3,248 research outputs found
Samuel Beckett and the Writers of Port-Royal
It has been observed that ‘the literary influences on Beckett have been far more important than has been acknowledged, and more important indeed, than the philosophical influences’ (Smith 2002: 3). The truth of this statement is evidenced by the description that scholars have given of Samuel Beckett’s relationship to seventeenth century French classicism. To date, critical interest has been limited for the most part to the figure of the philosopher René Descartes on the (fragile) grounds that Beckett was exclusively concerned with the Cartesian imperative of clarity and order, the fundamental dualism between body and mind, and Nominalism.
Together with the assumption that Beckett’s vision was essentially Cartesian, his literary filiation with Pascal was suggested by critics, but only in terms of Beckett’s formal approach to the theatre. In his short article on En attendant Godot in 1953, the playwright Jean Anouilh was among the first reviewers to suggest that Beckett’s drama synthesizes the encounter between ‘classicism’ and a ‘modern’ form of art. It is well known that Beckett retained a lifelong admiration for Pascal – indeed, Pascal was one of his ‘old chestnuts’ (Knowlson 1997: 653). Little attention has been paid, however, to the originality of Pascal’s thought, the specific nature of his prose, and the impact these might have had upon Beckett’s mature work, especially the trilogy and the subsequent short prose. Yet, in the literary and philosophical context of post-war France, Beckett’s filiation with Pascal, their corresponding preoccupations, were evident to his contemporaries, who identified Pascal as an underlying presence in his works
How should context-escaping closures proceed?
Context-oriented programming treats execution context explicitly and provides means for context-dependent adaptation at runtime. This is achieved, for example, using dynamic layer activation and contextual dispatch, where the context consists of a layer environment of a stack of active layers. Layers can adapt existing behaviour using proceed to access earlier activated layers. A problem arises when a call to proceed is made from within a closure that escapes the layer environment in which it was defined. It is not clear how to interpret proceed when the closure is subsequently applied in a different environment, because the layers it implicitly refers to (such as the original layer and/or the remaining layers) may no longer be active. In this paper, we describe this problem in detail and present some approaches for dealing with it, though ultimately we leave the question open.status: Publishe
Generic accelerated sequence alignment in SeqAn using vectorization and multi-threading
Motivation
Pairwise sequence alignment is undoubtedly a central tool in many bioinformatics analyses. In this paper, we present a generically accelerated module for pairwise sequence lignments applicable for a broad range of applications. In our module, we unified the standard dynamic programming kernel used for pairwise sequence alignments and extended it with a generalized inter-sequence vectorization layout, such that many alignments can be computed simultaneously by exploiting SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions of modern processors. We then extended the module by adding two layers of thread-level parallelization, where we a) distribute many independent alignments on multiple threads and b) inherently parallelize a single alignment computation using a work stealing approach producing a dynamic wavefront progressing along the minor diagonal.
Results
We evaluated our alignment vectorization and parallelization on different processors, including the newest Intel® Xeon® (Skylake) and Intel® Xeon Phi™ (KNL) processors, and use cases. The instruction set AVX512-BW (Byte and Word), available on Skylake processors, can genuinely improve the performance of vectorized alignments. We could run single alignments 1600 times faster on the Xeon Phi™ and 1400 times faster on the Xeon® than executing them with our previous sequential alignment module.
Availability
The module is programmed in C++ using the SeqAn (Reinert et al., 2017) library and distributed with version 2.4. under the BSD license. We support SSE4, AVX2, AVX512 instructions and included UME::SIMD, a SIMD-instruction wrapper library, to extend our module for further instruction sets. We thoroughly test all alignment components with all major C++ compilers on various platforms
Sabil and Wikala of Dhul Fiqar Oda Bashi
interior, courtyard, "Vue de l'Okel Zoulfiqar," color plate XLIV of Pascal Coste's "Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826", 1818-182
First person - Aude Pascal
International audienceFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Aude Pascal is first author on `Annexin A2 and Ahnak control cortical NuMA-dynein localization and mitotic spindle orientation', published in JCS. Aude is a research assistant in the lab of Re ' gis Giet at University of Rennes, France, who is particularly interested in developmental biology. She has always been struck by the fact that a whole organism displaying multiple functions arises from a single cell. For this reason, she has oriented her research on mitosis and meiosis to study the different steps, components and structures involved in these processes
Pascal Tutorial, 1987
There exists a limited number of tutorials for the Pascal programming language using the Apple Computer. The demand for these tutorials exceeds the supply. In this thesis an attempt was made to rectify this shortage by designing a Pascal tutorial for the Apple computer. This Pascal tutorial is designed to assist with instructing an introductory computer programming course in Pascal, incorporating Apple Superpilot as the authoring language. Emphasis is placed on making the program "user friendly." A person with no previous programming experience should be able to easily execute this tutorial. The information presented as the subject matter of the tutorial will follow the guidelines recommended by the Association for Computing Machinery
Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826
general view, "Vue des Tombeaux au Nord-Est de la Ville," color plate LXIII of Pascal Coste's "Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826", 1818-182
Gamia el-Muaiyad
interior, qibla wall, "Vue de la Niche du Sanctuaire et de la Chaire de la Mosquee el Moyed"," color plate XXVIII of Pascal Coste's "Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826", 1818-182
Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826
section, section of the prayer hall, and details of inscription and chandelier, Plate XXIII of Pascal Coste's "Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826
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