Shorthand Systems Research Articles

A summary of the 209 PCB congener nomenclature

Primary publications of congener numbering shorthand systems for PCB congener identification were reviewed, including the original Ballschmiter-Zell (BZ) system; recommended changes by Schulte and Malisch, and Guitart et al.; and listings by the Chemical Abstracts Service. Comparisons of the various congener numbering shorthands and chlorine substitution numberings in the structural name listings are presented. Several changes, to adhere more closely to IUPAC rules, have been incorporated into the BZ structural nomenclature, and these resulted in renumbering congeners. These corrected listings have been erroneously identified as "IUPAC" numbers, a misnomer, because IUPAC has not published a shorthand system. Guitart pointed out additional inconsistencies with IUPAC rules for nine congeners which would result in further order changes, but did not recommend renumbering, to avoid further confusion. We noted an additional error in the structural name for congener 97, named 2,2',3',4,5 using Ballschmiter and Zell nomenclature and 2,2',3,4',5' using strict IUPAC nomenclature. This renaming would cause the renumbering of the IUPAC number system reported by Guitart for isomers 91 through 98. No further changes are recommended, however. Tables summarizing each publication, and the discrepancies between them are provided in hopes of clarifying the current state of the nomenclature.

MUSLI: A hypermedia interface for dynamic, interactive, and symbolic communication

This article proposes a hypermedia interface for writing and reading documents that include dynamic, interactive, abstract objects. Highly active and interactive documents supersede the passive ones we usually find in hypermedia systems. Although the work has its background in visual communication and story telling, it lends itself to any kind of domain modelling, shorthand systems, process descriptions, or formal representations of multimedia aspects of knowledge. It is a framework for dynamic abstract languages, rather than a single language as such. We present one specific example of such an interface: MUSLI (MUlti-Sensory Language Interface) and show how it may be used for interactive story telling.

Book reviews: Man of many mysteries

Joy Hancox, The Queen’s Chameleon: the Life of John Byrom . London, Jonathan Cape, 1994. Pp. 276, £18.99. ISBN 0224-030477 John Byrom, F.R.S. (1691-1763) was a walking contradiction: a man of great intelligence who often seems extremely stupid; an honourable man who acted duplicitously for much of his life as an ineffectual double agent; a charming man who would ingratiate himself with the powerful and then let them down; a tall man (6 feet 4 inches) who stooped to low methods. His only straightforward activity was as a teacher of the system of shorthand he devised about 1719. Joy Hancox suggests that he saw the system primarily as a cypher for secret messages. When pressed to publish it fully, in 1741, he over-reacted with an extraordinary gambit: he asked the House of Commons to let him bring in a bill that would give him the sole right to teach his system of shorthand for 21 years. The bill was passed within three months, and George II gave the Act his Royal Assent.

The queen's chameleon: the life of John Byrom: a study of conflicting loyalties

John Byrom (1691-1763) was an enigma, a playboy, a philosopher, a poet and possibly a spy. On the one hand a pillar of the Establishment Byrom was also an active and secret Jacobite who conducted a wild affair with Queen Caroline. At least one of Byrom's close associates went to the gallows to protect his good name in high society while George II, unaware of the traitor at the gate, granted him by Act of Parliament a monopoly license top teach his new system of phonetic shorthand to leading political and social figures who might have caused to conceal their communications. Not content with being a member of the Royal society with Isaac Newton as well as the Freemasons. Byrom formed a secret society known as the Cabala Club through which he amassed a collection of mystical drawing and architectural designs in his search for a new model of the universe. Through the poems he published in the leading journals of the day he planted oblique references to his seditious ideas and yet he survived again and again, returning to the bosom of his loving family, tormented in his later years by the trail of duplicity he had left in his quest for a more just and honest mode of thought than the prevailing Hanovarian mores.

Class Characteristics of Alphabetic Speedwriting Shorthand Systems

Abstract The handwriting class characteristics of four alphabetic speedwriting shorthand systems are identified and compared. The four systems are analyzed and compared primarily by (1) letter form simplification; (2) printed and cursive capital letter forms; (3) disjoined and joined letter forms; (4) superscript and subscript letter or number forms, or both; (5) capital and small letters or symbols, or a combination of these, used as abbreviations; (6) nonalphabetic symbols; and (7) phrasing or combinations of symbols.

Diversification: The growing confusion

AbstractOver the years the concepts of diversification have been simplified and a system of shorthand has developed for discussing the issues surrounding the strategy. Because of this a confusion in terminology has developed and sight of the fundamental principles involved has been lost within the vagaries of fashion. Selection of a particular strategy ought to be based on the clear identification of the benefits that the strategy will offer. Those benefits should be used to help solve specific problems. Only by returning to this type of thinking can the legitimacy of diversification be revived and the alternating acclamation and denunciation of the strategy be overcome.

Objectifying testing of the MEGA CODE station: A system of shorthand

We have developed a system of shorthand for MEGA CODE that allows advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) instructors to record accurately the events of simulated codes as they occur in the teaching and testing of this station. The method is easy to learn. Incorporation of the method into the ACLS provider course would enable instructors to more accurately reconstruct arrest scenarios and facilitate the process of providing the student with meaningful feedback. The instructor's flexibility in making up the code is maximized, and a lasting document of a student's performance is produced.

A Shorthand Notation for Carbonate Facies--Dunham Revisited: ABSTRACT

Carbonate facies can be described in a concise format that reads like an algebraic equation: CARBONATE FACIES = (LITHIC DESCRIPTOR) (COMPOSITION) (TEXTURE) ± REMARK. Lithic descriptors are portrayed by symbols for sedimentary structures, admixtures of argillaceous or arenaceous material, diagenetic features, and/or porosity. The second term, composition, generally used for describing the sand-size fraction of the rock, is represented by symbols designed to look like the grains themselves. Compositional symbols that appear in the equation should include only common rock-forming particle types, listed in order of decreasing abundance. The third term of the equation, texture, consists of a one-letter or two-letter abbreviation for the textural terms of Dunham or of Embray and Klovan. The fourth term of the descriptive equation is optional and allows a qualifying remark, using a minimum of appropriate symbols. Thus, a limestone that is cross-stratifie and consists of 75% ooids and 25% carbonate cement is written as X^ThgrG. Advantages of this shorthand system are (1) it is graphic and can be used to expedite routine sample logging and digital data recording; (2) it is useful in maps and cross sections to illustrate facies patterns in carbonate rocks, (3) it provides an international shorthand that transcends language barriers, and (4) it is both descriptive and genetic and has important implications for porosity prediction, and is thus an aid in the search for stratigraphic traps. End_of_Article - Last_Page 146------------

The Berkeley Late Egyptian Dictionary

Surely the writing system developed by the ancient Egyptians is one of the most complex and beautiful ever invented. Their hieroglyphs, depicting both animate and inanimate objects in various and often significant postures and positions, required a large inventory of characters, at times numbering in the thousands, and almost all of these were represented facing in both directions for texts that were written either from right to left or left to right, horizontally or vertically. Indeed some documents have texts with both vertical and horizontal lines with some parts of them to be read from the right and some from the left. Words were not separated from one another and were generally grouped closely together and made to fill up vacant space in the imaginary squares that made up their lines of text. Any given character, therefore, appears in a variety of sizes, at different elevations from a base line, and centered proportionately with regard to the other signs that make up a group. In many periods during the 34 centuries that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was in use, various peculiarities in palaeography (consisting of either general proportions or special characteristics) were adopted as more or less standard. Through this same span of time the Egyptians also had at least two handwriting systems, the socalled hieratic, in which hieroglyphic characters were represented in cursive form and ligatured, and, after the 7th century B.C., demotic, which was a shorthand system in which whole words were abbreviated. In both systems, color was important not only in genuine rubrics in handwritten texts, but also in their occasionally standardized application to signs in hieroglyphic texts.' In attempting to restore damaged texts, we can benefit from having signs with outlines sometimes totally gone, but with some internal markings or color. A second unusual and not inconsiderable difficulty with Egyptian is that it is virtually impossible to alphabetize or to enumerate the signs, even though most

Some manuscripts on electrical and other subjects attributed to Thomas Bayes, F. R. S

Among the Canton Papers in the Library of the Royal Society there are two items, written in a very distinctive and different hand from the other documents in the collection, that have been attributed to the mathematician Thomas Bayes (1702-1761), discoverer of the theorem named in his honour that is so well known to present-day statisticians (1). A notebook in a similar hand is preserved elsewhere in London, in the archives of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and it too has been attributed to Bayes (2). Parts of these documents are in a shorthand similar in structure to but different in some of its details from the systems most commonly used in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the fact that the same slightly idiosyncratic system of shorthand is used throughout reinforces the evidence of the handwriting as to their common authorship. All three documents were, it appears, drawn up by one and the same person. There is nothing about any of the documents to prove beyond all doubt that that person was Bayes, nor does what is known of their provenance link them definitively with him. The attribution to Bayes of the notebook at the Equitable Life offices is in fact certainly derivative, since it was made merely through a comparison of the handwriting with that used in the documents at the Royal Society (2); but nothing positive is known in regard to these latter documents themselves. Indeed, the grounds upon which they were attributed to Bayes in the first place are uncertain, as is the identity of the person who made the attribution. Probably, however, it was based upon a comparison with the very similar (and similarly distinctive) handwriting in a letter from Bayes to Canton preserved elsewhere in the Royal Society’s archives (3).

IV Parliamentary Diaries of Nathaniel Ryder, 1764–7

This Parliamentary diary is taken from shorthand manuscripts in the archives of the Harrowby MSS. Trust at Sandon Hall in Stafford-shire. For nearly a century from about 1713 successive members of the Ryder family recorded much of their personal, legal and political activities in shorthand notes and diaries. This practice was begun by Sir Dudley Ryder, who used a variant of Rich's shorthand system, which had been devised in the seventeenth century. He taught the system to his son Nathaniel, the author of this diary, and he in turn taught it to his two eldest sons, Dudley, later first Earl of Harrowby and Foreign Secretary 1804–5, and Richard, Home Secretary 1809–1812. Legal business comprises much of the material thus recorded, and many other notes concern personal and social matters, or estate management and accounts: but a considerable amount of important Parliamentary and other political information has also been discovered. Altogether, the surviving shorthand documents at Sandon Hall amount to some four million words. During the last thirty years or so, the Earl of Harrowby has sought to have these documents transcribed as part of his plan to put his family records in order. Since 1949 this task has been undertaken on something approaching a voluntary basis by Mr. K. L. Perrin of Great Comberton in Worcestershire, a hobby of great benefit to past, present and future historians.

Symbolic Shorthand System for Physiology and Medicine

The Symbolic Shorthand System (SSS) is applicable to any problem of documentation. Instead of a code designation composed of numbers and letters the SSS uses mnemonic symbols and signs reminiscent of the subjects they denote.All possible subjects and relationships between them are first arranged in one dimension, typed separately on subject cards, and then arranged one after the other according to a fixed order of precedence.Synonymous designations are avoided because all symbols have only one fixed meaning. The possibility of combining symbols gives this system the vital flexibility that other methods lack and it can be expanded indefinitely by establishing new symbols and signs.

Three Alphabetic Shorthand Systems in One Workshop “Kept us Busy—But They Were Fun!”

Three Alphabetic Shorthand Systems in One Workshop “Kept us Busy—But They Were Fun!”

Personal shorthand systems

Personal shorthand systems

How to Evaluate Shorthand Systems

(1945). How to Evaluate Shorthand Systems. The Journal of Business Education: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 15-22.

A Scientific Comparison of Two Shorthand SystemsAn Empirical Study of the Relative Merits of Gregg Shorthand and Script Shorthand. Walter L. Deemer

Previous articleNext article No AccessEducational WritingsA Scientific Comparison of Two Shorthand Systems An Empirical Study of the Relative Merits of Gregg Shorthand and Script Shorthand. Walter L. Deemer Harriett Cochran RichardsonHarriett Cochran Richardson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 53, Number 6Jun., 1945 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/441181 Journal History This article was published in The School Review (1893-1979), which is continued by the American Journal of Education (1979-present). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Personal shorthand systems

Personal shorthand systems

Personal shorthand systems

Personal shorthand systems

An Experimental Comparison of Two Shorthand Systems.

An Experimental Comparison of Two Shorthand Systems.

English pronunciation as described in shorthand systems of the 17th and 18th centuries

English pronunciation as described in shorthand systems of the 17th and 18th centuries