5.0286 Rs: CALL; uuencode; ASCII; Trees; BCE (5/104)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 20 Aug 1991 18:40:45 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0286. Tuesday, 20 Aug 1991.


(1) Date: Fri,16 Aug 91 15:26:09 BST (10 lines)
From: DJT18@hull.ac.uk
Subject: Re: 5.0279 Language Learning Projects

(2) Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 10:58:37 GMT (23 lines)
From: Christopher Currie (IHR) <THRA004@mvs.ulcc.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: vol5.0281 Upper ASCII

(3) Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 09:51 EDT (31 lines)
From: "Ed Harris, Academic Affairs, So Ct State U"
Subject: Uuencoding email through gateways

(4) Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 12:37:34 GMT (28 lines)
From: Christopher Currie (IHR) <THRA004@mvs.ulcc.ac.uk>
Subject: Dendrology

(5) Date: Thu, 15 Aug 91 18:52:34 CST (12 lines)
From: (James Marchand) <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: BCE

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri,16 Aug 91 15:26:09 BST
From: DJT18@hull.ac.uk
Subject: Re: 5.0279 Language Learning Projects

I seem to have missed the original request: for information on CALL
projects in the UK, contact the CTI Centre for Modern Languages at the
University of Hull, HU6 7RX JANET email: CTI.Lang@uk.ac.hull.
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------33----
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 10:58:37 GMT
From: Christopher Currie (IHR) <THRA004@mvs.ulcc.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: vol5.0281 Upper ASCII

Michael Kessler points out that some machines automatically uuencode
upper ASCII characters before mailing them. Whether your mailer
does this or not, you can always do it yourself on a micro before
sending the document to the mailer. In this way, word processor
control codes etc. can be preserved. It's also a useful technique
for sending ASCII documents with long lines (e.g. some PostScript
files). It may be safer to XXENCODE rather than UUENCODE, and you
should always use an encoder with a table option set. This puts a
table of characters at the beginning of the file, so that the
recpipient can see if any have been corrupted and correct them with
an ASCII text editor before decoding.

There are other codeforms which do the same job (e.g. .BOO encoding
and atob encoding) but they are less widely used than UUENCODE/XXENCODE
and you can't be sure that the recipient will be able to get a decoder
for his machine.

Christopher
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------37----
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 09:51 EDT
From: "Ed Harris, Academic Affairs, So Ct State U"
Subject: Uuencoding email through gateways

MKessler@HUM.SFSU.EDU wrote:

> Some readers may be interested in knowing that under certain
> circumstances it is possible to send upper ASCII characters, i.e.
> accented characters, Macintosh documents, graphic characters, etc.,
> through E-Mail. I accidentally discovered that our mail system on the
> VAX automatically UUENCODEs attachments containing at least one upper
> ASCII character sent with E-Mail from our 3Com (DOS based) 3+Mail
> server. The largest file sent and then UUDECODEd to check it integrity
> has been 130K.

Uuencoding also allows the transmission of executable files. I _think_
(I used to know this, but no longer remember) that it's used to send
regular text files from IBM mainframes which encode text using ebcdic
to machines which code text with ascii. This is how email moves between
the internet (ascii) and bitnet (ebcdic). As noted above, many machines
make the conversion automatically. Not ours. I run it on a clone and have
successfully decoded files of close to a meg; the resulting decoded files
are smaller. You can download a version of uuen/decode in basic--straight
ascii--which, when run once, creates an executable file (A file which
you couldn't have downloaded without already having! Huh? Have computers
solved the chicken and egg question?) I got mine from one of the simtel20
lookalikes.

Ed <HARRIS@CTSTATEU.BITNET>
Southern Connecticut State U, New Haven, CT 06515 USA
Tel: 1 (203) 397-4322 / Fax: 1 (203) 397-7076
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------38----
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 91 12:37:34 GMT
From: Christopher Currie (IHR) <THRA004@mvs.ulcc.ac.uk>
Subject: Dendrology

A small spanner in the works. The discussion has referred to trees of
kinship, evolution, stemmata etc. as if they were analogous. But in
fairness to genealogists, a well-constructed family tree cannot present
a single stemma, since everyone has two natural parents. There is thus
'contamination' in every generation. How far is the penchant for
uniradical trees the result of the dominance of patrilinear thinking
(particularly in Europe since the High Middle Ages)?

Tree-structures are also used to analyse, for example, the development
of artifact typology. But the use of the device doesn't commit one to
a particular interpretation. For example, the study of timber roofs
in Europe has been conducted mainly on a national or regional basis, so that
the 'trees' show development from some supposed original folktype.
It is curious that the earliest type of roof known in northern Europe
is very widespread and remarkably little differentiated wherever it
occurs (from Northern France to Poland and from the Alps to England and
Sweden). It has almost universally been regarded as 'foreign' by national
typologists, except in north Germany and Poland, each of which (for
ideological reasons) has claimed it as authentically German or Slavonic.
An alternative approach could be to posit a tree showing regional
differentiation from this early form; but this 'tree' has a quite
different ideological content from the national folkloristic ones.

Christopher
(5) --------------------------------------------------------------23----
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 91 18:52:34 CST
From: (James Marchand) <marchand@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: BCE

Thanks to Dennis Baron, we are moving closer to my 18th century suspicion.
It might be of interest to HUMANIST subscribers to see the exchange on the
subject which is going on in the Biblical Archaeology Review. One reader
even cancelled his subscription, feeling that this abbreviation and the
editors had an anti-Christian bias. Since many people (over half of the
students I asked who had even a clue as to what it meant) still think it
means "Before the Christian Era," it's not working.
Jim Marchand