On a Multiple-Access in a Vector Disjunctive Channel

We address the problem of increasing the sum rate in a multiple-access system from [1] for small number of users. We suggest an improved signal-code construction in which in case of a small number of users we give more resources to them. For the resulting multiple-access system a lower bound on the relative sum rate is derived. It is shown to be very close to the maximal value of relative sum rate in [1] even for small number of users. The bound is obtained for the case of decoding by exhaustive search. We also suggest reduced-complexity decoding and compare the maximal number of users in this case and in case of decoding by exhaustive search.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to IEEE ISIT 201

Une forme frondeuse: the Function of Discontinuity in La Rochefoucauld's Maximes

[First paragraph] In 1663 Mme de Sablé circulated privately a small number of copies of La Rochefoucauld’s Sentences et maximes de morale (as it was titled at the time); this exercise was intended to sound out opinion about the work in advance of any publication. Among the extant replies to this consultation, one in particular singles out disapprovingly the disjointed nature of the work. Describing the reading process in terms of masonry, the anonymous critic states: On y remarque de belles pierres, j’en demeure d’accord; mais on ne saurait disconvenir qu’il ne s’y trouve aussi du moellon et beaucoup de plâtras, qui sont si mal joints ensemble qu’il est impossible qu’ils puissent faire corps ni liaison, et par conséquent que l’ouvrage puisse subsister. The critic goes on to claim that the work is nothing but an anthology of ‘sentences’ and ‘pointes’ culled from more coherent works that had the distinct advantage over the Maximes of contextualizing their remarks: ‘car si l’on voyait ce qui était devant et après, assurément on en serait plus édifié et moins scandalisé

Bringing bodies back in: for a phenomenological and psychoanalytic film criticism of embodied cultural identity

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies, both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s