microsensor

Alternating magnetic field was used for detection of surface flaws on conductive metallic specimens. The nondestructive sensor probe was composed of the planar coil with inductive magnetic thin film yoke as a sensing component and a single straight typed exciting coil. The planar inductive coil sensor with magnetic yoke was fabricated by sputtering, electroplating, dry etching, and photolithography process. The exciting coil was generated by the alternative current with the range of 0.1-1.2 A with frequency rage of 0.6-1.8 MHz, respectively, which alternating current (ac) magnetic fields by exciting coil were applied to the specimen with artificial flaws. The specimens were prepared with the slit shaped artificial surface flaws (minimum depth and width; 0.5 mm) on metallic plate (Al; nonmagnetic metal and FeC; magnetic metal). The detected signal for the positions and shapes of surface flaws on specimens were obtained with high sensitivity and high signal to ratio by the planar inductive microsensor probe. The measured output signals by the noncontacted scanning on surface of coins (one cent and two euros) were converted to the images of the flaws. These results were compared with the optical images of real coins, respectively.

Heavy and light money in the Netherlands Indies and the Dutch Republic: dilemmas of monetary management with unit of account systems

AbstractIn its Asian operations the Dutch United East Indies Company (VOC) (1602–1798) acted both as a territorial ruler and as a trading company. The company shipped large amounts of precious metals to Asia, both in the form of bullion and as coins, to pay for its trade and to provide currency for the areas under its control. The Company faced the problem that silver coins rapidly disappeared from circulation, as demand for silver was high in Asia. The Company attempted to manage the problem with a monetary policy using a unit of account, modelled after the policy of the Dutch Republic. It turned out that the two purposes of the money of account system, viz., putting the bookkeeping on a systematic basis and managing the currency in circulation, were conflicting. The first demanded a fixed unit of account, the second demanded a flexible policy of linking and de-linking the unit of account to real coins. Although the Company managed to muddle through this dilemma, it only succeeded in finding temporary solutions.

Fail-stop blind signature scheme design based on pairings

We propose a robust first-stop blind signature scheme that will work in any Gap Diffie–Hellman (GDH) group. It can be applied in more critical systems like e-voting, e-commerce and e-payment systems that need higher security against sophisticated attacks and can preserve participants’ anonymity. Untracebility and unlinkability are the two main properties of real coins for successful electronic mimicking. Whenever a user is permitted to spend an e-coin, he must fulfill the blind signature requirements. Because of the GDH group structure and the base scheme, most of our constructions are simpler, more efficient and have more useful properties than similar existing constructions.

Practical ways to teach about money

Being able to recognise and name coins is a skill you can teach using the senses of sight and touch. For this reason, it is essential that real coins or facsimiles are used as opposed to pictures. This first set of activities concentrates on recognising and describing the attributes of the coins. Neither the value nor the naming of the coins is intended to be addressed though this could be included and encouraged with more mathematically able or older children. It is important that the word coin is used not money.

Li0.3MnO2—cathode material for secondary lithium batteries

Abstract Li 0.3 MnO 2 synthesized by solid state reaction of CMD Faradizer M and LiOH or LiNO 3 as lithiating agents, in atmosphere or with the addition of oxygen and in the temperature range 375–450°C, has been investigated. Optimizing the synthesis route, a product with more then 30 m 2 /g specific surface area (SSA) was successfully synthesized and evaluated as positive electrode material in lithium cells. High charge–discharge rates up to C/2 have been applied to carry out the electrochemical performances in laboratory test cells with Li reference electrode. Real coin cells CR2032 have been assembled and tested and demonstrated an energy density of about 400 mWh/g.

The philosophical basis for the use of probabilities in safety assessments

Abstract The axiomatic theory of probability is analogous to the theory of moving objects based on relations such as Newton's second law, F = ma . Each theory purports to describe the behavior of physical objects, and each has been validated by countless observations and experiments. In this sense, the probability of coming up heads is just as intrinsic a property of a real coin as is its mass. In contrast to the established validity of the axiomatic approach, the major weakness of the subjectivistic (Bayesian) approach to probability is the questionable connection between its conclusions and the real world.

Currency and Commerce in the Early Seventeenth Century

The seventeenth-century monetary system was based on a dual coinage of so-called 'real' and 'imaginary' money.2 The former was the medium of exchange-the actual metallic counters circulating from hand to hand. The latter, however, was used for price-quotation; it was the money of account. Real coins had many particular names: angel, groat, rixdollar, quart d'6cu, real, etc. To facilitate commercial transactions these real units were given an official rating in terms of the standard money of account (which might rarely or never exist as actual coins). In England these ratings were given directly to the metallic counters in circulation; on the Continent they would often be given to petty coins, whose monetary value exceeded their commodity value, which would, in their turn, be used to rate larger, metallic units. The following presentation will assume that rating of the larger coins was done directly in imaginary money. Examples of this 'imaginary' money were pounds, shillings, pence in England; livres, sous, deniers in France; and guilders, stuivers, penningen in the Low Countries.3 These could be used to unify a complex 1 See especially: C. H. Wilson, 'Treasure and Trade Balances: The Mercantilist Problem,' Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. II (i949), 152-6X; E. F. Heckscher, 'Multilateralism, Baltic Trade, and the Mercantilists,' Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. III (1950), 2i9-8; C. H. Wilson, 'Treasure and Trade Balances: Further Evidence,' Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. IV (1951), 231-42; J. D. Gould, 'The Royal Mint in the Early Seventeenth Century,' Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. V (1952), 240-8; J. D. Gould, 'The Trade Depression of the Early i620'S,' Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. VII (X954), 8i-go; R. W. K. Hinton, 'The Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun,' Econ. Htst. Rev. 2nd ser. VII (1955), 277-90. 2 For a fuller description, see L. Einaudi, 'The Theory of Imaginary Money from Charlemagne to the French Revolution,' reprinted in Enterprise and Secular Change, ed. F. C. Lane and J. C. Riemersma (Homewood, Illinois, 953). Also C. M. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization