Of Parasites, Mutations and Plagues. Notes on the Art of the Novel

Se maneja una concepción cientifista de la novela y acerca el proceder del creador de ficciones al del investigador y la novela es interpretada como si de un ser vivo se tratase para ser descrita con los ojos de un darvinista La novela es una especie que lucha por su supervivencia, aunque no hay peligro de extinción porque su capacidad de mutación es constante, y en la línea de su progreso evolutivo señala el último estado: la novela que une la ficción con el ensayo (Sebald, Marías, Magris, Coetzee, Del Paso, Vila-Matas, Pitol). La reflexión puede entenderse como un manifiesto.A scientific conception of the novel allows for an approximation of the procedures of creators of fiction and scientific researchers. The novel is interpreted as though it were a live being to be described with the eyes of a Darwinist. The novel is a species struggling to survive, although there is no risk of extinction due to its ability for constant mutation. In the most recent phase of its evolutionary progress, the novel unites fiction and essay (Sebald, Marías, Magris, Coetzee, Del Paso, Vila-Matas, Pitol). The reflections can be understood as a manifesto

Carlos Fuentes or the Defiance of Time

En este artículo se sitúan La Celestina y el Quijote como los dos pilares sobre los que se asienta la monumental Terra Nostra de Carlos Fuentes. La novela va en este caso mucho más allá del mero entretenimiento o de la adaptación al medio que la permita sobrevivir, se vuelve exigente y se erige en arquitectura verbal que trata de levantar toda una idea de la realidad y la ficción. Se revisa la magna novela del mexicano Carlos Fuentes. La primera parte refleja la corte imperial española y a sus artistas: el Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán, los personajes imaginarios como el Lazarillo de Tormes. La segunda relata la creación del nuevo mundo. La tercera parte es interpretada en el artículo como la creación de un nuevo orden resultante de la fusión entre los dos mundos precedentes.According to this article, La Celestina and Don Quixote are the two columns which sustain Carlos Fuentes' monumental Terra Nostra. The novel goes far beyond mere entertainment or adaptation to the environment that allows it to survive; it becomes demanding and creates a verbal architecture which aims to offer an allencompassing idea of reality and fiction. This rereading of the Mexican's vast novel studies the way the first part reflects the Spanish imperial court and its artists: El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán, as well as imaginary characters such as Lazarillo de Tormes. The second part of the novel focuses on the new world. The third part is interpreted as the creation of a new order, which arises from the fusion of the two earlier worlds

Placing objects in context via inpainting for out-of-distribution segmentation

When deploying a semantic segmentation model into the real world, it will inevitably be confronted with semantic classes unseen during training. Thus, to safely deploy such systems, it is crucial to accurately evaluate and improve their anomaly segmentation capabilities. However, acquiring and labelling semantic segmentation data is expensive and unanticipated conditions are long-tail and potentially hazardous. Indeed, existing anomaly segmentation datasets capture a limited number of anomalies, lack realism or have strong domain shifts. In this paper, we propose the Placing Objects in Context (POC) pipeline to realistically add any object into any image via diffusion models. POC can be used to easily extend any dataset with an arbitrary number of objects. In our experiments, we present different anomaly segmentation datasets based on POC-generated data and show that POC can improve the performance of recent state-of-the-art anomaly fine-tuning methods in several standardized benchmarks. POC is also effective to learn new classes. For example, we use it to edit Cityscapes samples by adding a subset of Pascal classes and show that models trained on such data achieve comparable performance to the Pascal-trained baseline. This corroborates the low sim-to-real gap of models trained on POC-generated images

Observation of associated near-side and away-side long-range correlations in √sNN=5.02 TeV proton-lead collisions with the ATLAS detector

Two-particle correlations in relative azimuthal angle (Δϕ) and pseudorapidity (Δη) are measured in √sNN=5.02  TeV p+Pb collisions using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements are performed using approximately 1  μb-1 of data as a function of transverse momentum (pT) and the transverse energy (ΣETPb) summed over 3.1<η<4.9 in the direction of the Pb beam. The correlation function, constructed from charged particles, exhibits a long-range (2<|Δη|<5) “near-side” (Δϕ∼0) correlation that grows rapidly with increasing ΣETPb. A long-range “away-side” (Δϕ∼π) correlation, obtained by subtracting the expected contributions from recoiling dijets and other sources estimated using events with small ΣETPb, is found to match the near-side correlation in magnitude, shape (in Δη and Δϕ) and ΣETPb dependence. The resultant Δϕ correlation is approximately symmetric about π/2, and is consistent with a dominant cos⁡2Δϕ modulation for all ΣETPb ranges and particle pT

Single hadron response measurement and calorimeter jet energy scale uncertainty with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

The uncertainty on the calorimeter energy response to jets of particles is derived for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). First, the calorimeter response to single isolated charged hadrons is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo simulation using proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies of sqrt(s) = 900 GeV and 7 TeV collected during 2009 and 2010. Then, using the decay of K_s and Lambda particles, the calorimeter response to specific types of particles (positively and negatively charged pions, protons, and anti-protons) is measured and compared to the Monte Carlo predictions. Finally, the jet energy scale uncertainty is determined by propagating the response uncertainty for single charged and neutral particles to jets. The response uncertainty is 2-5% for central isolated hadrons and 1-3% for the final calorimeter jet energy scale.Comment: 24 pages plus author list (36 pages total), 23 figures, 1 table, submitted to European Physical Journal

Search for squarks and gluinos in events with isolated leptons, jets and missing transverse momentum at s√=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

The results of a search for supersymmetry in final states containing at least one isolated lepton (electron or muon), jets and large missing transverse momentum with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider are reported. The search is based on proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy s√=8 TeV collected in 2012, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20 fb−1. No significant excess above the Standard Model expectation is observed. Limits are set on supersymmetric particle masses for various supersymmetric models. Depending on the model, the search excludes gluino masses up to 1.32 TeV and squark masses up to 840 GeV. Limits are also set on the parameters of a minimal universal extra dimension model, excluding a compactification radius of 1/R c = 950 GeV for a cut-off scale times radius (ΛR c) of approximately 30

Standalone vertex finding in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

A dedicated reconstruction algorithm to find decay vertices in the ATLAS muon spectrometer is presented. The algorithm searches the region just upstream of or inside the muon spectrometer volume for multi-particle vertices that originate from the decay of particles with long decay paths. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using both a sample of simulated Higgs boson events, in which the Higgs boson decays to long-lived neutral particles that in turn decay to bbar b final states, and pp collision data at √s = 7 TeV collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC during 2011

Search for squarks and gluinos with the ATLAS detector in final states with jets and missing transverse momentum using √s=8 TeV proton-proton collision data

A search for squarks and gluinos in final states containing high-p T jets, missing transverse momentum and no electrons or muons is presented. The data were recorded in 2012 by the ATLAS experiment in s√=8 TeV proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, with a total integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1. Results are interpreted in a variety of simplified and specific supersymmetry-breaking models assuming that R-parity is conserved and that the lightest neutralino is the lightest supersymmetric particle. An exclusion limit at the 95% confidence level on the mass of the gluino is set at 1330 GeV for a simplified model incorporating only a gluino and the lightest neutralino. For a simplified model involving the strong production of first- and second-generation squarks, squark masses below 850 GeV (440 GeV) are excluded for a massless lightest neutralino, assuming mass degenerate (single light-flavour) squarks. In mSUGRA/CMSSM models with tan β = 30, A 0 = −2m 0 and μ > 0, squarks and gluinos of equal mass are excluded for masses below 1700 GeV. Additional limits are set for non-universal Higgs mass models with gaugino mediation and for simplified models involving the pair production of gluinos, each decaying to a top squark and a top quark, with the top squark decaying to a charm quark and a neutralino. These limits extend the region of supersymmetric parameter space excluded by previous searches with the ATLAS detector