This is a selected list of the packages posted to CTAN from January 2004 through December 2004, with descriptive text pulled from the announcement or researched and edited for brevity. Please inform us of any errors. This installment, like the last, lists entries alphabetically within CTAN directories, rather than by date. We’ve also omitted some packages which had only minor updates, again for...

Existing algorithms for the Generation of Referring Expressions (GRE) aim at generating descriptions that allow a hearer to identify its intended referent uniquely; the length of the expression is also considered, usually as a secondary issue. We explore the possibility of making the trade-off between these two factors more explicit, via a general cost function which scores these two aspects se...

Semple et al. (Semple et al. in press, Biol. Lett. (doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.1062)) argued that the 'law of brevity' (an inverse relationship between word length and frequency of use) applies not only to human language but also to vocal signalling in non-human primates, because coding efficiency is paramount in both situations. We analysed the frequency of use of signals of different duration in t...

While the identification of the malaria parasite presents little difficulty to any one who has once seen it under the microscope, it is no means so easy a matter to those who, as so often happens in India, have had to depend upon books alone for their knowledge. This arises from th ree principal causes : the badness of the plates in the earlier works, the extreme brevity of the descriptions in ...

The book Uniform distribution of sequences by Kuipers and Niederreiter, long out of print, has recently been made available again by Dover books. I came across a copy at the Borders bookstore in San Francisco and decided to give it a try (the price, as they say, was right). It turned out to be full of interesting results, so I decided to take some notes on what seemed to me to be the parts most...

irony is a mysterious communicative language between writer and reader and among its beauties, brevity and oddity and duality of meaning can be referred to. so it is considered as one of the best means of interpretation in an indirect way to reform society. this article elaborates on irony in terms of language and terminology with emphasis on the most important available works in this area. the...

SO(p, q) = {g ∈ SLp+q(R) : g>Qg = Q} (where Q = ( 1p 0 0 −1q ) )  SU(2) −→ SO(3) SL2(R) −→ SO(2, 1) SU(2)× SU(2) −→ SO(4) SL2(C) −→ SO(3, 1) SL2(R)× SL2(R) −→ SO(2, 2) Sp∗(2, 0) −→ SO(5) Sp∗(1, 1) −→ SO(4, 1) Sp2(R) −→ SO(3, 2) SU(4) −→ SO(6) SL2(H) −→ SO(5, 1) SU(2, 2) −→ SO(4, 2) SL4(R) −→ SO(3, 3) Thus, these are small examples...