Love-Rats

Love-Rats is a short story collection concerned with love and relationships in contemporary society in the United Kingdom and North America. The tone of the collection is generally ironic, with longer stories allowing for deeper character development and a larger range of tone. The majority of the settings, plots, and characters are dark and absurdist. Throughout the collection boyfriends morph into different shapes and forms including sloths, rats, and vampires. The recurring theme of anthropomorphism in respect to love allows the stories to explore painful aspects of relationships, or damaging types of relationships, and look at them from a distance. Many contemporary authors inspired this work, mostly notably Dan Rhodes, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Etgar Keret. In particular, the short shorts by these authors served as a pattern to follow because of their use of minimalist language and humour. Some stories in the collection have also been inspired by nonfiction writing on the subject of romance from various media, including newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Guardian) as well as blogs and websites (The Toast and BuzzFeed), television shows (Girls and Broad City), and online dating apps (OkCupid and Tinder)

Ricerche sopra il quesito proposto dalla Reale Accademia delle scienze con suo programma de' 4 gennaio 1788. ...

... Quali siano i mezzi di provvedere al sostentamento degli operaj ... del marchese Nicolao Incisa della Rocchetta dissertazione ..

The role of the frontal cortex in memory: an investigation of the Von Restorff effect

Evidence from neuropsychology and neuroimaging indicate that the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in human memory. Although frontal patients are able to form new memories, these memories appear qualitatively different from those of controls by lacking distinctiveness. Neuroimaging studies of memory indicate activation in the PFC under deep encoding conditions, and under conditions of semantic elaboration. Based on these results, we hypothesize that the PFC enhances memory by extracting differences and commonalities in the studied material. To test this hypothesis, we carried out an experimental investigation to test the relationship between the PFC-dependent factors and semantic factors associated with common and specific features of words. These experiments were performed using Free-Recall of word lists with healthy adults, exploiting the correlation between PFC function and fluid intelligence. As predicted, a correlation was found between fluid intelligence and the Von-Restorff effect (better memory for semantic isolates, e.g., isolate “cat” within category members of “fruit”). Moreover, memory for the semantic isolate was found to depend on the isolate's serial position. The isolate item tends to be recalled first, in comparison to non-isolates, suggesting that the process interacts with short term memory. These results are captured within a computational model of free recall, which includes a PFC mechanism that is sensitive to both commonality and distinctiveness, sustaining a trade-off between the two

Multiple List Learning in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Parallels with Frontal Lobe Damage or Further Evidence of Diminished Relational Processing?

To test the effects of providing relational cues at encoding and/or retrieval on multi-trial, multi-list free recall in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 16 adults with ASD and 16 matched typical adults learned a first followed by a second categorised list of 24 words. Category labels were provided at encoding, retrieval, both or not at all. Both groups showed enhanced recall when labels were available during encoding or throughout the task. ASD individuals showed reduced recall of the second list and reduced clustering. Clustering and recall were correlated in both groups, which also showed similar levels of subjective organisation. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of frontal and medial temporal lobe contributions to memory in ASD

Encoding and retrieval : effects of unilateral frontal- or temporal-lobe excisions

In Part I of this thesis, recognition of natural scenes was tested in 72 patients with unilateral frontal- or temporal-lobe excisions and 32 normal control subjects (NC). The occurrence of a novel scene in the midst of a series of other scenes normally induces forgetting of the scene that had preceded the novel one. This phenomenon was not observed following right frontal- and right temporal-lobe lesions, and was only partially present after left temporal-lobe excisions that included the hippocampus (LTH). These brain regions were thus seen as part of a circuit that codes novel stimuli. In Part 2, recall of lists of words was examined in 77 patients and 12 normal control subjects. Both the left frontal-lobe (LF) and LTH groups recalled fewer words overall than the other groups; their performance was normal, however, when the words were pre-organized into categories and when category labels were supplied during test. In another experiment it was demonstrated that the LF group was impaired when category exemplars were provided together with the category labels, the LTH group being unaffected in this condition. It was concluded that left frontal-lobe lesions may affect retrieval mechanisms

Impact and integration of information monitoring in the context of a software startup: how to increase user retention

Management of Technology (MoT