Gramsci’s France and Gramsci in France

This is the abstract of the English translation of a review in French by Camilla Sclocco of the two collectively-authored books Gramsci in Francia, edited by R. Descendre, F. Giasi and G. Vacca, with the assistance of A. Crézégut, as part of the Gramsci nel mondo series, Bologna, il Mulino, 2020; and La France d’Antonio Gramsci, edited by R. Descendre e J-C. Zancarini for Ens Éditions, Lyon, 2021

CIÊNCIA EXPERIMENTAL E TRADUTIBILIDADE. OBJETIVIDADE E IDEOLOGIA CIENTÍFICA NOS CADERNOS DO CÁRCERE

The article constitutes a re-elaboration of the minicurso held on the occasion of the III COLÓQUIO INTERNACIONAL ANTONIO GRAMSCI (IGS-Brasil) "Filosofia da práxis e tradutibilidade: legado de Gramsci na América Latina." In the first part, the link between the reflection on experimental sciences and the theme of translatability in the Prison Notebooks is investigated. The second part discusses the relationship of Gramsci's epistemology with Croce's philosophy and Lenin's philosophy. The third part shows the relevance of Gramscian reflection on the sciences in the context of contemporary epistemological debates.O artigo constitui uma reformulação do minicurso realizado por ocasião do III COLÓQUIO INTERNACIONAL ANTONIO GRAMSCI (IGS-Brasil) "Filosofia da práxis e tradutibilidade: legado de Gramsci na América Latina". A primeira parte investiga a conexão entre a reflexão sobre as ciências experimentais e o tema da tradutibilidade nos Cadernos da Prisão. A segunda parte discute a relação da epistemologia de Gramsci com a filosofia de Croce e a filosofia de Lênin. A terceira parte mostra a relevância da reflexão de Gramsci sobre as ciências no contexto dos debates epistemológicos contemporâneos

Real-Time Dedispersion for Fast Radio Transient Surveys, using Auto Tuning on Many-Core Accelerators

Dedispersion, the removal of deleterious smearing of impulsive signals by the interstellar matter, is one of the most intensive processing steps in any radio survey for pulsars and fast transients. We here present a study of the parallelization of this algorithm on many-core accelerators, including GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, and the Intel Xeon Phi. We find that dedispersion is inherently memory-bound. Even in a perfect scenario, hardware limitations keep the arithmetic intensity low, thus limiting performance. We next exploit auto-tuning to adapt dedispersion to different accelerators, observations, and even telescopes. We demonstrate that the optimal settings differ between observational setups, and that auto-tuning significantly improves performance. This impacts time-domain surveys from Apertif to SKA.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Computin

Gramsci in Francia e la Francia di Gramsci

This is the abstract of a review in Italian by Camilla Sclocco of the two collectively-authored books Gramsci in Francia, edited by R. Descendre, F. Giasi and G. Vacca with the assistance of A. Crézégut, as part of the Gramsci nel mondo series, Bologna, il Mulino, 2020; and La France d’Antonio Gramsci, edited by R. Descendre e J-C. Zancarini and published by Ens Éditions, Lyon, 2021

Real-Time RFI Mitigation for the Apertif Radio Transient System

Current and upcoming radio telescopes are being designed with increasing sensitivity to detect new and mysterious radio sources of astrophysical origin. While this increased sensitivity improves the likelihood of discoveries, it also makes these instruments more susceptible to the deleterious effects of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). The challenge posed by RFI is exacerbated by the high data-rates achieved by modern radio telescopes, which require real-time processing to keep up with the data. Furthermore, the high data-rates do not allow for permanent storage of observations at high resolution. Offline RFI mitigation is therefore not possible anymore. The real-time requirement makes RFI mitigation even more challenging because, on one side, the techniques used for mitigation need to be fast and simple, and on the other side they also need to be robust enough to cope with just a partial view of the data. The Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS) is the real-time, time-domain, transient detection instrument of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), processing 73 Gb of data per second. Even with a deep learning classifier, the ARTS pipeline requires state-of-the-art real-time RFI mitigation to reduce the number of false-positive detections. Our solution to this challenge is RFIm, a high-performance, open-source, tuned, and extensible RFI mitigation library. The goal of this library is to provide users with RFI mitigation routines that are designed to run in real-time on many-core accelerators, such as Graphics Processing Units, and that can be highly-tuned to achieve code and performance portability to different hardware platforms and scientific use-cases. Results on the ARTS show that we can achieve real-time RFI mitigation, with a minimal impact on the total execution time of the search pipeline, and considerably reduce the number of false-positives.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures. To appear in Proceedings from the 2019 Radio Frequency Interference workshop (RFI 2019), Toulouse, France (23-26 September

The central autonomic network at rest: Uncovering functional MRI correlates of time-varying autonomic outflow.

Peripheral measures of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity at rest have been extensively employed as putative biomarkers of autonomic cardiac control. However, a comprehensive characterization of the brain-based central autonomic network (CAN) sustaining cardiovascular oscillations at rest is missing, limiting the interpretability of these ANS measures as biomarkers of cardiac control. We evaluated combined cardiac and fMRI data from 34 healthy subjects from the Human Connectome Project to detect brain areas functionally linked to cardiovagal modulation at rest. Specifically, we combined voxel-wise fMRI analysis with instantaneous heartbeat and spectral estimates obtained from inhomogeneous linear point-process models. We found exclusively negative associations between cardiac parasympathetic activity at rest and a widespread network including bilateral anterior insulae, right dorsal middle and left posterior insula, right parietal operculum, bilateral medial dorsal and ventrolateral posterior thalamic nuclei, anterior and posterior mid-cingulate cortex, medial frontal gyrus/pre-supplementary motor area. Conversely, we found only positive associations between instantaneous heart rate and brain activity in areas including frontopolar cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, anterior, middle and posterior cingulate cortices, superior frontal gyrus, and precuneus. Taken together, our data suggests a much wider involvement of diverse brain areas in the CAN at rest than previously thought, which could reflect a differential (both spatially and directionally) CAN activation according to the underlying task. Our insight into CAN activity at rest also allows the investigation of its impairment in clinical populations in which task-based fMRI is difficult to obtain (e.g., comatose patients or infants).This work was supported by the US National Institutes for Health (NIH), Office of the Director (OT2-OD023867 to VN); National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), NIH (P01-AT009965, R61-AT009306, R33-AT009306, R01-AT007550 to VN); the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), NIH (R01-AR064367 to VN); the Medical Research Council (MRC), UK (MR/P01271X/1 to LP); the American Heart Association (16GRNT26420084 to RB)

Causal influence of brainstem response to transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on cardiovagal outflow

background: the autonomic response to transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has been linked to the engagement of brainstem circuitry modulating autonomic outflow. However, the physiological mechanisms supporting such efferent vagal responses are not well understood, particularly in humans. hypothesis: we present a paradigm for estimating directional brain-heart interactions in response to taVNS. We propose that our approach is able to identify causal links between the activity of brainstem nuclei involved in autonomic control and cardiovagal outflow. methods: we adopt an approach based on a recent reformulation of granger causality that includes permutation-based, nonparametric statistics. The method is applied to ultrahigh field (7T) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected on healthy subjects during taVNS. results: our framework identified taVNS-evoked functional brainstem responses with superior sensitivity compared to prior conventional approaches, confirming causal links between taVNS stimulation and fMRI response in the nucleus tractus solitarii (NTS). furthermore, our causal approach elucidated potential mechanisms by which information is relayed between brainstem nuclei and cardiovagal, i.e., high-frequency heart rate variability, in response to taVNS. Our findings revealed that key brainstem nuclei, known from animal models to be involved in cardiovascular control, exert a causal influence on taVNS-induced cardiovagal outflow in humans. conclusion: our causal approach allowed us to noninvasively evaluate directional interactions between fMRI BOLD signals from brainstem nuclei and cardiovagal outflow