7,473 research outputs found
‘We want what you have’: Faustian finance in The terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim and Capital
‘We want what you have’ is the most emblematic sentence in Lanchester’s Capital: it is printed on a postcard left in the houses of Pepys Road and evokes the spectre of house repossessions followed by the 2008 financial crisis. Conversely, in literature the repossession by definition is that of Faust’s soul by Mephistopheles. Ian Watts (2006) tracing the origins of the Faustian myth recounts the historical and fictional roots of the myth and affirms that that Faust represents the ‘unrepentant individualist’. Faust’s unstoppable desire to achieve his own interests by any means is eventually the cause of his own ruin and perpetual damnation.
The financial crisis started in 2008 in the UK revealed the fallacy of the “alchemic” dream of the deregulated finance to constantly generating wealth through dubious gambling practices. The result of that individualistic and greedy pursue of wealth is the current economic and social crises. In this paper I will investigate how the parable of greed, success, crisis and final ruin is represented through Faustian echoes in Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim and Lanchester’s Capital. I will focus specifically on those characters and sections of the novels that revoke the Faustian parable in the context of the representation of deregulated finance
Switching control for incremental stabilization of nonlinear systems via contraction theory
In this paper we present a switching control strategy to incrementally
stabilize a class of nonlinear dynamical systems. Exploiting recent results on
contraction analysis of switched Filippov systems derived using regularization,
sufficient conditions are presented to prove incremental stability of the
closed-loop system. Furthermore, based on these sufficient conditions, a design
procedure is proposed to design a switched control action that is active only
where the open-loop system is not sufficiently incrementally stable in order to
reduce the required control effort. The design procedure to either locally or
globally incrementally stabilize a dynamical system is then illustrated by
means of a representative example.Comment: Accepted to ECC 201
Effects of variations of load distribution on network performance
This paper is concerned with the characterization of the relationship between
topology and traffic dynamics. We use a model of network generation that allows
the transition from random to scale free networks. Specifically, we consider
three different topological types of network: random, scale-free with \gamma =
3, scale-free with \gamma = 2. By using a novel LRD traffic generator, we
observe best performance, in terms of transmission rates and delivered packets,
in the case of random networks. We show that, even if scale-free networks are
characterized by shorter characteristic-path- length (the lower the exponent,
the lower the path-length), they show worst performances in terms of
communication. We conjecture this could be explained in terms of changes in the
load distribution, defined here as the number of shortest paths going through a
given vertex. In fact, that distribu- tion is characterized by (i) a decreasing
mean (ii) an increas- ing standard deviation, as the networks becomes
scale-free (especially scale-free networks with low exponents). The use of a
degree-independent server also discriminates against a scale-free structure. As
a result, since the model is un- controlled, most packets will go through the
same vertices, favoring the onset of congestion.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, included in conference proceedings ISCAS 2005,
Kobe Japa
Multiplex PI-Control for Consensus in Networks of Heterogeneous Linear Agents
In this paper, we propose a multiplex proportional-integral approach, for
solving consensus problems in networks of heterogeneous nodes dynamics affected
by constant disturbances. The proportional and integral actions are deployed on
two different layers across the network, each with its own topology. Sufficient
conditions for convergence are derived that depend upon the structure of the
network, the parameters characterizing the control layers and the node
dynamics. The effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated using a
power network model as a representative example.Comment: 13 pages, 6 Figures, Preprint submitted to Automatic
Reconstructing directed and weighted topologies of phase-locked oscillator networks
The formalism of complex networks is extensively employed to describe the
dynamics of interacting agents in several applications. The features of the
connections among the nodes in a network are not always provided beforehand,
hence the problem of appropriately inferring them often arises. Here, we
present a method to reconstruct directed and weighted topologies (REDRAW) of
networks of heterogeneous phase-locked nonlinear oscillators. We ultimately
plan on using REDRAW to infer the interaction structure in human ensembles
engaged in coordination tasks, and give insights into the overall behavior
Ratiometric control for differentiation of cell populations endowed with synthetic toggle switches
We consider the problem of regulating by means of external control inputs the
ratio of two cell populations. Specifically, we assume that these two cellular
populations are composed of cells belonging to the same strain which embeds
some bistable memory mechanism, e.g. a genetic toggle switch, allowing them to
switch role from one population to another in response to some inputs. We
present three control strategies to regulate the populations' ratio to
arbitrary desired values which take also into account realistic physical and
technological constraints occurring in experimental microfluidic platforms. The
designed controllers are then validated in-silico using stochastic agent-based
simulations.Comment: Accepted to CDC'201
Normal form maps for grazing bifurcations in N-dimensional piecewise-smooth dynamical systems
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