1. Lectura

Elena Lombardi, ‘1. **Lectura/**’, in Elena Lombardi, Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories, Cultural Inquiry, 28 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 13-45 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-28_1

5. It Was Sunset

Elena Lombardi, ‘5. It Was Sunset’, in Elena Lombardi, Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories, Cultural Inquiry, 28 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 173-212 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-28_5

4. ‘… And Maybe Sometime’

Elena Lombardi, ‘4. “… And Maybe Sometime”’, in Elena Lombardi, Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories, Cultural Inquiry, 28 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 125-72 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-28_4

3. To Pursue Virtue and Knowledge

Elena Lombardi, ‘3. To Pursue Virtue and Knowledge’, in Elena Lombardi, Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories, Cultural Inquiry, 28 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 91-124 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-28_3

A fast direct method of mass reconstruction for gravitational lenses

Statistical analyses of observed galaxy distortions are often used to reconstruct the mass distribution of an intervening cluster responsible for gravitational lensing. In current projects, distortions of thousands of source galaxies have to be handled efficiently; much larger data bases and more massive investigations are envisaged for new major observational initiatives. In this article we present an efficient mass reconstruction procedure, a direct method that solves a variational principle noted in an earlier paper, which, for rectangular fields, turns out to reduce the relevant execution time by a factor from 100 to 1000 with respect to the fastest methods currently used, so that for grid numbers N = 400 the required CPU time on a good workstation can be kept within the order of 1 second. The acquired speed also opens the way to some long-term projects based on simulated observations (addressing statistical or cosmological questions) that would be, at present, practically not viable for intrinsically slow reconstruction methods.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Uses A&A macros. Accepted for pubblication on A&

A sports career: why not?

“It does not matter how many times you get knocked down,but how many times you get up” – Vince Lombardi, famous American football coach

Images of Peru: a national cinema in crisis

A brief look at the major trends in the history of the national cinema of Peru suggests that the relationship between the development of the moving image and the onset of modernity in that country has always been awkward. Many have argued that the advent of cinema coincided in most parts of the world with the decades when modernity was already ‘at full throttle . . . a watershed moment in which a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space’. However, the reality for the majority of Latin American countries was quite different. As Ana M. López points out, it simply is not possible to link the rise of cinema in that part of the world to ‘previous large-scale transformations of daily experience resulting from urbanization, industrialization, rationality and the technological transformation of modern life’. Such developments were only just starting to emerge, so that as cinema was launched across the world, modernity in Latin America ‘was above all a fantasy and a profound desire.