Lost Girls, Dead Poets, Last Waves

The dead poets society: The copyright term and the public domain

Creating a Dead Poets Society: Extracting a Social Network of Historical Persons from the Web

We present a simple method to extract information from search engine snippets. Although the techniques presented are domain independent, this work focuses on extracting biographical information of historical persons from multiple unstructured sources on the Web. We first similarly find a list of persons and their periods of life by querying the periods and scanning the retrieved snippets for pe...

Last Passage Percolation and Traveling Waves

We consider a system of N particles with a stochastic dynamics introduced by Brunet and Derrida [5]. The particles can be interpreted as last passage times in directed percolation on {1, . . . , N} of mean-field type. The particles remain grouped and move like a traveling wave, subject to discretization and driven by a random noise. As N increases, we obtain estimates for the speed of the front...

Last rights: the ethics of research on the dead.

People have strong views about being the subjects of research after their deaths. Should these views be given any weight and, if so, how much? How could we find out what the views are and what should we do if we cannot? This paper defends the idea of posthumous interests and discusses the significance of those interests for research ethics. It argues that we can be guided by a symmetry between ...

Banishing the Poets

The main argument of this monograph,* if I understand it rightly (something its rather cloudy writing makes me uncertain of), is that the body of works often (and traditionally) grouped together under the rubric ‘ancient literary criticism’ should be understood not as contributions to aesthetics or criticism of literature as these terms are commonly understood today but rather as political inte...