Trembling Hand Research Articles

The Property of Water

It always amazes me how our waiter Reynard never spills a drop from the water pitcher when he refills our glasses. Reynard has this palsy he doesn't talk about, and it's nerve-wracking to watch him reach for the pen in his apron to take our order or move his trembling hand between lighted candles and full flower vase to pluck out an empty glass. I'm sure he's going to knock over everything within his reach or dump a bowlful of French onion soup in my lap, but in all the times Kelly and I have come to Cafe Degas and ended up with Reynard, he's never dropped so much as a salad fork.

Estimation of time delay by coherence analysis

Using coherence analysis (which is an extensively used method to study the correlations in frequency domain, between two simultaneously measured signals) we estimate the time delay between two signals. This method is suitable for time delay estimation of narrow band coherence signals for which the conventional methods cannot be reliably applied. We show, by analysing coupled Rössler attractors with a known delay, that the method yields satisfactory results. Then, we apply this method to human pathologic tremor. The delay between simultaneously measured traces of electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyogram (EMG) data of subjects with essential hand tremor is calculated. We find that there is a delay of 11–27 milli-seconds (ms) between the tremor correlated parts (cortex) of the brain (EEG) and the trembling hand (EMG) which is in agreement with the experimentally observed delay value of 15 ms for the cortico-muscular conduction time. By surrogate analysis we calculate error bars of the estimated delay.

Mandorla

How quickly a gilded edge shades into charcoal, how city streets and tree-lined borders, tensile wires across a bridge, can darken without warning, as though a wrist had merely guided the flat side of a coloring stick across watermarked linen to change day into night. And the retinal shutters adjust, the irises open wider like plants coming out of water. A woman descends to the trains in subterranean corridors, smoothing her bell- shaped skirt the color of plums, of Bordeaux, of things that have lain a while in the clarifying dark. People walking in the park glance up at a sound— only a plane crossing the night sky: not in itself remarkable, only part of the age we inhabit. Even now a nameless future rears its rump at the end of the boulevard, displaying indifference. Arcs of copper neon open like fans; in shop windows lettered signs advertise White Nights, Golden Girls. Our guide points out this neighborhood, describing a wide circle with his arm—a continuum of taverns in Dostoyevsky's time, any of them the very one into which Raskolnikov might have slipped to wheedle a drink. I don't need to close my eyes to see the emerald from an absinthe glass [End Page 15] drain into the hollow of a throat, feel the places behind sockets of bones where liquid comes to rest as heat that rends and loosens. If in the end what swallows all is the very darkness the mouth fears, what it spurns at the end of the cup—the trembling hand begging for one, one drink more—what would we do with perpetual light? Unsettling sun at midnight, shimmer of candy-striped, mosaiced cathedrals that until recently warehoused grain and timber and brick. I want to know more than— to see—how a body recognizes what it loves even before it's poured into form. The way I dropped down on my haunches, combing through green beside a path with both hands one summer in a different city by water— because a tendril of scent unspooled itself out of the tightening dusk. Volatile white, it was the odor of jasmine I rooted for among the vivid campanula in the garden, a halo of scent that flickered as if to match the ripples drawn by goldfish on a silken pond. To witness beyond ruin, beyond the wound— the reason for our constant return to places of elusive thought, furtive form. Two bodies sliding apart in a room above the river after a kiss. A sliver of the beautiful, light as an almond wafer on the tongue. Sometimes one glance unlocks the portals, revealing that nimbus where heaven and earth are joined as one. There is a story of a child running from broken towers in Manhattan, transfixed by [End Page 16] the sight of common birds, their burning— as if a flock of phoenixes beat the air with wings of chalcedony, tourmaline, jasper, onyx; with the gold of icons' haloes, of consuming fire.

"He Summons Genius . . . to His Aid": Letters, Partisanship, and the Making of the Farmer's Weekly Museum, 1795-1800

In December 1797, Joseph Dennie, Federalist editor of a Walpole, New Hampshire, newspaper called Farmer's Weekly Museum, burst forth in print a declaration of his and his newspaper's success. constant swell of our subscription book suggests a theme to our gratitude, and a motive to our industry, he wrote. Farmer's Museum is read by more than two thousand individuals, and has its patrons in Georgia, and on banks of Ohio. Spurring his readers, contributors, and himself on to further efforts, he asked that the owners of London papers . . . promptly answer Editor's late appeals for material; he dramatically announced that he had, with a trembling hand, embarked on a new set of columns for Museum's back page; and he demanded that his farflung subscribers pay him seventy-five cents in advance for privilege of receiving his paper, lest he summarily deprive them of his talents.1Dennie's exuberance was not misplaced. His list of 2,000 subscribers approaches what most recent and thorough historian of era's partisan press deems upper limits of paid circulation, even for the most successful urban newspapers. During Dennie's association Museum, from 1795 through 1800, politicians and amateur literati scrambled to have their offerings appear in his pages, and men and women discussed Dennie, his essays, and his newspaper at bookstores and dinner tables. By 1800, he had received requests from printers and editors in Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Halifax to take over or join their newspapers, and no less a figure than William Cobbett, exiled from Philadelphia but not yet resigned to leaving United States, had sent urgent letters begging him to embark on a joint venture. At same time, other Federalists, support from Adams family, were concocting a scheme to bring Dennie to Philadelphia so that he might begin a new periodical while enjoying a sinecure secretary of State Timothy Pickering.2In short, in crucial years between dispute over Jay Treaty and election of 1800, Joseph Dennie was, in both political and cultural terms, just what his crowing words in Museum claimed: an influential man. The surprising ways in which he achieved that influence make him important to our understanding of that tumultuous period. Attention to Dennie and his Museum demonstrates need to understand story of new nation's political and cultural development as, in no small measure, story of logistical and rhetorical struggles to create persistent, dynamic, and demanding national audiences.3Dennie was successful not only because of liveliness of his prose and editorial persona, but also because he managed to render his Museum and its readership useful to other early national cultural and political entrepreneurs. The Museum potentially offered to early national printers hope of gauging and influencing tastes of an otherwise elusive, farflung cohort of educated young Americans; at same time, Museum offered to politicians of fledgling Federalist party a chance to spread information, ideas, and emotions. Studying Museum as both content and process in fact offers insight into Federalism and partisanship themselves as both content and process. It allows us to witness workings of a kind of Federalism that was a constellation of attitudes and ideas more than it was a stable political agenda, and which, rather than simply reflecting directives of filiopietist political conservatives, emerged from and invigorated a self-consciously youthful and even rebellious network of educated Americans. Attention to Museum also suggests that partisan press, and so to an important extent nascent national partisan communities themselves, were creation of literary rhetorics, practices, ambitions, and men, and not only of political ones. Finally, Museum reminds us that political and cultural ferment of early republic was part of an international and not simply an American story. …

Twelve Theses on the Impact of Humanitarian Intervention

Armed external intervention may sometimes be required to halt barbaric attacks on the vulnerable, but rebuilding political, economic and social order in the aftermath of an intervention is fraught with difficulty. Post-intervention problems may include coping with new and fractious actors, managing complex processes of change, addressing fundamental questions of political philosophy, coping with `spoilers' and low levels of trust, and avoiding inadvertent damage to the intervention's beneficiaries - all in situations where resources may be scarce and intervening powers at odds with each other. Interveners should strive to absorb the lessons of past interventions and master the complexities of the territory on which they propose to act. Patience and humility are sterling qualities in an intervening force, even where robust action is required. Adapting Montesquieu's advice, if one must intervene, one should do so with a trembling hand.

NASH EQUILIBRIUM WITH LOWER PROBABILITIES

We generalize the concept of Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies for strategic form games to allow for ambiguity in the players' expectations. In contrast to other contributions, we model ambiguity by means of so-called lower probability measures or belief functions, which makes it possible to distinguish between a player's assessment of ambiguity and his attitude towards ambiguity. We also generalize the concept of trembling hand perfect equilibrium. Finally, we demonstrate that for certain attitudes towards ambiguity it is possible to explain cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma in a way that is in accordance with some recent experimental findings.

Evolutionary stability in extensive two-person games

The concept of an ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) has been introduced by Maynard Smith and Price for two-person games in normal form (Maynard Smith and Price, 1973). The generalization to extensive two-person games raises various conceptual and mathematical problems, like the notion of symmetry in such games. A direct translation of the normal form concept to the framework of extensive games leads to unsatisfactory consequences. Therefore, on the basis of the trembling hand approach to perfectness (Selten, 1975), the notion of a limit ESS is introduced. Several theorems on the properties of a limit ESS provide tools for the analysis of specific games. Finally, a many-period model of animal contests with ritual fights and escalated conflicts is investigated in detail.