Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
8,780
result(s) for
"Written correspondence"
Sort by:
The epistolary art of Catherine the Great
\"The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great is the first study to analyse comprehensively the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (reigned 1762-1796) and to argue that they constitute a masterpiece of eighteenth-century epistolary writing. Kelsey Rubin-Detlev traces Catherine's development as a letter-writer, her networking strategies, and her image-making, demonstrating the centrality of ideas, literary experimentation, and manipulation of material form evident in Catherine's epistolary practice. Through this, Rubin-Detlev illustrates how Catherine's letters reveal her full engagement with the Enlightenment and further show how creatively she absorbed and responded to the ideas of her century. The letter was not merely a means by which the empress promoted Russia and its leader as European powers; it was a literary genre through which Catherine expressed her identity as a member of the social, political, and intellectual elite of her century\"--Page 4 of cover.
BOOK
Tracing the Generational Progress of Language Change in Fifteenth-century English: the Digraph in the \Paston Letters\
Research based on corpora of historical correspondence has not only confirmed the relevance of letters to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language changes in the past, it has also sanctioned the historical validity of some 'sociolinguistic universals' – like, among others, the curvilinear hypothesis, the distinctions between 'overt' and 'covert' prestige, 'changes from above' and 'changes from below'–and has often permitted to trace the diffusion of historically attested changes over the social, geographical and temporal spaces, as well as their connection to age, social status, occupation, gender and mobility. The sociolinguistic possibilities of late fifteenth century English private correspondence are, in this sense, outstanding, in so far as it belongs to a crucial period in the development of the English language. Moreover, the preservation of letters written by members of the same family over several generations (such as those included in the fifteenth-century Paston correspondence) ensures that the sociolinguistic diffusion of changes in the course of time can also be traced, and attempts can be made to track individual and community behaviours in this respect. In this paper the patterns of chronological diffusion of a change in progress in fifteenth century English – the diffusion of replacing <þ> and <ð> – is reconstructed in connection to the individual repertoires of letter-writers from the above-mentioned collection.
Journal Article
Writing for love and money : how migration drives literacy learning in transnational families
\"This book tells the story of how families separated across borders write--and learn new ways of writing--in pursuit of love and money. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside their countries of birth. The human drama behind these numbers is that parents are often separated from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the wallet, also poses problems for the heart. Writing for Love and Money shows how families separated across borders turn to writing to address these problems. Based on research with transnational families in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and North America, it describes how people write to sustain meaningful relationships across distance and to better their often impoverished circumstances. Despite policy makers' concerns about \"brain drain,\" the book reveals that immigrants' departures do not leave homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead, migration promotes experiences of literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and familial intimacy.\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Poissonian explanation for heavy tails in e-mail communication
Patterns of deliberate human activity and behavior are of utmost importance in areas as diverse as disease spread, resource allocation, and emergency response. Because of its widespread availability and use, e-mail correspondence provides an attractive proxy for studying human activity. Recently, it was reported that the probability density for the inter-event time τ between consecutively sent e-mails decays asymptotically as τ⁻α, with α [almost equal to] 1. The slower-than-exponential decay of the inter-event time distribution suggests that deliberate human activity is inherently non-Poissonian. Here, we demonstrate that the approximate power-law scaling of the inter-event time distribution is a consequence of circadian and weekly cycles of human activity. We propose a cascading nonhomogeneous Poisson process that explicitly integrates these periodic patterns in activity with an individual's tendency to continue participating in an activity. Using standard statistical techniques, we show that our model is consistent with the empirical data. Our findings may also provide insight into the origins of heavy-tailed distributions in other complex systems.
Journal Article
Kinetic Responses of β-Catenin Specify the Sites of Wnt Control
Despite more than 30 years of work on the Wnt signaling pathway, the basic mechanism of how the extracellular Wnt signal increases the intracellular concentration of β-catenin is still contentious. Circumventing much of the detailed biochemistry, we used basic principles of chemical kinetics coupled with quantitative measurements to define the reactions on β-catenin directly affected by the Wnt signal. We conclude that the core signal transduction mechanism is relatively simple, with only two regulated phosphorylation steps. Their partial inhibition gives rise to the full dynamics of the response and subsequently maintains a steady state in which the concentration of β-catenin is increased.
Journal Article
Higher ramification and the local Langlands correspondence
Let F be a non-Archimedean locally compact field. We show that the local Langlands correspondence over F has a property generalizing the higher ramification theorem of local class field theory. If π is an irreducible cuspidal representation of a general linear group GLn(F) and σ the corresponding irreducible representation of the Weil group WF of F, the restriction of σ to a ramification subgroup of WF is determined by a truncation of the simple character θπ contained in π, and conversely. Numerical aspects of the relation are governed by an Herbrand-like function ΨΘ depending on the endo-class Θ of θπ. We give a method for calculating ΨΘ directly from Θ. Consequently, the ramification-theoretic structure of σ can be predicted from the simple character θπ alone.
Journal Article
meaning of Darwin's 'abominable mystery'
Charles Darwin's \"abominable mystery\" has come to symbolize just about all aspects of the origin and early evolution of flowering plants. Yet, there has never been an analysis of precisely what Darwin thought was so abominably mysterious. Here I explicate Darwin's thoughts and frustrations with the fossil record of flowering plants as revealed in correspondence with Joseph Hooker, Gaston de Saporta, and Oswald Heer between 1875 and 1881. I also examine the essay by John Ball that prompted Darwin to write his \"abominable mystery\" letter to Hooker in July of 1879. Contrary to what is generally believed, Darwin's abominable mystery has little if anything to do with the fossil prehistory of angiosperms, identification of the closest relatives of flowering plants, questions of the homologies (and character transformations) of defining features of flowering plants, or the phylogeny of flowering plants themselves. Darwin's abominable mystery and his abiding interest in the radiation of angiosperms were never driven primarily by a need to understand the literal text of the evolutionary history of flowering plants. Rather, Darwin was deeply bothered by what he perceived to be an abrupt origin and highly accelerated rate of diversification of flowering plants in the mid-Cretaceous. This led Darwin to create speculative arguments for a long, gradual, and undiscovered pre-Cretaceous history of flowering plants on a lost island or continent. Darwin also took refuge in the possibility that a rapid diversification of flowering plants in the mid-Cretaceous might, if real, have a biological explanation involving coevolutionary interactions between pollinating insects and angiosperms. Nevertheless, although generations of plant biologists have seized upon Darwin's abominable mystery as a metaphor for their struggle to understand angiosperm history, the evidence strongly suggests that the abominable mystery is not about angiosperms per se. On the contrary, Darwin's abominable mystery is about his abhorrence that evolution could be both rapid and potentially even saltational. Throughout the last years of his life, it just so happens that flowering plants, among all groups of organisms, presented Darwin with the most extreme exception to his strongly held notion natura non facit saltum, nature does not make a leap.
Journal Article
The Role of Writing in Distributed Collaboration
Distributed collaborations face significant dialogical challenges: sharing knowledge, questioning ideas, and developing new solutions. These challenges are often associated with collaborations' reliance on written communication such as emails and documents, which are not seen as conducive to the rich dialogues necessary for effective collaboration. However, numerous successful distributed collaborations exist despite their sometimes exclusive reliance on written communication. Based on a qualitative study of distributed collaboration in two contexts—an organization effectively coordinating work across two continents and a pair of scientists working together to develop a new theory—we examine how writing supports dialogue, and thus collaboration, among distant partners. Our analysis of the correspondences exchanged in these two historical distributed collaborations identifies four mechanisms of writing—objectifying, contextualizing, specifying, and reflecting—and shows how they support dialogue and so address the dialogical challenges involved in distributed collaboration. These findings are particularly relevant in our era of technology-mediated communication where even collaborations in colocated settings rely extensively on written communication. Our findings advance our understanding of fundamental aspects of distributed collaboration and propose to rethink the value of written communication in enacting dialogue and supporting collaboration at a distance.
Journal Article