“‘For you, pollution’: The Victorian Novel and a Human Ecology. Disraeli’s Sibyl and Gaskell’s Mary Barton”

Catherine Gallagher, in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel locates the interest of Victorian literature in its deconstruction of boundaries. Her notion of a ‘dialectical synthesis’, in the novel, between Victorian political economy and ‘the unique, nonfungible properties of things’ and ‘noninstrumental nature of people’ (2006: 1) might, in turn, inform a less dichotomous ecological theory that would substitute (broadly) romantic, deep ecology with a more dialectical understanding in which the now recognised complexity of ecological systems would extend to encompass the human realm including, ultimately, issues around environmental injustice

On Pl\"ucker Equations Characterizing Grassmann Cones

Polynomial solutions to the KP hierarchy are known to be parametrized by a cone over an infinite-dimensional Grassmann variety. Using the notion of Schubert derivation on a Grassmann algebra, we encode the classical Pl\"ucker equations of Grassmannians of r-dimensional subspaces in a formula whose limit for $r\rightarrow\infty$ coincides with the KP hierarchy phrased in terms of vertex operators.Comment: 20 Page

Can Negligible Cooperation Increase Network Reliability?

In network cooperation strategies, nodes work together with the aim of increasing transmission rates or reliability. This paper demonstrates that enabling cooperation between the transmitters of a two-user multiple access channel, via a cooperation facilitator that has access to both messages, always results in a network whose maximal- and average-error sum-capacities are the same---even when those capacities differ in the absence of cooperation and the information shared with the encoders is negligible. From this result, it follows that if a multiple access channel with no transmitter cooperation has different maximal- and average-error sum-capacities, then the maximal-error sum-capacity of the network consisting of this channel and a cooperation facilitator is not continuous with respect to the output edge capacities of the facilitator. This shows that there exist networks where sharing even a negligible number of bits per channel use with the encoders yields a non-negligible benefit.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

The Benefit of Encoder Cooperation in the Presence of State Information

In many communication networks, the availability of channel state information at various nodes provides an opportunity for network nodes to work together, or "cooperate." This work studies the benefit of cooperation in the multiple access channel with a cooperation facilitator, distributed state information at the encoders, and full state information available at the decoder. Under various causality constraints, sufficient conditions are obtained such that encoder cooperation through the facilitator results in a gain in sum-capacity that has infinite slope in the information rate shared with the encoders. This result extends the prior work of the authors on cooperation in networks where none of the nodes have access to state information.Comment: Extended version of paper presented at ISIT 2017 in Aachen. 20 pages, 1 figur

Negligible Cooperation: Contrasting the Maximal- and Average-Error Cases

In communication networks, cooperative strategies are coding schemes where network nodes work together to improve network performance metrics such as the total rate delivered across the network. This work studies encoder cooperation in the setting of a discrete multiple access channel (MAC) with two encoders and a single decoder. A network node, here called the cooperation facilitator (CF), that is connected to both encoders via rate-limited links, enables the cooperation strategy. Previous work by the authors presents two classes of MACs: (i) one class where the average-error sum-capacity has an infinite derivative in the limit where CF output link capacities approach zero, and (ii) a second class of MACs where the maximal-error sum-capacity is not continuous at the point where the output link capacities of the CF equal zero. This work contrasts the power of the CF in the maximal- and average-error cases, showing that a constant number of bits communicated over the CF output link can yield a positive gain in the maximal-error sum-capacity, while a far greater number of bits, even numbers that grow sublinearly in the blocklength, can never yield a non-negligible gain in the average-error sum-capacity