A good, a bad, and an evil character: Who renders a novel most enjoyable?✰

Abstract The choice, or invention, of protagonists is an important part of the poetics and aesthetics of narratives and dramas. Aristotle stipulated that, for the purposes of engaging the readers or onlookers, protagonists should neither be excessively good nor excessively bad, leaving room for much variation in the middle-ground ( Aristotle, 1961 ). A theoretical model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception (Menninghaus et al., 2017) supports the conclusion that aesthetically preferred choices of characters may not be equally distributed between the poles of saints and villains, but show a bias towards the latter. We experimentally tested this assumption by presenting an identical excerpt from a novel by Jose Saramago to participants, while exclusively inserting a few words of background information which cast the protagonist's distant past either in a morally good, bad, or evil light. Compared to the good character version, the bad character version indeed had an enhancing effect on scales for "suspenseful," "captivating," and "entertaining," and no adverse effect on any of the seven other aesthetically evaluative dimensions. Fully supporting Aristotle's thumb rule, none of these enhancing effects of character Badness on aesthetic perception/evaluation compared to the good character condition extended to the evil character version. Moreover, moral evilness of the protagonist had an adverse effect on sympathy, though not on empathy. In contrast, the good and the bad character versions were rated equally not only on empathy, but also on sympathy scales

Nearest-Neighbor Queries in Customizable Contraction Hierarchies and Applications

Customizable contraction hierarchies are one of the most popular route planning frameworks in practice, due to their simplicity and versatility. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for finding k-nearest neighbors in customizable contraction hierarchies by systematically exploring the associated separator decomposition tree. Compared to previous bucket-based approaches, our algorithm requires much less target-dependent preprocessing effort. Moreover, we use our novel approach in two concrete applications. The first application are online k-closest point-of-interest queries, where the points of interest are only revealed at query time. We achieve query times of about 25 milliseconds on a continental road network, which is fast enough for interactive systems. The second application is travel demand generation. We show how to accelerate a recently introduced travel demand generator by a factor of more than 50 using our novel nearest-neighbor algorithm

A good, a bad, and an evil character: Who renders a novel most enjoyable?\u2730

The choice, or invention, of protagonists is an important part of the poetics and aesthetics of narratives and dramas. Aristotle stipulated that, for the purposes of engaging the readers or onlookers, protagonists should neither be excessively good nor excessively bad, leaving room for much variation in the middle-ground (Aristotle, 1961). A theoretical model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception (Menninghaus et al., 2017) supports the conclusion that aesthetically preferred choices of characters may not be equally distributed between the poles of saints and villains, but show a bias towards the latter. We experimentally tested this assumption by presenting an identical excerpt from a novel by Jos\ue9 Saramago to participants, while exclusively inserting a few words of background information which cast the protagonist's distant past either in a morally good, bad, or evil light. Compared to the good character version, the bad character version indeed had an enhancing effect on scales for \u201csuspenseful,\u201d \u201ccaptivating,\u201d and \u201centertaining,\u201d and no adverse effect on any of the seven other aesthetically evaluative dimensions. Fully supporting Aristotle's thumb rule, none of these enhancing effects of character Badness on aesthetic perception/evaluation compared to the good character condition extended to the evil character version. Moreover, moral evilness of the protagonist had an adverse effect on sympathy, though not on empathy. In contrast, the good and the bad character versions were rated equally not only on empathy, but also on sympathy scales

Real-Time Traffic Assignment Using Fast Queries in Customizable Contraction Hierarchies

Given an urban road network and a set of origin-destination (OD) pairs, the traffic assignment problem asks for the traffic flow on each road segment. A common solution employs a feasible-direction method, where the direction-finding step requires many shortest-path computations. In this paper, we significantly accelerate the computation of flow patterns, enabling interactive transportation and urban planning applications. We achieve this by revisiting and carefully engineering known speedup techniques for shortest paths, and combining them with customizable contraction hierarchies. In particular, our accelerated elimination tree search is more than an order of magnitude faster for local queries than the original algorithm, and our centralized search speeds up batched point-to-point shortest paths by a factor of up to 6. These optimizations are independent of traffic assignment and can be generally used for (batched) point-to-point queries. In contrast to prior work, our evaluation uses real-world data for all parts of the problem. On a metropolitan area encompassing more than 2.7 million inhabitants, we reduce the flow-pattern computation for a typical two-hour morning peak from 76.5 to 10.5 seconds on one core, and 4.3 seconds on four cores. This represents a speedup of 18 over the state of the art, and three orders of magnitude over the Dijkstra-based baseline

Customizable Contraction Hierarchies with Turn Costs

We incorporate turn restrictions and turn costs into the route planning algorithm customizable contraction hierarchies (CCH). There are two common ways to represent turn costs and restrictions. The edge-based model expands the network so that road segments become vertices and allowed turns become edges. The compact model keeps intersections as vertices, but associates a turn table with each vertex. Although CCH can be used as is on the edge-based model, the performance of preprocessing and customization is severely affected. While the expanded network is only three times larger, both preprocessing and customization time increase by up to an order of magnitude. In this work, we carefully engineer CCH to exploit different properties of the expanded graph. We reduce the increase in customization time from up to an order of magnitude to a factor of about 3. The increase in preprocessing time is reduced even further. Moreover, we present a CCH variant that works on the compact model, and show that it performs worse than the variant on the edge-based model. Surprisingly, the variant on the edge-based model even uses less space than the one on the compact model, although the compact model was developed to keep the space requirement low

The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review

Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry. Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is why simulation software engineering (SSE) is emerging lately as a research focus. The dichotomous trade-off between scalability and efficiency (SE) on the one hand and maintainability and portability (MP) on the other hand is one of the core challenges. We report on the SE/MP trade-off in the context of an ongoing systematic literature review (SLR). After characterizing the issue of the SE/MP trade-off using two examples from our own research, we (1) review the 33 identified articles that assess the trade-off, (2) summarize the proposed solutions for the trade-off, and (3) discuss the findings for SSE and future work. Overall, we see evidence for the SE/MP trade-off and first solution approaches. However, a strong empirical foundation has yet to be established; general quantitative metrics and methods supporting software developers in addressing the trade-off have to be developed. We foresee considerable future work in SSE across scientific communities.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for presentation at the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for High Performance Computing in Computational Science and Engineering (SEHPCCSE 2016

Thermal field methods of the shallow subsurface

Temperature is one major physical quantity of the subsurface and therefore, heat can be used as a tracer. This thesis further promotes heat as a tracer by evaluating a thermal tracer test and comparing the obtained results to previous studies. Additionally, a new thermal field test for the hydraulic characterization of the subsurface is developed. This new development transfers the thermal response test, to a powerful hydrogeological field test, by introducing a new evaluation approach

Double Superhelix Model of High Density Lipoprotein

High density lipoprotein (HDL), the carrier of so-called “good” cholesterol, serves as the major athero-protective lipoprotein and has emerged as a key therapeutic target for cardiovascular disease. We applied small angle neutron scattering (SANS) with contrast variation and selective isotopic deuteration to the study of nascent HDL to obtain the low resolution structure in solution of the overall time-averaged conformation of apolipoprotein AI (apoA-I) versus the lipid (acyl chain) core of the particle. Remarkably, apoA-I is observed to possess an open helical shape that wraps around a central ellipsoidal lipid phase. Using the low resolution SANS shapes of the protein and lipid core as scaffolding, an all-atom computational model for the protein and lipid components of nascent HDL was developed by integrating complementary structural data from hydrogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry and previously published constraints from multiple biophysical techniques. Both SANS data and the new computational model, the double superhelix model, suggest an unexpected structural arrangement of protein and lipids of nascent HDL, an anti-parallel double superhelix wrapped around an ellipsoidal lipid phase. The protein and lipid organization in nascent HDL envisages a potential generalized mechanism for lipoprotein biogenesis and remodeling, biological processes critical to sterol and lipid transport, organismal energy metabolism, and innate immunity

linguistic representation and conceptual structure

This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation and on the felt emotional state, respectively. By applying a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and computing the Cognitive Salience Index, we identified joy and sadness as key emotional ingredients of being moved, and significant life events and art experiences as main elicitors of this emotional state. Metric multidimensional scaling analyses of the semantic field revealed that the core terms designate a cluster of emotional states characterized by low degrees of arousal and slightly positive valence, the latter due to a nearly balanced representation of positive and negative elements in the conceptual structure of being moved

neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles

It is a common experience—and well established experimentally—that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry