Repetitions and reflections in Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of ~ Death Foretold is a spiralling search for satisfying explanations of why events occur as they do. The first sentences prefigure the book's concern with the nature of memory and our perception of reality as describable in words. The narrator's declared intention of reassembling "the broken mirror of memory" allows the scrutiny of many kinds of reflections: dream images, recollections and retrospective insights, repetitions and contradictions. Memory is both individual and collective; separate voices are joined in a town history. The story of a small town murder becomes a chronicle of a universal need to understand the purpose of life. The fallibility of memory and of words is expanded into the impossibility of recovering the past objectively. We are able to perceive repeated patterns of behavior but the meaning of history eludes us. Interwoven throughout the cycling narrative fabric of repetitions, mockeries and fragmented insights are affirmations of the creativity and strength of human imagination, and Chronicle is ultimately a celebration of the power of words, despite the inadequacy of language to mirror objective reality

Resale Price Maintenance After Monsanto: A Doctrine Still at War With Itself

In this article, two enforcement officials at the Federal Trade Commission reexamine resale price maintenance in light of the Supreme Court\u27s recent decision in Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp. Commissioner Calvani and Mr. Berg consider both antitrust law and economic policy in their review of the history of resale price maintenance; they point out the chronic inconsistencies to which this antitrust regime has been subject, and identify these same inconsistencies at work in Monsanto. The authors set forth three theses with respect to Monsanto: first, that the Court intimated a willingness to reconsider at some future time the per se standard of illegality for resale price maintenance; second, that the Court recognized the continuing vitality of the Colgate doctrine, which had been seriously questioned in recent years; and, third, that the Monsanto Court unsuccessfully attempted to delineate a workable evidentiary standard applicable to communications between sellers and resellers when it is alleged that such communications constitute an illegal contract, combination, or conspiracy under section one of the Sherman Act. The authors suggest that, taken together, these elements in Monsanto display a doctrine at war with itself. The authors conclude by examining the possible implications of the Monsanto decision for the future direction of the law of resale price maintenance

Optimization problems involving the first Dirichlet eigenvalue and the torsional rigidity

We present some open problems and obtain some partial results for spectral optimization problems involving measure, torsional rigidity and first Dirichlet eigenvalue.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Enhanced diffusion by reciprocal swimming

Purcell's scallop theorem states that swimmers deforming their shapes in a time-reversible manner ("reciprocal" motion) cannot swim. Using numerical simulations and theoretical calculations we show here that in a fluctuating environment, reciprocal swimmers undergo, on time scales larger than that of their rotational diffusion, diffusive dynamics with enhanced diffusivities, possibly by orders of magnitude, above normal translational diffusion. Reciprocal actuation does therefore lead to a significant advantage over non-motile behavior for small organisms such as marine bacteria

Form Factors in Off--Critical Superconformal Models

We discuss the determination of the lowest Form Factors relative to the trace operators of N=1 Super Sinh-Gordon Model. Analytic continuations of these Form Factors as functions of the coupling constant allows us to study a series of models in a uniform way, among these the latest model of the Roaming Series and a class of minimal supersymmetric models.Comment: 11 pages, 2 Postscript figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the Euroconference on New Symmetries in Statistical Mech. and Cond. Mat. Physics, Torino, July 20- August 1 199

AGRESTE project: Agricultural resources investigations in northern Italy and southern France

The author has identified the following significant results. Recognition of rice varieties at the flowering stage by using airborne scanner data at low altitude (1500 m) seems to be feasible. The accuracies obtained on a reduced test area (3 sq km) range from 65% to 83%. Variations of a single cultural factor, such as nitrogen fertilization, induce variations of the total rice biomass at harvest, which can be correlated closely to the values of the reflectance ratio at earing. When grain production is correlated to total biomass, prediction of yield can be achieved based on reflectance data measured two months before harvest

Derivation of an integral of Boros and Moll via convolution of Student t-densities

We show that the evaluation of an integral considered by Boros and Moll is a special case of a convolution result about Student t-densities obtained by the authors in 2008