Entanglement entropy and D1-D5 geometries

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.066004Giusto, Stefano, and Rodolfo Russo. "Entanglement Entropy and D1-D5 geometries." Physical Review D 90.6 (2014): 066004

Beauty: a bioform of storytelling?

L'articolo si concentra sulla recente teoria del cosiddetto 'period-eye' ha mostrato l'influenza costante di quello che ci circonda sulla nostra percezione di ciò che è bello, confermando le teorie neo-darwiniane, alla luce dei meccanismi storici e sociali, non solo bio-evolutivi

Perché piacciono maghi e vampiri: letteratura, cognitivismo e controfattualità

Recenti test sul potenziale socio-cognitivo e il valore edonico di testi letterari che utilizzano elementi magici rivelano come la controfattualità costituisca una ‘palestra mentale’ per i lettori: essi apprendono a elaborare spiegazioni causali complesse e incrementano i fattori coinvolti nel costituirsi della coesione sociale, sia nel caso di lettori young adult sia nel caso di lettori adulti. Lo psicologo Eugene Subbotsky ha dimostrato che la magia ci rende più sensibili alle operazioni di Teoria della Mente e socialmente empatici, mentre un gruppo di narratologi ha di recente misu- rato i tempi di riassorbimento della dissonanza cognitiva prodotta dall’elemento magico: ciò rie- sce fra l’altro a spiegare il grande successo di Harry Potter e della saga di Twilight.L'articolo indaga i meccanismi contrattuali della letteratura dal punto di vista neurocognitivista

Dan Brown: Morphology of a Bestsellersaurus

L'articolo indaga da un punto di vista narratologico l'opera di Dan Brown e la teoria della serial fiction

The immersive novel

The paper analyzes the emergence of an emotional immersion pattern in the works of authors of the contemporary bestselling such as Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk, in particular the novel The Museum of Innocence, the Hunger Games saga by Suzanne Collins and the Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Tetralogy, El cementerio de los libros olvidados

Suspense is the Key. Narratology, Cognitive Neurosciences and Computer Technology

L'articolo indaga i meccanismi neurocognitivi alla base della suspense sia in ambito letterario che filmico

Graph Reachability on Parallel Many-Core Architectures

Many modern applications are modeled using graphs of some kind. Given a graph, reachability, that is, discovering whether there is a path between two given nodes, is a fundamental problem as well as one of the most important steps of many other algorithms. The rapid accumulation of very large graphs (up to tens of millions of vertices and edges) from a diversity of disciplines demand efficient and scalable solutions to the reachability problem. General-purpose computing has been successfully used on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize algorithms that present a high degree of regularity. In this paper, we extend the applicability of GPU processing to graph-based manipulation, by re-designing a simple but efficient state-of-the-art graph-labeling method, namely the GRAIL (Graph Reachability Indexing via RAndomized Interval) algorithm, to many-core CUDA-based GPUs. This algorithm firstly generates a label for each vertex of the graph, then it exploits these labels to answer reachability queries. Unfortunately, the original algorithm executes a sequence of depth-first visits which are intrinsically recursive and cannot be efficiently implemented on parallel systems. For that reason, we design an alternative approach in which a sequence of breadth-first visits substitute the original depth-first traversal to generate the labeling, and in which a high number of concurrent visits is exploited during query evaluation. The paper describes our strategy to re-design these steps, the difficulties we encountered to implement them, and the solutions adopted to overcome the main inefficiencies. To prove the validity of our approach, we compare (in terms of time and memory requirements) our GPU-based approach with the original sequential CPU-based tool. Finally, we report some hints on how to conduct further research in the area

Creativity and Autism Spectrum Conditions: a Hypothesis on Lewis Carroll

The hypothesis formulated by Simon Baron-Cohen and his collaborators on the onset of autistic syndromes and their link with an excess of the so-called S brain is reflected in the work of Lewis Carroll, a formal logic and mathematics professor deeply inclined to visual and spatial descriptions, interested in affordances and systemic circuits, and devoid of empathic tendencies in creating his characters. In the future, this finding may serve as a test for predicting autism spectrum disorders and support the elaboration of narrative artefact for therapeutic purposes in relation to people with autism

Creativity and Autism Spectrum Conditions: a Hypothesis on Lewis Carroll

The hypothesis formulated by Simon Baron-Cohen and his collaborators on the onset of autistic syndromes and their link with an excess of the so-called S brain is reflected in the work of Lewis Carroll, a formal logic and mathematics professor deeply inclined to visual and spatial descriptions, interested in affordances and systemic circuits, and devoid of empathic tendencies in creating his characters. In the future, this finding may serve as a test for predicting autism spectrum disorders and support the elaboration of narrative artefact for therapeutic purposes in relation to people with autism