Huge amounts of handwritten historical documents are being published by digital libraries world wide. However, for these raw digital images to be really useful, they need to be annotated with informative content. State-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) approaches require an impressive training effort by expert paleographers. Our contribution is a scalable, end-to-end transcription w...

A 1997 Commonwealth Secretariat report on small states commented that “for small states, particularly those that are remote from the major markets and commercial and financial centers, the communications revolution has created the possibility of reducing traditional barriers and opened up new opportunities.” Drawing upon existing research by Nye, Melissen, Chong and others, soft power can be ar...

More than 40 years after the Council’s close, we are faced with the paradox of a Council that meant to speak a new language more comprehensible to modern man, yet which today remains the object of discussions about its correct interpretation. We have grown accustomed to hearing of the “two hermeneutics of Vatican II,” two interpretations of the conciliar documents that have been championed in t...

On December 16, 1978, a telegram purporting to be from the Vatican was handdelivered to the office of Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. "Habemus regimen recombinatum," it proclaimed, in celebration of the end of a long struggle to revise the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules. It was not the first telegram the Secretary had receiv...