Guerrilla warriors on the Brooklyn Bridge: a case-study of the Unbearables' poetic terrorism (1994-2001)

On 13 September 1994, a loose collective of Downtown poets known as the Unbearables lined up on the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway, all the way from Manhattan to Brooklyn. During rush hour, they simultaneously ranted erotic poems in six-minute loops, so that, at least theoretically, "a few words from each reader would have reached each pedestrian's ear, and the whole string of phrases would add up to a single 'stochastic' poem, a different version for each and every passerby" (Bey 1994, n.p.). The Unbearables' thirty-minute performance was repeated in six consecutive years with only minor variations. The current article reconstructs the annual Brooklyn Bridge readings on the basis of previously unpublished sources that include personal interviews with the Unbearables and archival material from New York University's Fales Library Downtown Collection and the SUNY of Buffalo Poetry Collection. On the basis of this reconstruction, the article analyzes the event as a poetic implementation of anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey's theories on the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Poetic Terrorism and Artistic Disappearance

Numerical stability of descent methods for solving linear equations

In this paper we perform a round-off error analysis of descent methods for solving a liner systemAx=b, whereA is supposed to be symmetric and positive definite. This leads to a general result on the attainable accuracy of the computed sequence {xi} when the method is performed in floating point arithmetic. The general theory is applied to the Gauss-Southwell method and the gradient method. Both methods appear to be well-behaved which means that these methods compute an approximationxi to the exact solutionA−1b which is the exact solution of a slightly perturbed linear system, i.e. (A+δA)xi=b, ‖δA‖ of order ɛ‖A‖, where ɛ is the relative machine precision and ‖·‖ denotes the spectral norm

BPMN: A Meta Model for the Happy Path

Recently, the OMG has been working on developing a new standard for a business process management notation (BPMN). This standard development results in documents that contain the newest approved version of a standard or a standard proposal that can be ammended. It is our vision that such a standard document, that also serves as a specification for BPMN modeling tool developers could benefit from a fact-oriented model in which the same domain knowledge is represented conceptually as a list of concept definitions (including naming conventions), a set of information structure diagrams and the constraints or business rules that govern the instances of the information structure diagrams. In this paper we will show precisely, how such a fact-oriented conceptual view on a standard document can be created, and we will show how a fact-oriented approach can improve the completeness of a specification.management information;

A Formal ORM-to -UML Mapping Algorithm

The object-role model (ORM) data structure can be represented in the unified modeling language (UML) using the five fact encoding constructs: class attribute, association, association class, sub-class and the association qualifier. In the existing literature there exist numerous mappings of how individual fact types from an ORM information model can be mapped onto ‘well-formed’ UML expressions. What is lacking in the existing literature is a precise description of the conditions on the ‘source’ object-role model under which a specific UML fact encoding construct can be applied in the ‘target’ UML class diagram. In this paper we will show under what conditions, a specific UML fact encoding construct must be applied in a way that results in a well-formed UML class diagram.computer science applications;

Computational models of consumer confidence from large-scale online attention data: crowd-sourcing econometrics

Economies are instances of complex socio-technical systems that are shaped by the interactions of large numbers of individuals. The individual behavior and decision-making of consumer agents is determined by complex psychological dynamics that include their own assessment of present and future economic conditions as well as those of others, potentially leading to feedback loops that affect the macroscopic state of the economic system. We propose that the large-scale interactions of a nation's citizens with its online resources can reveal the complex dynamics of their collective psychology, including their assessment of future system states. Here we introduce a behavioral index of Chinese Consumer Confidence (C3I) that computationally relates large-scale online search behavior recorded by Google Trends data to the macroscopic variable of consumer confidence. Our results indicate that such computational indices may reveal the components and complex dynamics of consumer psychology as a collective socio-economic phenomenon, potentially leading to improved and more refined economic forecasting.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 13 table

Systematic description of bacterial isolants from rigorous environments

Ammonification and nitrification tests of desert soil

Microorganism study - Systematic description and key to isolants from Mexico Progress report

Systematic description and key to actinomycetes and Bacillus isolants from Mexican soil