An Introduction to Natural Computation,

ABSTRACT Coherence Spaces were defined by J. Y. Girard in Coherence Spaces are a special subcategory of Scott domains [4] having a strictly finitary structure. The objects are constructed over a set of tokens (basic elements) where a coherence (reflexive and symmetric) relation is defined. The order of information is the set inclusion relation. In this work, we introduce the Probabilistic Coherence Spaces by associating probabilistic values with the objects of coherence spaces. As a result we get a notion of partial probability associated with the partial objects of the probabilistic coherence spaces. It is possible to adopt a vector notation, introducing the Vector Coherence Spaces, so that Probabilistic Coherence Spaces can be used to represent state spaces of probabilistic processes. Since such states represent partial probabilities, computation with such states produces probabilistic approximation processes whose limits are the conventional probabilistic processes. We also study linear functions on probabilistic coherence spaces to represent those probabilistic approximation processes and conventional probabilistic limits. The aim to recast in terms of the special structure of Vector Coherence Spaces the fundamental notions of probabilistic and quantum computing One immediate application of the work is in the construction of a domain of Markov models [1] with partial probabilities

The Communist Party and the New Party

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Contemporary British History, vol. 23(4), 2009, pp.477-491 copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13619460903198101The New Party was never at the centre of the concerns of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). However, the CPGB had to take a line on the new organisation when it was formed, and tried to use it to smear Labour and Independent Labour Party politicians as enemies of the working class. As the 1931 political crisis unfolded, the New Party became increasingly an irrelevance at the side of the much more tangible threat of the National government, although communists did campaign against Mosley in late 1931. Ultimately, the New Party was significant for the communists because it seemed to offer some vindication of the 'class against class' line; because it suggested that the CPGB was not always wrong in its analysis; because it led to increased attention to the party's youth movement; and because it led to the leading left-wing polemicist of the 1930s, John Strachey, working with the CPGB for almost a decade

Reassessing Britain’s ‘post-war consensus’: the politics of reason 1945–1979

Since the late-1970s, scholars have been engaged in a vibrant debate about the nature of post-war British politics. While some writers have suggested that the three decades that succeeded the Second World War witnessed a bi-partisan consensus on key policy questions, others have argued that it was conflict, not agreement, that marked the period. This article offers a novel contribution to this controversy by drawing attention to the epistemological beliefs of the Labour and Conservative parties. It argues that once these beliefs are considered, it becomes possible to reconcile some of the competing claims made by proponents and critics of the ‘post-war consensus’ thesis. Labour and Conservative leaders may have been wedded to different beliefs, but they also shared a common enthusiasm for empiricist reasoning and were both reluctant to identify fixed political ‘ends’ that they sought to realise. Consequently, they were both committed to evolutionary forms of change, and they eschewed the notion that any social or political arrangement was of universal value

Considerações sobre o final de análise

Na comunidade psicanalítica, o tema do final de análise sempre permeou a discussão técnico-teórica. Na Escola Lacaniana, especificamente, esse tema adquiriu especial interesse a partir do momento em que Lacan propôs um novo dispositivo de transmissão, o passe, para que novos analistas testemunhassem sobre a sua passagem à condição de analista. Desde então, diferentes concepções lacanianas sobre o final de análise têm surgido e produzido nova discussão. É nesse contexto que este artigo visa a contribuir com esse debate atual, discutindo diversos aspectos, tais como a eficácia da análise, as vicissitudes da transferência e da pulsão no processo analítico, a re-análise e o dispositivo do passe. Para tanto, parte, inicialmente, das questões levantadas pelo texto freudiano “Análise terminável e interminável” e as discute à luz dos desenvolvimentos teóricos realizados por analistas lacanianos. Após apresentar diferentes concepções sobre o final de análise, o artigo defende que há, nesse processo, um ponto de irredutibilidade, a partir do qual se é convocado a uma produção singular

‘New and important careers’: how women excelled at the BBC, 1923–1939

From its beginnings in 1923, the BBC employed a sizeable female workforce. The majority were in support roles as typists, secretaries and clerks but, during the 1920s and 1930s, a significant number held important posts. As a modern industry, the BBC took a largely progressive approach towards the ‘career women’ on its staff, many of whom were in jobs that were developed specifically for the new medium of broadcasting. Women worked as drama producers, advertising representatives and Children’s Hour Organisers. They were talent spotters, press officers and documentary makers. Three women attained Director status while others held significant administrative positions. This article considers in what ways it was the modernity and novelty of broadcasting, combined with changing employment possibilities and attitudes towards women evident after the First World War, that combined to create the conditions in which they could excel

High availability using virtualization - 3RC

High availability has always been one of the main problems for a data center. Till now high availability was achieved by host per host redundancy, a highly expensive method in terms of hardware and human costs. A new approach to the problem can be offered by virtualization. Using virtualization, it is possible to achieve a redundancy system for all the services running on a data center. This new approach to high availability allows the running virtual machines to be distributed over a small number of servers, by exploiting the features of the virtualization layer: start, stop and move virtual machines between physical hosts. The 3RC system is based on a finite state machine, providing the possibility to restart each virtual machine over any physical host, or reinstall it from scratch. A complete infrastructure has been developed to install operating system and middleware in a few minutes. To virtualize the main servers of a data center, a new procedure has been developed to migrate physical to virtual hosts. The whole Grid data center SNS-PISA is running at the moment in virtual environment under the high availability system.Comment: 10 page

Mourning and melancholia revisited: correspondences between principles of Freudian metapsychology and empirical findings in neuropsychiatry

Freud began his career as a neurologist studying the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, but it was his later work in psychology that would secure his place in history. This paper draws attention to consistencies between physiological processes identified by modern clinical research and psychological processes described by Freud, with a special emphasis on his famous paper on depression entitled 'Mourning and melancholia'. Inspired by neuroimaging findings in depression and deep brain stimulation for treatment resistant depression, some preliminary physiological correlates are proposed for a number of key psychoanalytic processes. Specifically, activation of the subgenual cingulate is discussed in relation to repression and the default mode network is discussed in relation to the ego. If these correlates are found to be reliable, this may have implications for the manner in which psychoanalysis is viewed by the wider psychological and psychiatric communities