- With Jonathan Rees
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Appeared in Academe: Magazine of the AAUP; © 2021 Jonathan Poritz and Jonathan Rees, released under
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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Last section:
Defending Your Rights
You and your faculty colleagues can take steps now to address these academic freedom issues before they become a problem. Start by making sure that faculty members on your campus have a significant role in selecting the learning management system before a contract is signed (or before it is renewed). Since the selection of an LMS may be the single most important decision affecting all teaching and learning on campus, meaningful faculty involvement should be shared governance 101. If you are able to participate in an LMS contract decision, look at the intellectual property policies. Find out about the degree of customization possible for individual instructors. Ask everyone involved who has access to the day-to-day operations of courses. Set guidelines for when anyone, including information technology staff, can gain access to the work of instructors.
Then enshrine protections in your faculty handbook or collective bargaining agreement. Explicitly extend whatever academic freedom language exists to your colleagues who are teaching entirely online. Protect the right to privacy of all instructors who are using your learning management system. Establish guidelines that spell out under what circumstances materials from inside the LMS can be used in tenure and promotion decisions (such as if the faculty member decides to submit them). Make sure that your handbook clearly supports the academic exception to the works-for-hire copyright doctrine, not only for tenure-line faculty but for all instructional faculty if possible. If your administration refuses to grant contingent faculty the copyrights to their pedagogical materials, as is all too common, it might at least be willing to release all of those materials under a Creative Commons license, to benefit instruction at other institutions and, in the future, at your institution. Perhaps most important, preserve the freedom for faculty to teach using tools outside the LMS or to bypass the LMS entirely.
The traditional prerogatives of faculty members teaching online or using online tools haven’t been tested extensively yet, but at the moment the prospects for the future look bleak on this front. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of online tools and systems for remote teaching has opened up an opportunity for more unwarranted and centralized supervision of faculty teaching than ever before. As a result, academic freedom is in danger. The extraordinary crises instigated by the pandemic have swamped higher education and made it more difficult to keep up with the threats to academic freedom from countless competing interests. The effects of this particular threat may not be apparent yet, but taking steps now to support every faculty member teaching online could prevent even bigger threats from emerging in the future. - Here is the official version on the AAUP website.
- Here is a local copy: PDF — 246KB
- And here is a post Rees and I made on the AAUP's Academe Blog related to our article:
- Appeared in the Inside Digital Learning newsletter of Inside Higher Ed on 27 February 2019; © 2018 Jonathan A. Poritz [maybe? see Note1, below, for discussion].
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Opening Lines:
Total student debt in the United States stands at approximately \$1.5 trillion — yes, trillion, with a T. It increased by approximately \$37 billion in the third quarter of 2018: that's a quarterly increase by about the endowment of Harvard University or, annualized, by more than the GDP of three-quarters of the nations on Earth.Concluding Lines:
Public institutions of higher education in a majority of U.S. states are funded more — often much more — by tuition than by state support, calling into question the adjective public in that traditional terminology.
Nationally, more than a third of university students, and more than half of those at community colleges, have experienced housing insecurity in the last year and food insecurity in the last month, while 9 percent of university students and 12 percent of community college students were homeless at some point in the last year.
It's not so much that as a society we are eating our seed corn with this treatment of the next generation, it is more that we have set the global climate on fire, skewered our children on pointy sticks and are roasting them like marshmallows.Let me propose four stipulations to replace Casey Green's three:- The cost of higher education imposed on today's students is an almost unimaginable cruelty, and avoiding contributing to this cruelty by using OER is a way faculty can show they have some empathy and understanding of the reality of higher ed today.
- Affordances of OER are known to include both making significant progress in lessening demographic achievement gaps that bedevil higher ed and contributing to open pedagogy, an exciting new movement in education.
- OER (and FLOSS) are free like a free dragon's egg: yes, there is a lot of hard, scary work in the future, but it will be amazing!
- There is little actual reason to believe that commercial textbooks are of higher quality than OER — in fact, there is good evidence that they are not, at least by all reasonable metrics of quality — and to believe this is to have merely blind faith in a form of free-market fundamentalism that doesn't even apply in the failed market of textbooks.
- Here is the official version on the IHE website.
- Here is a local mirror of that official version: PDF — 105K
- And here is the version I prefer, with a different approach to footnotes, etc., also in editable file formats:
- Appeared in the Inside Digital Learning newsletter of Inside Higher Ed on 11 September 2018; © 2018 Jonathan A. Poritz [maybe? see Note1, below, for discussion].
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Opening Lines:
One week ago, Inside Higher Ed and "Inside Digital Learning" published the essay "What Every College Leader Should Know About Blockchain," by Daniel Pianko, managing director of the investment firm University Ventures.Concluding Lines:
One of the first commenters on the article, DavidT, complained, "I still don't know what blockchain is."
Let's calm DavidT's demons by describing some of the key features of this much-admired technology. Unfortunately, with understanding comes sadness: there is really is no there there.I used to be optimistic about the eventual outcome of the blockchain bubble. I thought it would soon pop, leaving us all a little poorer (except for a few of the more charismatic charlatans, who would be much richer), but we would at least all be forced to understand public key cryptography and the value of a good PKI.
As time goes on, though, I am getting more pessimistic: I fear putting more of our economy -- and even our educational systems -- "on the blockchain" hardwires an extremist neoliberal worldview into the very code of our society. And, of course, code is law. - Here is the official version on the IHE website.
- Here is a local copy: PDF — 5.8M
- Appeared in the Inside Digital Learning newsletter of Inside Higher Ed on 11 October 2017; © 2017 Jonathan A. Poritz [maybe? see Note1, below, for discussion].
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Concluding paragraph:
The AAUP has long maintained -- and the success of American higher education gives weight to this assertion -- that instructors' expertise offers unique insight from which they can design curricula to benefit students. This implies that teacher autonomy and control of ed tech should have absolute priority. These examples show the benefits of this approach and the dangers of abandoning it.
- Here is the official version on the IHE website.
- Here is a local copy: PDF — 5.8M
- With Jonathan Rees
- Appeared in the May/June 2017 issue of Academe: Magazine of the AAUP; © 2017 American Association of University Professors
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Conclusion:
It is sometimes said that technology is neutral. Whether it is good or evil depends on how it's used. Edward R. Murrow could have been speaking of the Internet and not television when he said:
"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even, it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful."
Had he known about modern information technology, Murrow might have added surveillance to the three adversaries he named in the great battle. Certainly we practitioners must have a share in governing how technology is used in our colleges and universities. We must do the hard work of educating ourselves and our students in how to use this tool for illumination and freedom. Otherwise, as Murrow said at the beginning of that famous speech, "this just might do nobody any good."
Thanks to free software, faculty can even own the means of digital education production if they put their minds to it. While the echoes of Marx and Engels in this suggestion may make some people uncomfortable, faculty taking control of the tools we use in our digital labor is our best bet for preserving our role in academic governance and the quality of education on the emerging virtual academic shop floor. The advantages of choosing this path far outweigh any individual fears of learning how to operate new technologies or in departing from the traditional ways in which some of us have chosen to teach. The only things we have to lose are our virtual chains. At the same time, we have a whole new world to win.
- Here is the official version on the AAUP website.
- Here is a local copy: PDF — 14M
- And here is a post Rees and I made on the AAUP's Academe Blog related to our article:
- Appeared in the Views section of Inside Higher Ed on 20 September 2016; © 2016 Jonathan A. Poritz and Jonathan Rees.
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Concluding paragraph:
Without extending tenure to IT professionals, campuses will continue to spend money on expensive commercial IT systems and the inferior ed-tech tools that generally come with them. Moreover, the people who tend those systems will not be the kind of innovative individuals that institutions generally try to hire for positions on their regular faculty. Since IT professionals will play an ever-growing role in educational decision making in our increasingly wired campuses, giving them the same protections as regular faculty members is both economical and logical. To do otherwise is to risk forfeiting all the educational benefits that technology can bring.
- Here is the official version on the IHE website.
- A local copy is here: PDF — 61K
- Appeared as Journal of Academic Freedom 5 (2014); © 2014 American Association of University Professors
- Abstract:Information technology (IT) — hardware, software, and networks — is enormously important in the daily lives of everyone on college and university campuses. Yet decisions about academic IT are usually made by a small administrative team with almost no faculty input. This can lead to policies and priorities which poorly serve pedagogical and scholarly needs, and is often actually an inversion of the traditional academic division of responsibilities as set out, for example, in the 1966 AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.
This essay examines some of the assumptions and traditions behind the IT governance structure currently prevalent on so many campuses and suggest some different perspectives on these issues. These alternative ideas then suggest a new approach — similar to, and in fact supporting, the Open Access movement for scholarly products but centered on the openness of the IT infrastructures themselves of college and universities.
To clarify the foundations of this new model of shared IT governance in academia, this essay states two important new principles: the principle of academic network freedom and the principle of shared academic network governance. These principles can clarify the appropriate roles of the various actors in university governance and give guidance about how to implement new governance models.
- Here is the official version on the AAUP's website.
- A local copy is hosted here: PDF — 544K
- Appeared in G.W. Dueck and D.M. Miller (Eds.): RC 2013, LNCS 7948, pp. 155-167; © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
- Abstract:I describe a new formalization for computation which is similar to traditional circuit models but which depends upon the choice of a family of [semi]groups — essentially, a choice of the structure group of the universe of the computation. Choosing the symmetric groups results in the reversible version of classical computation; the unitary groups give quantum computation. Other groups can result in models which are stronger or weaker than the traditional models, or are hybrids of classical and quantum computation.
One particular example, built out of the semigroup of doubly stochastic matrices, yields classical but probabilistic computation, helping explain why probabilistic computation can be so fast. Another example is a smaller and entirely $\RR$eal version of the quantum one which uses a (real) rotation matrix in place of the (complex, unitary) Hadamard gate to create algorithms which are exponentially faster than classical ones.
I also articulate a conjecture which would help explain the different powers of these different types of computation, and point to many new avenues of investigation permitted by this model.
- The final publication is available at link.springer.com
- Here is my personal version: PDF — 256K
- Presented at the October AAUP Shared Governance Conference
- © 2016 Jonathan A. Poritz
- Abstract:Information technology (IT) — hardware, software, and networks — is enormously important in the daily lives of everyone on university campuses. Yet decisions about academic IT are usually made by a small administrative team with almost no faculty input. This can lead to policies and priorities which poorly serve pedagogical and scholarly needs, and is a clear violation of the AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, hence violating academic freedom. I propose here a different model of shared IT governance in academia and suggest that the first step towards realizing this new model is for faculty to educate itself a little about real IT alternatives.
- Here (PDF — 192K) is the version I shared at the conference.
- Appeared in the September/October 2012 issue of Academe: Magazine of the AAUP; the AAUP released it under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US licence
- Abstract:The free-software and open-source communities, dedicated to the open exchange of research and to the idea that knowledge is a public good, are the natural allies of academic faculty.
- This is the official web version.
- While this is the official version as it appeared in print.
- And here are two guest posts I made on the AAUP's Academe Blog related to my article:
- And here is a version with my own typesetting, more graphics, and an extra paragraph of text: PDF — 820K
- With Alan Poritz
- Appeared as Linear Algebra and Its Applications 434(6) 1425-1443 (2010); © 2010 Elsevier Inc
- Abstract:When an $n\times n$ doubly stochastic matrix $A$ acts on $\RR^n$ on the left as a linear transformation and $P$ is an $n$-long probability vector, we refer to the new probability vector $AP$ as the stochastic average of the pair $(A,P)$. Let $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$ denote the set of pairs $(A,P)$ whose stochastic average preserves the entropy of $P$: $H(AP)=H(P)$. $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$ is a subset of $\mathbf{B}_n\times\boldsymbol{\Sigma}_n$ where $\mathbf{B}_n$ is the Birkhoff polytope and $\boldsymbol{\Sigma}_n$ is the probability simplex.
We characterize $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$ and determine its geometry, topology, and combinatorial structure. For example, we find that $(A,P)\in\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$ if and only if $A^tAP=P$. We show that for any $n$, $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$ is a connected set, and is in fact piecewise-linearly contractible in $\mathbf{B}_n\times\boldsymbol{\Sigma}_n$. We exhibit two finite decompositions of $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$. We derive the geometry of the fibers $(A,\cdot)$ and $(\cdot,P)$ of $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_n$. $\boldsymbol{\Gamma}_3$ is worked out in detail. Our analysis exploits the convexity of $x\log x$ and the structure of an efficiently computable bipartite graph that we associate to each ds-matrix. This graph also lets us represent such a matrix in a permutation-equivalent, block diagonal form where each block is doubly stochastic and fully indecomposable.
- The definitive version is available at LAA's web site or through the doi:10.1016/j.laa.2010.10.014
- The text of the following is the corrected, final (published) version,
however without the journal's formatting:
PDF — 256K
- Appeared as The Information Society 23(5) 383-389 (2007); © 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
- Abstract:Privacy has largely been equated with every individual's right to privacy. Accordingly, current efforts to protect privacy on the Internet have sought anonymity by breaking, where possible, links with personally identifiable information (PII) — all uses of aggregated data stripped of PII are considered legitimate. This article argues that we need to use a broader concept, general or group identifying information (GII), because even aggregated data stripped of PII violate privacy at the community level. The search engine companies, or anyone else with access to their log files, can use these data to generate a moment-by-moment view of what is on the collective mind. Such a view can be used in a variety of ways, some with deep economic and even political impact. In order to frame this discussion, it is necessary to examine some of the realities of the search engine-mediated associative interface to the World Wide Web. While this interface has enormous benefits for the networked world, it also fundamentally changes a number of issues underlying various current debates about Internet governance.
- PDF — 184K
- With Christian Cachin, Yves Deswarte, Nuno Neves, David Powell, Robert Stroud, Paulo Verissimo, and Ian Welch
- Appeared as IEEE Security & Privacy 4 (2006) 54-62; © 2006 IEEE
- Abstract:The pervasive interconnection of systems throughout the world has given computer services a significant socioeconomic value that both accidental faults and malicious activity can affect. The classical approach to security has mostly consisted of trying to prevent bad things from happening–by developing systems without vulnerabilities, for example, or by detecting attacks and intrusions and deploying ad hoc countermeasures before any part of the system is damaged. But what if we could address both faults and attacks in a seamless manner, through a common approach to security and dependability? This is the proposal of intrusion tolerance, which assumes that
- systems remain somewhat faulty or vulnerable;
- attacks on components will sometimes be successful; and
- automatic mechanisms ensure that the overall system nevertheless remains secure and operational.
- ps.gz — 660K
- PDF — 172K
- Appeared at the 2nd ACM SAC TRECK Track, April 2006. © ACM, (2006)
- Abstract:The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is an industry consortium which has invested in the design of a small piece of hardware (roughly a smartcard), called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and associated APIs and protocols which are supposed to help increase the reliability of TPM-endowed computing platforms (trusted platforms). The TCG envisions that boot loaders, OSes and applications programs on trusted platforms will all collaborate in building a cryptographic hash chain which represents the current execution state of the platform, and which resides on the TPM. Remote sites can then verify that the platform in question is ``in a trusted state'' by requesting the TPM to produce a signed data blob containing the value of this hash chain, which can then be compared against a library of recognized (``trusted'') values; this process is called remote attestation, and the whole picture is sometimes referred to as integrity-based computing (IBC).
We argue that there is a fundamental gap between the stated goals of the TCG's IBC and the central technology that is intended to achieve these goals, which gap is simply that remote attestation asks the attesting platform to answer the wrong question — the platform is not attesting to its security state, but rather to its execution state, and this underlies all of the troublesome use cases, as well as a number of the practical difficulties, of the TCG world-view. One response to this is to replace standard TCG attestation with property-based attestation (PBA), which places the emphasis on deriving security properties from (potentially) elaborate trust models and conditional statements of security property dependencies. Herein the central rôle for IBC of trust and deriving consequences from precise trust models becomes clear.
Finally, we claim that the TCG's own remote attestation is most properly viewed in fact as a form of PBA, with a certain simple trust model and database of security properties. From this point of view, it becomes clear that IBC can have a much less restrictive range of applications than envisioned merely by the TCG. In fact, with the right ``trust infrastructure'' and sufficiently open software using and relying upon this infrastructure, IBC could actually realize some of the portentous early promises of the TCG for truly increasing the reliability of individual users' platforms and pushing back the apocalyptic rise of malware, especially if platforms and OSes virtualize and enforce some kind of signed code contracts.
- This (ps.gz — 88K; PDF — 92K) is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is published by the ACM.
- With Morton Swimmer
- Appeared as Virus Bulletin October, 2004, 14-16; © 2004 Virus Bulletin, Ltd.
- Abstract:In a rump session of the August 2004 Crypto conference, where attendees have the chance to give informal (non-refereed) presentations of works in progress, a group of Chinese researchers demonstrated flaws in a whole set of hash functions and the entire crypto community was abuzz. In this article, we will clarify the situation and draw lessons from this incident.
- PDF — 432K
- With Christian Cachin
- Appeared in Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2002) (2002) 167-176; © 2002 IEEE
- Abstract:This paper describes a Secure INtrusion-Tolerant Replication Architecture (SINTRA) for coordination in asynchronous networks subject to Byzantine faults. SINTRA supplies a number of group communication primitives, such as binary and multi-valued Byzantine agreement, reliable and consistent broadcast, and an atomic broadcast channel. Atomic broadcast immediately provides secure state-machine replication. The protocols are designed for an asynchronous wide-area network, such as the Internet, where messages may be delayed indefinitely, the servers do not have access to a common clock, and up to one third of the servers may fail in potentially malicious ways. Security is achieved through the use of threshold public-key cryptography, in particular through a cryptographic common coin based on the Diffie-Hellman problem that underlies the randomized protocols in SINTRA. The implementation of SINTRA in Java is described and timing measurements are given for a test-bed of servers distributed over three continents. They show that extensive use of public-key cryptography does not impose a large overhead for coordination in wide-area networks.
- ps.gz — 76K
- PDF — 168K
- With Alberto Iozzi and Edilio Valentini
- Appeared as Journal of Public Economic Theory 4 (2002) 93-112; © 2002 Blackwell Publishers
- The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com
- Abstract:This paper analyses the allocative properties of price cap regulation under a very general hypothesis on the nature of society's preferences. We propose a generalised form of price cap formula (GPC) and we show that it ensures the convergence to optimal (second best) prices in the long-run equilibrium for virtually any form of the welfare function. In particular, we show that the GPC guarantees that the social welfare increases over time and converges to a long run equilibrium value which is socially optimal, given the level of profits obtained by the regulated firm in equilibrium. Hence, the result of the convergence to Ramsey prices of Laspeyres-type price cap regulation is a particular instance of our more general result. The generalisation of the price cap mechanism we propose does not substantially alter the simplicity typical of traditional price cap schemes nor does it impose much higher informational requirements on the regulator's side. To substantiate this argument, we provide an explicit and relatively easy to calculate and implement price cap formula for a distributionally weighted utilitarian welfare functions, as proposed by Feldstein (1972a).
- ps.gz — 242K
- PDF — 127K
- With John J. Millson
- Appeared as Communications in Mathematical Physics 218 (2001) 315-331; © 2001 Springer-Verlag
- The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com
- Abstract:We survey certain moduli spaces in low dimensions and some of the geometric structures that they carry, and then construct identifications among all of these spaces. In particular, we identify the moduli spaces of polygons in $\RR^3$ and $S^3$, the moduli space of restricted representations of the fundamental group of a punctured 2-sphere, the moduli space of flat connections on a punctured sphere, the moduli space of parabolic bundles on a sphere, the moduli space of weighted points on $\CC\PP^1$ and the symplectic quotient of $SO(3)$ acting diagonally on $(S^2)^n$. All of these spaces depend upon parameters and some of the above identifications require the parameters to be small. One consequence of this work is that these spaces are all biholomorphic with respect to the most natural complex structures they can each be given.
- ps.gz — 119K
- PDF — 143K
- With Alessandra Iozzi
- Appeared as Geometriae Dedicata 76 (1999) 65-79; © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
- The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com
- Abstract:In an earlier paper, the authors introduced the notion of a boundary compactification of $SL(2,\RR)$ and $SL(2,\CC)$, a normal projective embedding of $PSL_2$ arising as the Zariski closure of an orbit in $(\PP^1)^n$ under the diagonal action of $SL_2$. Here the moduli space of such boundary compactifications of $SL(2,\RR)$ is shown to be a contractible hyperbolic orbifold, by using the Schwarz-Christoffel transformation to identify it with a quotient of the moduli space of equi-angular planar polygons.
- ps.gz — 527K
- PDF — 546K
- With Alessandra Iozzi
- Appeared as Forum Mathematicum 11 (1999) 385-397; © 1999 de Gruyter
- Abstract:We construct a class of normal projective embeddings of $PSL(2,k)$, for $k=\RR$ and $\CC$, which we call boundary compactifications of $SL(2,k)$. These arise essentially as the Zariski closures of orbits in $(\PP^1_k)^n$ under the diagonal action of $SL(2,k)$. In addition, we determine precisely when our examples can be $SL(2,k)$-homeomorphic, showing that the resulting deformation space is a countable union of positive-dimensional families.
- ps.gz — 176K
- PDF — 153K
- With Todd Drumm
- First published in Conformal Geometry and Dynamics 3 (1999) 116-150; © 1999 American Mathematical Society
- Electronic version available at the AMS web site — check it out, it's interactive!
- Abstract:Let $\Gamma$ be a cyclic subgroup of $PSL_2(\CC)$ generated by a loxodromic element. The Ford and Dirichlet fundamental domains for the action of $\Gamma$ on $\HH^3_\RR$ are the complements of configurations of half-balls centered on the plane at infinity $\partial\HH^3_\RR$. Jørgensen (On cyclic groups of Möbius transformations, Math. Scand. 33 (1973), 250-260) proved that the boundary of the intersection of the Ford fundamental domain with $\partial\HH^3_\RR$ always consists of either two, four or six circular arcs and stated that an arbitrarily large number of hemispheres could contribute faces to the Ford domain in the interior of $\HH^3_\RR$. We give new proofs of Jørgensen's results, prove analogous facts for Dirichlet domains and for Ford and Dirichlet domains in the interior of $\HH^3_\RR$, and give a complete decomposition of the parameter space by the combinatorial type of the corresponding fundamental domain.
- ps.gz — 3812K
- PDF — 651K
- Appeared as International Journal of Mathematics 4 (1993) 467-501; © 1993 World Scientific Publishing Company
- Abstract:We study a certain moduli space of irreducible Hermitian-Yang-Mills connections on a unitary vector bundle over a punctured Riemann surface. The connections used have non-trivial holonomy around the punctures lying in fixed conjugacy classes of $U(n)$ and differ from each other by elements of a weighted Sobolev space; these connections give rise to parabolic bundles in the sense of Mehta and Seshadri. We show in fact that the moduli space of stable parabolic bundles can be identified with our moduli space of HYM connections, by proving that every stable bundle admits a unique unitary gauge orbit of Hermitian-Yang-Mills connections.
- Here is an electronic version of an article with doi:10.1142/S0129167X9300025X
- dvi.gz — 72K
- ps.gz — 129K
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author of many (non-fictional — they really exist) fine
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this symbol appears in the text below, it indicates a place where
the reasoning is intricate and difficult to follow, or calls
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