"Don't expect me to repair in four years what you have destroyed in four hundred years": On the ethos in (inter)action of Lula and Alckmin in an election TV debate

This paper analyzes the discursive strategies employed by Inácio Lula da Silva and Geraldo Alckmin during the first presidential election TV debate in Brazilian history between a president in office (Lula) and an opposition candidate (Alckmin) in 2006. Special attention is paid to those discursive strategies which were used by the candidates in their attempts to create a positive image of themselves (i.e., the discursive ethos). The paper shows that the social divisions in Brazilian society, which are rooted in the colonial period, are extremely relevant for the construction of the discursive ethos despite nearly two hundred years of Brazilian independence

Identifying combinations of tetrahedra into hexahedra: a vertex based strategy

Indirect hex-dominant meshing methods rely on the detection of adjacent tetrahedra an algorithm that performs this identification and builds the set of all possible combinations of tetrahedral elements of an input mesh T into hexahedra, prisms, or pyramids. All identified cells are valid for engineering analysis. First, all combinations of eight/six/five vertices whose connectivity in T matches the connectivity of a hexahedron/prism/pyramid are computed. The subset of tetrahedra of T triangulating each potential cell is then determined. Quality checks allow to early discard poor quality cells and to dramatically improve the efficiency of the method. Each potential hexahedron/prism/pyramid is computed only once. Around 3 millions potential hexahedra are computed in 10 seconds on a laptop. We finally demonstrate that the set of potential hexes built by our algorithm is significantly larger than those built using predefined patterns of subdivision of a hexahedron in tetrahedral elements.Comment: Preprint submitted to CAD (26th IMR special issue

Self-Stabilizing Disconnected Components Detection and Rooted Shortest-Path Tree Maintenance in Polynomial Steps

We deal with the problem of maintaining a shortest-path tree rooted at some process r in a network that may be disconnected after topological changes. The goal is then to maintain a shortest-path tree rooted at r in its connected component, V_r, and make all processes of other components detecting that r is not part of their connected component. We propose, in the composite atomicity model, a silent self-stabilizing algorithm for this problem working in semi-anonymous networks under the distributed unfair daemon (the most general daemon) without requiring any a priori knowledge about global parameters of the network. This is the first algorithm for this problem that is proven to achieve a polynomial stabilization time in steps. Namely, we exhibit a bound in O(W_{max} * n_{maxCC}^3 * n), where W_{max} is the maximum weight of an edge, n_{maxCC} is the maximum number of non-root processes in a connected component, and n is the number of processes. The stabilization time in rounds is at most 3n_{maxCC} + D, where D is the hop-diameter of V_r

Self-Stabilizing Distributed Cooperative Reset

Self-stabilization is a versatile fault-tolerance approach that characterizes the ability of a system to eventually resume a correct behavior after any finite number of transient faults. In this paper, we propose a self-stabilizing reset algorithm working in anonymous networks. This algorithm resets the network in a distributed non-centralized manner, i.e., it is multi-initiator, as each process detecting an inconsistency may initiate a reset. It is also cooperative in the sense that it coordinates concurrent reset executions in order to gain efficiency. Our approach is general since our reset algorithm allows to build self-stabilizing solutions for various problems and settings. As a matter of facts, we show that it applies to both static and dynamic specifications since we propose efficient self-stabilizing reset-based algorithms for the (1-minimal) (f, g)-alliance (a generalization of the dominating set problem) in identified networks and the unison problem in anonymous networks. Notice that these two latter instantiations enhance the state of the art. Indeed, in the former case, our solution is more general than the previous ones, while in the latter case, the complexity of our unison algorithm is better than that of previous solutions of the literature

Fair and Reliable Self-Stabilizing Communication

12 pages -- Edition: World Scientific Version 2: soumission ArXivInternational audienceWe assume a link-register communication model under read/write atomicity, where every process can read from but cannot write into its neighbours' registers. The paper presents two self-stabilizing protocols for basic fair and reliable link communication primitives. The rst primitive guarantees that any process writes a new value in its register(s) only after all its neighbours have read the previous value, whatever the initial scheduling of processes' actions. The second primitive implements a weak rendezvous communication mechanism by using an alternating bit protocol: whenever a process consecutively writes n values (possibly the same ones) in a register, each neighbour is guaranteed to read each value from the register at least once. Both protocols are self-stabilizing and run in asynchronous arbitrary networks. The goal of the paper is in handling each primitive by a separate procedure, which can be used as a black box in more involved self-stabilizing protocols

A Self-Stabilizing Communication Primitive

Invited paperInternational audienceThe goal of the paper is to provide designers of self-stabilizing protocols with a fair and reliable communication primitive, which allows any proces that writes a value in its own register to make sure that every neihgbour eventually does read that value. We assume a link register communication model under read/write atomicity, where every process can read but cannot write into its neighbours' registers. The primitive runs a self-stabilizing protocol, which implements a "rendezvous" communication mechanism in the link register asynchronous model. This protocol works in arbitrary networks and also solves the problem of how to simulate reliable self-stabilizing message-passing in asynchronous distributed systems