Ron Roth

Some of the most dramatic and consequential events of the Civil War era took place in the South Carolina Lowcountry between Charleston and Savannah. From Robert Barnwell Rhett's inflammatory 1844 speech in Bluffton calling for secession, to the last desperate attempts by Confederate forces to halt Sherman's juggernaut, the region was torn apart by war. This history tells the story through the experiences of two radically different military units--the Confederate Beaufort Volunteer Artillery and the U.S. 1st South Carolina Regiment, the first black Union regiment to fight in the war--both organized in Beaufort, the heart of the Lowcountry.

Error-correcting codes constitute one of the key ingredients in achieving the high degree of reliability required in modern data transmission and storage systems. This 2006 book introduces the reader to the theoretical foundations of error-correcting codes, with an emphasis on Reed-Solomon codes and their derivative codes. After reviewing linear codes and finite fields, the author describes Reed-Solomon codes and various decoding algorithms. Cyclic codes are presented, as are MDS codes, graph codes, and codes in the Lee metric. Concatenated, trellis, and convolutional codes are also discussed in detail. Homework exercises introduce additional concepts such as Reed-Muller codes, and burst error correction. The end-of-chapter notes often deal with algorithmic issues, such as the time complexity of computational problems. While mathematical rigor is maintained, the text is designed to be accessible to a broad readership, including students of computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics, from senior-undergraduate to graduate level.