Narratives of Arab Anglophone Women and the Articulation of a Major Discourse in a Minor Literature

“It is important to stress that a variety of positions with respect to feminism, nation, religion and identity are to be found in Anglophone Arab women’s writings. This being the case, it is doubtful whether, in discussing this literary production, much mileage is to be extracted from over emphasis of the notion of its being a conduit of ‘Third World subaltern women.’” (Nash 35) Building on Geoffrey Nash’s statement and reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of minor literature and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderland(s), we will discuss in this paper how the writings of Arab Anglophone women are specific minor and borderland narratives within minor literature(s) through a tentative (re)localization of Arab women’s English literature into distinct and various categories. By referring to various bestselling English works produced by Arab British and Arab American women authors, our aim is to establish a new taxonomy that may fit the specificity of these works

Self-Similar Solutions of Triaxial Dark Matter Halos

We investigate the collapse and internal structure of dark matter halos. We consider halo formation from initially scale-free perturbations, for which gravitational collapse is self-similar. Fillmore and Goldreich (1984) and Bertschinger (1985) solved the one dimensional (i.e. spherically symmetric) case. We generalize their results by formulating the three dimensional self-similar equations. We solve the equations numerically and analyze the similarity solutions in detail, focusing on the internal density profiles of the collapsed halos. By decomposing the total density into subprofiles of particles that collapse coevally, we identify two effects as the main determinants of the internal density structure of halos: adiabatic contraction and the shape of a subprofile shortly after collapse; the latter largely reflects the triaxiality of the subprofile. We develop a simple model that describes the results of our 3D simulations. In a companion paper, we apply this model to more realistic cosmological fluctuations, and thereby explain the origin of the nearly universal (NFW-like) density profiles found in N-body simulations.Comment: corresponds to version published in Ap

Reinforcement Learning for the Unit Commitment Problem

In this work we solve the day-ahead unit commitment (UC) problem, by formulating it as a Markov decision process (MDP) and finding a low-cost policy for generation scheduling. We present two reinforcement learning algorithms, and devise a third one. We compare our results to previous work that uses simulated annealing (SA), and show a 27% improvement in operation costs, with running time of 2.5 minutes (compared to 2.5 hours of existing state-of-the-art).Comment: Accepted and presented in IEEE PES PowerTech, Eindhoven 2015, paper ID 46273

On non-vanishing and sign changes of the Fourier coefficients of Hilbert cusp forms

In this article, we study (simultaneous) non-vanishing, (simultaneous) sign changes of Fourier coefficients of (two) Hilbert cusp forms, respectively