A look into the picture-perfect fake life of Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and perfections

In 2014, the Spanish artist Amalia Ulman gathered inspiration from the ways of aestheticizing everyday life chosen by Instagram users to develop an elaborate performative photographic series that lasted months and existed firstly only on her personal Instagram feed @amaliaulman. In April of that year, she suddenly started posting iPhone photographs about an apparently trendy life she was living in Los Angeles, California. She started reproducing the style of different Instagram personas while incorporating the usual aesthetic choices of the social media. The narrative constructed by each of the 175 pictures accounted for her life as an artsy girl who firstly moves to LA after apparently breaking up with a boyfriend, starting work as an escort, having cosmetic plastic surgery and drug abuse issues, followed by time in rehab, and finally posts about recovery, and healthy and fitness habits. The attention to the details of what she wrote and exhibited was what probably made the almost 90 thousand subscribers she gathered along the 5 months of the performance very surprised when she finally announced it was all part of an art work entitled Excellences and Perfections. This fictional life of Amalia Ulman was thoroughly calculated to appear believable to an audience already accustomed to aesthetics of this social media visual culture by reproducing certain patterns of pictures, captions, use of hashtags and interactions with followers. This paper will analyse the performance via the Instagram archive as well as the recently published book Excellences and Perfections. (2018), discussing the ways that it deals aesthetically with questions of identity, gender, class, sexuality and “lifestyle porn” in a visual network platform. The main question to be discussed is: how did the aesthetic choices of this performance made a fake story so convincing

Black hole collisions: how far can perturbation theory go?

The computation of gravitational radiation generated by the coalescence of inspiralling binary black holes is nowdays one of the main goals of numerical relativity. Perturbation theory has emerged as an ubiquitous tool for all those dynamical evolutions where the two black holes start close enough to each other, to be treated as single distorted black hole (close limit approximation), providing at the same time useful benchmarks for full numerical simulations. Here we summarize the most recent developments to study evolutions of perturbations around rotating (Kerr) black holes. The final aim is to generalize the close limit approximation to the most general case of two rotating black holes in orbit around each other, and thus provide reliable templates for the gravitational waveforms in this regime. For this reason it has become very important to know if these predictions can actually be trusted to larger separation parameters (even in the region where the holes have distinct event horizons). The only way to extend the range of validity of the linear approximation is to develop the theory of second order perturbations around a Kerr hole, by generalizing the Teukolsky formalism.Comment: 6 pages, Latex, uses moriond.sty, proceedings of the talk given at the Moriond 99' euroconferenc

Mussolini's war of words : Italian propaganda and subversion in Egypt and Palestine, 1934-1939

This article examines Italy's attempts to export the Fascist revolution to areas formally and informally controlled by Britain. The challenge mounted by the Italian government to the British imperial structure rested upon the development of preferential relations with nationalist movements throughout the empire; such relationship would be forged by propaganda in a region, the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, which was central to Mussolini’s foreign policy. The promotion of Fascist ideology among the Middle Eastern populations, and in particular in Egypt and Palestine, was driven by political priorities rather than ideological imperatives insofar as propaganda was carefully employed to expand the economic and military capacity of Fascist Italy. Thus propaganda became as early as the 1920s an instrument of foreign policy. This article also questions the effectiveness of Britain's response to the Fascist challenge: here structural problems within the British propaganda machine and intelligence community seriously undermined Britain’s defence against Axis subversion in the Middle East

Spectral features in galactic cosmic rays

Recent results by space borne experiments took cosmic ray data to a precision level. These new results are able to challenge the conventional scenario for cosmic ray acceleration and propagation in the Milky Way. In these contributions, written for the XVII Vulcano Workshop, we will give an overview of the latest results of the cosmic ray fluxes, and some possible interpretations will be discussed. These measurements have a common feature, namely the presence of unexpected and still not yet fully understood spectral features.Comment: Proceedings of the XVII Vulcano Worksho

Models for Paired Comparison Data: A Review with Emphasis on Dependent Data

Thurstonian and Bradley-Terry models are the most commonly applied models in the analysis of paired comparison data. Since their introduction, numerous developments have been proposed in different areas. This paper provides an updated overview of these extensions, including how to account for object- and subject-specific covariates and how to deal with ordinal paired comparison data. Special emphasis is given to models for dependent comparisons. Although these models are more realistic, their use is complicated by numerical difficulties. We therefore concentrate on implementation issues. In particular, a pairwise likelihood approach is explored for models for dependent paired comparison data, and a simulation study is carried out to compare the performance of maximum pairwise likelihood with other limited information estimation methods. The methodology is illustrated throughout using a real data set about university paired comparisons performed by students.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-STS396 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Comment on ``Perturbative Method to solve fourth-order Gravity Field Equations"

We reconsider the cosmic string perturbative solution to the classical fourth-order gravity field equations, obtained in Ref.\cite{CLA94}, and we obtain that static, cylindricaly symmetric gauge cosmic strings, with constant energy density, can contain only $\beta$-terms in the first order corrections to the interior gravitational field, while the exact exterior solution is a conical spacetime with deficit angle $D=8\pi\mu$.Comment: 6 pages, Revte