Gringo in Mañanaland: Latin America in Hollywood

ABSTRACT:  This article presents an analysis of Gringo in Mañanaland, a 1995 documentary by the American media activist and producer DeeDee Halleck. This documentary offers a revisionist perspective about the US representations of Latin America especially by Hollywood films. Thus, Halleck’s production is representative of the reflexive aesthetics of contemporary documentary production. Such aesthetics is revealing of a fruitful political, economic and cultural debate, as an alternative to the commercial film production. As support for the discussion of Gringo in Mañanaland as a revisionist documentary, this analysis relies on the studies about Hollywood films and their representations of Latin America by Robert Burgoyne, Tunico Amancio and  David Bordwell, as well as on Robert Rosenstone’s studies on film as tools to revision of  history

On the Semantics of Gringo

Input languages of answer set solvers are based on the mathematically simple concept of a stable model. But many useful constructs available in these languages, including local variables, conditional literals, and aggregates, cannot be easily explained in terms of stable models in the sense of the original definition of this concept and its straightforward generalizations. Manuals written by designers of answer set solvers usually explain such constructs using examples and informal comments that appeal to the user's intuition, without references to any precise semantics. We propose to approach the problem of defining the semantics of gringo programs by translating them into the language of infinitary propositional formulas. This semantics allows us to study equivalent transformations of gringo programs using natural deduction in infinitary propositional logic.Comment: Proceedings of Answer Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP 2013), 6th International Workshop, August 25, 2013, Istanbul, Turke

The Multi-engine ASP Solver ME-ASP: Progress Report

MEASP is a multi-engine solver for ground ASP programs. It exploits algorithm selection techniques based on classification to select one among a set of out-of-the-box heterogeneous ASP solvers used as black-box engines. In this paper we report on (i) a new optimized implementation of MEASP; and (ii) an attempt of applying algorithm selection to non-ground programs. An experimental analysis reported in the paper shows that (i) the new implementation of \measp is substantially faster than the previous version; and (ii) the multi-engine recipe can be applied to the evaluation of non-ground programs with some benefits