Thomas Dekker’s religious, political, and anti-catholic imbroglio, The Whore of Babylon (1605–6),2 written on the heels of the Powder Treason of 5 November 1605, teems with images of contagious disease, pollution, and porousness. Dekker maps these images onto the body of the Empress of Babylon,3 the whore of the play’s title, a ‘freckled face queane’, ‘speckled toade’, and ‘villanous drab’, who...

Speech-to-speech translation technology enables natural oral communication between different language speaking people. Many research projects have addressed speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) technology, such as ATR [1], VERBMOBIL [2], C-STAR [3], NESPOLE! [4], BABYLON [5], GALE [6], and EU-bridge [7]. The speechto-speech translation system is normally composed of automatic speech recognition ...

The spotted babylon, Babylonia areolata, is one of the most extensively cultured marine mollusks in southeast Asia. Eight polymorphic microsatellite markers were developed for this species, from a microsatellite-enriched library. These markers, characterized in 32 individuals from a hatchery population, were polymorphic, with allele numbers ranging from 6 to 18 per locus, expected and obs...

Linguistic distance, i.e. the dissimilarity between languages, is an important factor infl uencing international economic transactions such as migration or international trade fl ows by imposing hurdles for second language acquisition and increasing transaction costs. To measure these costs, we suggest to use a new measure of linguistic distance. The Levenshtein distance is an easily computed a...