2,348 research outputs found
Feverish fictions: William T. Vollmann and American literary history after postmodernism
The rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the notion are necessary if it is to remain useful as a descriptor for important qualities of recent texts. Among issues in need of greater attention are the implications of the New Sincerity for historical awareness, a topic I pursue via consideration of William T. Vollmannâs grappling with literary history. I argue that Vollmannâs works offer more than the pastiche that allegedly defined historical consciousness in postmodernist fiction. His intertextual engagements with Edgar Allan Poe are especially valuable for modelling some of the ways recent fictions bypass postmodernist ahistoricism in favor of connections to a usable past, and, especially, a usable literary tradition. Readings of Vollmannâs âThe Grave of Lost Storiesâ (in several editions) and âThe Cemetery of the Worldâ show how he employs research in the textual archive as a figuration of relations to the past that can serve the ends of renewal and recovery.Accepted manuscrip
The Sentence Is Most Important: Styles of Engagement in William T. Vollmannâs Fictions
William T. Vollmann frequently asserts that his ideal reader will appreciate the functionality and beauty of his sentences. This article begins by taking such claims seriously, and draws on both literary and rhetorical stylistics to explore some of the many ways that his texts answer to his intention to find âthe right sentence for the right job.â In particular, this article argues that Vollmannâs stylistic decisions are most notable when they most directly satisfy his effort to produce texts that foster empathetic knowledge, serve truth, resist abusive power, and encourage charitable action. Extended close analyses of passages from an early and from a mid-career text (The Rainbow Storiesand Europe Central) illustrate Vollmannâs consistency across two decades of his career regarding choices in the areas of figuration (including schemes and tropes of comparison, repetition, balance, naming, and amplification), grammar, deixis, allusion, and other compositional strategies. Particular attention is paid to passages that display the stylistic mechanisms underlying Vollmannâs negotiation of his textsâ moral qualities, including both the moral content of the worlds represented in the texts, and the moral responsibility the texts bear with regard to their audience. The results of my analyses demonstrate that Vollmann typically prioritizes openness, critique, and dialogue not only in terms of incident and character, but also on the scale of the phrase, clause, and sentence. Ultimately, this article shows how Vollmannâs sentences serve his declared intentions and allow readers to recognize compatibilities between Vollmannâs works and the characteristic features of post-postmodernist writing in general
Decremental All-Pairs ALL Shortest Paths and Betweenness Centrality
We consider the all pairs all shortest paths (APASP) problem, which maintains
the shortest path dag rooted at every vertex in a directed graph G=(V,E) with
positive edge weights. For this problem we present a decremental algorithm
(that supports the deletion of a vertex, or weight increases on edges incident
to a vertex). Our algorithm runs in amortized O(\vstar^2 \cdot \log n) time per
update, where n=|V|, and \vstar bounds the number of edges that lie on shortest
paths through any given vertex. Our APASP algorithm can be used for the
decremental computation of betweenness centrality (BC), a graph parameter that
is widely used in the analysis of large complex networks. No nontrivial
decremental algorithm for either problem was known prior to our work. Our
method is a generalization of the decremental algorithm of Demetrescu and
Italiano [DI04] for unique shortest paths, and for graphs with \vstar =O(n), we
match the bound in [DI04]. Thus for graphs with a constant number of shortest
paths between any pair of vertices, our algorithm maintains APASP and BC scores
in amortized time O(n^2 \log n) under decremental updates, regardless of the
number of edges in the graph.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in Proc. ISAAC 201
IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 8, Issue 1, Winter 2019
IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).In this issue of Impact you will find a humanities scholar deeply engaged with the arcing out of a new territory: the interdisciplinary study of the Grateful Dead. Impactâs own Christopher Coffmanâs review essay should be required reading for scholars of popular music, performance studies and history. His review also serves as an important reference for those who aspire to teach a course on the Grateful Dead, as well as for those who wish to write review essays. In this issue we also hear from those who are engaged in teaching people who are incarcerated. Importantly, Stephanie Cageâs essay looks to incarcerated people themselves to find out what they think about prison education. Peter Wakefield encourages us to see The Great Gatsby anew, in particular in the context of American racism and White supremacy. Wakefieldâs essay is important too because it had its genesis in Writing, the State, and the Rise of Neo-Nationalism: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Concerns, a conference sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning
Local symmetry properties of pure 3-qubit states
Entanglement types of pure states of 3 qubits are classified by means of
their stabilisers in the group of local unitary operations. It is shown that
the stabiliser is generically discrete, and that a larger stabiliser indicates
a stationary value for some local invariant. We describe all the exceptional
states with enlarged stabilisers.Comment: 32 pages, 5 encapsulated PostScript files for 3 figures. Published
version, with minor correction
On local invariants of pure three-qubit states
We study invariants of three-qubit states under local unitary
transformations, i.e. functions on the space of entanglement types, which is
known to have dimension 6. We show that there is no set of six independent
polynomial invariants of degree less than or equal to 6, and find such a set
with maximum degree 8. We describe an intrinsic definition of a canonical state
on each orbit, and discuss the (non-polynomial) invariants associated with it.Comment: LateX, 13 pages. Minor typoes corrected. Published versio
Localized Entanglement in one-dimensional Anderson model
The entanglement in one-dimensional Anderson model is studied. We show that
the pairwise entanglement measured by the average concurrence has a direct
relation to the localization length. The numerical study indicates that the
disorder significantly reduces the average entanglement, and entanglement
distribution clearly displays the entanglement localization. The maximal
pairwise entanglement exhibits a maximum as the disorder strength
increases,experiencing a transition from increase to decrease. The entanglement
between the center of localization and other site decreases exponentially along
the spatial direction. Finally,we study effects of disorder on dynamical
properties of entanglement.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure
Critical transmission sectors in embodied atmospheric mercury emission network in China
Atmospheric mercury is a crucial pollutant that must be well-controlled to avoid damaging public health. It is thus necessary to understand from multiple perspectives the roles played by different industrial sectors, as well as their geographical distribution. Existing studies have overlooked the transmission sectors in the economic supply chains of the embodied atmospheric mercury emission network. In this paper, we offer a betweenness-based account (BBA) for Chinese regions and industrial sectors in transmitting embodied atmospheric mercury emissions and in doing so have identified the transmitting hubs. Our results show that the Henan province acts as the transmission hub of the embodied atmospheric mercury emission network in China. The metallurgy, chemical, and construction industries generally play important roles in the transmission of embodied atmospheric mercury emissions across China. Henan's metallurgy sector, the third highest of all, is more closely linked with inter-provincial sectors than the top two transmission sectors (the metallurgy industry of Jiangsu and the chemical industry of Shandong). This study can help policy makers improve mercury control measures by focusing on transmission processes for effective and comprehensive atmospheric mercury emission control
General flux to a trap in one and three dimensions
The problem of the flux to a spherical trap in one and three dimensions, for
diffusing particles undergoing discrete-time jumps with a given radial
probability distribution, is solved in general, verifying the Smoluchowski-like
solution in which the effective trap radius is reduced by an amount
proportional to the jump length. This reduction in the effective trap radius
corresponds to the Milne extrapolation length.Comment: Accepted for publication, in pres
Influence of particle size and chemistry on the cloud nucleating properties of aerosols
International audienceThe ability of an aerosol particle to act as a cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) is a function of the size of the particle, its composition and mixing state, and the supersaturation of the cloud. In-situ data from field studies provide a means to assess the relative importance of these parameters. During the 2006 Texas Air Quality ? Gulf of Mexico Atmospheric Composition and Climate Study (TexAQS-GoMACCS), the NOAA RV Ronald~H.~Brown encountered a wide variety of aerosol types ranging from marine near the Florida panhandle to urban and industrial in the Houston-Galveston area. These varied sources provided an opportunity to investigate the role of aerosol sources, chemistry, and size in the activation of particles to form cloud droplets. Measurements were made of CCN concentrations, aerosol chemical composition in the size range relevant for particle activation, and aerosol size distributions. Variability in aerosol composition was parameterized by the mass fraction of Hydrocarbon-like Organic Aerosol (HOA) for particle diameters less than 200 nm (vacuum aerodynamic). The HOA mass fraction in this size range was lowest for marine aerosol and highest for aerosol sampled close to anthropogenic sources. Combining all data from the experiment reveals that composition (defined by HOA mass fraction) explains 40% of the variance in the critical diameter for particle activation at 0.44% supersaturation (S). Correlations between HOA mass fraction and aerosol mean diameter show that these two parameters are essentially independent of one another for this data set. We conclude that, based on the variability of the HOA mass fraction observed during TexAQS-GoMACCS, composition played a significant role in determining the fraction of particles that could activate to form cloud droplets. In addition, we estimate the error that results in calculated CCN concentrations if the HOA mass fraction is neglected (i.e., a fully soluble composition of (NH4)2SO4 is assumed) for the range of mass fractions and mean diameters observed during the experiment. This error is then related to the source of the aerosol. At 0.22 and 0.44% S, the error is considerable (>50%) for anthropogenic aerosol sampled near the source region as this aerosol had, on average, a high HOA mass fraction in the sub-200 nm diameter size range (vacuum aerodynamic). The error is lower for aerosol distant from anthropogenic source regions as it had a lower HOA mass fraction. Hence, the percent error in calculated CCN concentration is larger for organic-rich aerosol sampled near the source and smaller for aerosol sampled away from sources of anthropogenic particulate organic matter (POM)
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