Iconography of the Labour Movement. Part 2: Socialist Iconography, 1848–1952

This is Part 2 of a two-part study which aims at preliminary conclusions regarding the iconography of the international labour movement. Earlier research in the fields of social history, art history and visual rhetorics has been consulted for this purpose. After 1848, emerging socialist parties and labour unions depended on republican iconography for their manifestation of collective identity. The republican virtues of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity remained important, but Fraternity was gradually replaced or merged with Unity and Solidarity. In a process akin to the identification of the goddess of Liberty with a more common “Marianne”, the representation of Unity and manual work in socialist iconography became focused on images of individual male or female workers. In earlier prints and illustrations, these representations have strong affinities with how the concept of labour was personified in official monuments of the same period. Later, the doctrine of socialist solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers transformed the bipartite iconographic scheme of earlier personifications of Unity into a representation of agriculture and industry, or country and city. After 1917, the dilemma of how to represent dual aspects of society and its functions also included questions about the representations of the socialist leader. The Hjalmar Branting monument in Stockholm serves as an example of how the iconography of reformist social democracy is not always comparable to Soviet socialist realism

Connecting your Mobile Shopping Cart to the Internet-of-Things

International audienceOnline shopping has reached an unforeseen success during the last decade thanks to the explosion of the Internet and the development of dedicated websites. Nonetheless, the wide diversity of e-commerce websites does not really foster the sales, but rather leaves the customer in the middle of dense jungle. In particular, finding the best offer for a specific product might require to spend hours browsing the Internet without being sure of finding the best deal in the end. While some websites are providing comparators to help the customer in finding the best offer meeting her/his requirements, the objectivity of these websites remains questionable, the comparison criteria are statically defined, while the nature of products they support is restricted to specific categories (e.g., electronic devices). In this paper, we introduce MACCHIATO as a user-centered platform leveraging online shopping. MACCHIATO implements the principles of the Internet-of-Things by adopting the REST architectural style and semantic web standards to navigate product databases exposed on the Internet. By doing so, customers keep the control of their shopping process by selecting the stores and comparing the offers according to their own preferences

Minimality and mutation-equivalence of polygons

We introduce a concept of minimality for Fano polygons. We show that, up to mutation, there are only finitely many Fano polygons with given singularity content, and give an algorithm to determine the mutation-equivalence classes of such polygons. This is a key step in a program to classify orbifold del Pezzo surfaces using mirror symmetry. As an application, we classify all Fano polygons such that the corresponding toric surface is qG-deformation-equivalent to either (i) a smooth surface; or (ii) a surface with only singularities of type 1/3(1,1).Comment: 29 page

Socially-Aware Distributed Hash Tables for Decentralized Online Social Networks

Many decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have been proposed due to an increase in awareness related to privacy and scalability issues in centralized social networks. Such decentralized networks transfer processing and storage functionalities from the service providers towards the end users. DOSNs require individualistic implementation for services, (i.e., search, information dissemination, storage, and publish/subscribe). However, many of these services mostly perform social queries, where OSN users are interested in accessing information of their friends. In our work, we design a socially-aware distributed hash table (DHTs) for efficient implementation of DOSNs. In particular, we propose a gossip-based algorithm to place users in a DHT, while maximizing the social awareness among them. Through a set of experiments, we show that our approach reduces the lookup latency by almost 30% and improves the reliability of the communication by nearly 10% via trusted contacts.Comment: 10 pages, p2p 2015 conferenc