To Archive or Not to Archive: The Resistant Potential of Digital Poetry

This essay addresses the much discussed problem of archiving digital poetry. Digital media are labile, and several writers of digital poetry are incorporating the media’s ephemerality into their poetics. Rather than rehash arguments that have been taking place within the field of digital media and digital poetics for years, I turn to the field of contemporary art curation and preservation, a field in which curators and archivists are struggling with the very immediate concerns, ethical and otherwise, related to archiving works that are made from ephemeral media. One particular digital poem that has recently broken, has recently become unreadable, is Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia. Memmott composed the poem in 2000, and he incorporated the poem’s inevitable obsolescence into the text of the poem itself. He has since refused to “fix” or “update” the poem, because he contends that that would make it something other than what it was intended to be. Rather, he is choosing to let the poem die because that is what the poem is supposed to do. This essay concludes with a discussion of the political implications of acknowledging the ephemerality of digital media, the resistant potential of the poem when its ephemerality is embraced, and some ways in which archivists can preserve the memory of the poem without necessarily preserving the poem itself

Estudio comparativo cuantitativo del rendimiento de plataformas de E-learning libres

La presente investigación contará con una estructura cuantitativa pre-experimental donde se presenta un estudio comparativo cuantitativo del rendimiento de plataformas de e-learning libres. El objetivo principal fue diseñar una metodología para la evaluación de rendimiento de las plataformas e-learning libres y aplicarlas para determinar si las plataformas e-learning libres Atutor, Claroline, Chamilo, Moodle y Sakai tienen mayor rendimiento en términos de uso de recursos técnicos, conectividad en la red y seguridad de la Información. La muestra está conformada por cinco plataformas libres. El modelo de estudio será descriptivo y el diseño no experimental transversal-descriptivo. Por tal motivo, las plataformas se probarán en dispositivos con idénticas características de hardware y software dentro de una red, donde serán sometidas a pruebas de rendimiento como lo indican las siguientes dimensiones: (a) Utilización de recursos técnicos, (b) Conectividad en la red, (c) seguridad de la Información, (d) Usabilidad. De la misma manera se enuncian los indicadores usados en la investigación: (i) Tasa de uso de CPU, (ii) Tasa de uso de memoria RAM, (iii) Tasa de uso en el disco duro, (iv) Medida de throughput, (v) Medida de latencia, (vi) ataques denegados, (vii) Cantidad de vulnerabilidades, (viii) Accesibilidad del estudiante, (ix) número de usuario concurrentes. Dichas dimensiones e indicadores ayudarán a estudiar sus variables de comportamiento para una buena elección de una plataforma en institutos, colegios, etc

Dynamical models of elliptical galaxies – I. Simple methods

We study dynamical models for elliptical galaxies, deriving the projected kinematic profiles in a form that is valid for general surface-brightness profiles and (spherical) total mass profiles, without the need for any explicit deprojection. We then show that an almost flat rotation curve, combined with modest velocity anisotropy, is already sufficient to recover the kinematic profiles of nearby ellipticals. As an application, we provide two different sets of mass estimators for elliptical galaxies, based on either the velocity dispersion at a specific location near the effective radius, or the aperture-averaged velocity dispersion. In the large aperture (virial) limit, mass estimators are naturally independent of anisotropy. The spherical mass enclosed within the effective radius Re can be estimated as 2.4Re⟨σ2p⟩/G, where ⟨σ2p⟩ is the average of the squared velocity dispersion over a finite aperture. This formula does not depend on assumptions such as mass-follows-light, and is a compromise between the cases of small and large apertures sizes. Its general agreement with results from other methods in the literature makes it a reliable means to infer masses in the absence of detailed kinematic information. If on the other hand the velocity dispersion profile is available, tight mass estimates can be found that are independent of the mass-model and anisotropy profile (within ≈ 10\% accuracy). Explicit formulae are given for small anisotropy, large radii and/or power-law total densities. Motivated by recent observational claims, we also discuss the issue of weak homology of elliptical galaxies, emphasizing the interplay between morphology and orbital structure