An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

This paper addresses a special problem with historical document images where handwritten characters from the reverse side appear as noise on the front side and even interfere with the front side characters. A novel method to extract clear textual images from interfering and overlapping areas of text is presented here. The proposed algorithm is interesting in that, with an observation that the e...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) have successfully been applied in numerous domains to show the relations between essential components in complex systems. In this paper, a novel learning method is proposed to construct FCMs based on historical data and by using meta-heuristic: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Simulated Annealing (SA), and Tabu Search (TS). Implementation of the proposed method has demonstrat...

We describe ongoing work aiming at deriving a multilingual controlled vocabulary (German, French, Italian) from the combined subject indices from 22 volumes of a large-scale critical edition of historical documents. The controlled vocabulary is intended to support editors in assigning descriptors to new documents and to support users in retrieving documents of interest regardless of the spellin...

Post-employment restrictive covenants in the context of employment relationships have long posed challenges for employers. Both the nature of the agreement and the context in which it is entered into impact the enforceability of restrictive covenants. The lack of a unified or “national” body of law on restrictive covenants within the US further complicates the issue. For example, in some states...

samanidgovernment was established in the fourthcentury (ah) in the east of islamic caliphate, within a rich socio-cultural context. samanid dynasty needed to prove its rights and legitimacy because of its conflict with the political discourse of their rival governments. this had to be done by taking advantage of thevalues and conceptsembedded in the rational, cultural, and conceptual contextsan...

emphasizing collective memory and based on bakhtin's idea of the dialogical principle and multi-voice novelistic discourse, as well as considering the idea of the perspectival truth of historical fact, the present paper deals with the capacity of the history-oriented novel genre in introducing multiple perspectives of history. such an emphasize and description can be connected to analyzing...