We evaluate the performance of the PLC CSMA/CA protocol by analysis, simulations and testbed measurements. We explain the impact of each parameter on performance and the motivation behind the design choices for PLC. Both throughput and short-term fairness are discussed and modelled. Short-term fairness is achieved when all users share equally the medium over a short time horizon. If short-term fairness is not guaranteed, there exists high delay-deviation that harms certain delay-sensitive ap- plications. We provide fundamental evidence about performance trade- offs of the PLC CSMA/CA. Our study suggests that PLC parameters should be judiciously selected in order to exploit the tradeoff between throughput and fairness and to achieve high QoS for best-effort and delay-sensitive applications. This chapter also presents a cross-layer PHY/MAC evaluation of contending links and investigates the challenges of stations with different rates and hidden terminals.

Rather than understanding irony as the simple opposite of earnestness, sincerity, or genuineness, I want to suggest that it represents a mode of playful engagement with the hidden connective tissue that links the various commitments – serious or flippant, affirmative or destructive, quiescent or contentious – of a work, object, or discourse. Irony activates the latent trace of the one in the other, demonstrating how each of these serve ulterior motives beyond their stated purpose. Earnestness in turn can intensify its credibility and seriousness of purpose by confronting and working through the contradictions and tensions that ironic scrutiny exposes. A discourse or ideology is defined not only by what it values but also by what it attacks and rejects, by what it finds beautiful as well as by what it finds amusing, silly, or ridiculous. Irony activates, interrogates, and reorganizes the different possible combinations and permutations of commitments that organize any value system.

The relationship of plays to their sources has always been important evidence of chronology, authorship, and the derivation of textual variants. Such evidence has been particularly important to studies of Shakespeare’s early plays. But for centuries source scholarship has been based on random anecdotes: a scholar reading one text notices something about it that reminds them of another text. We can now re-evaluate those anecdotal findings by testing them systematically against digital databases. Such tests establish that Margaret's long speech at the beginning of Scene 2 of The First Part of the Contention is based on a passage in Hall's chronicle, whereas the variants in the Folio text of 2 Henry VI instead draw upon Holinshed's chronicle. This evidence supports revision rather than memorial reconstruction. Likewise, the links between the Contention speech and Edward II are best explained by Marlowe's authorship of both.