714 research outputs found

    This is (not) the end. Forme della fine tra serialità e narratività

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    A partire dalla fine, ricostruire il senso. Questo libro nasce dal progetto di un convegno interdisciplinare del Centro Internazionale di Scienze Semiotiche che si sarebbe dovuto tenere presso l’Università di Urbino, con la partecipazione di sociologi, semiologi, studiosi di media, e che, a causa della pandemia da Covid scoppiata agli inizi del 2020, si è poi rapidamente trasformato in un seminario online. L’idea era dunque quella di ragionare sul pensiero della fine, nelle sue possibili e plurali sfaccettature. La condizione della fine, cioè quella di una necessaria conclusione esistenziale, intesa come una sorta di radicale antropologico a partire dal quale tentare di fornire un senso alla vita, ovvero un ordine alle cose. Osservando, a margine, che le narrazioni, specie quelle mediali contemporanee, rappresentano di fatto uno dei luoghi privilegiati della messa in scena finzionale, attraverso la quale tentare un ragionamento sul senso. Narrazioni che si presentano ramificate, estremamente diffuse, e caratterizzate da una prevalenza della dimensione seriale, che, in quanto tale, nega, ritarda o dilata all’estremo, ogni possibile finale. Un’occasione per riflettere sul fatto che sia proprio la fine ad avere un senso, ad essere in grado di innescare lo stimolo per un ragionamento esistenziale retrospettivo, attraverso la forma della narrazione

    Informazione e consumi culturali: scenari di uso

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    Il saggio riflette sul posizionamento dell'informazione culturale nel campo dei consumi culturali, in una duplice prospettiva: da un lato come attività di orientamento delle scelte nel campo dei consumi di prodotti culturali, dall’altro come possibile forma di consumo culturale in sé. Nella seconda accezione, l’informazione culturale “consumata” può essere osservata con le categorie tipiche della letteratura della sociologia della cultura che si occupa di consumi culturali (in particolare il filone anglosassone che riattualizza la lezione di Pierre Bourdieu), ivi inclusa l’idea ormai classica di onnivorismo culturale, che necessita di rilettura critica, e di voracità culturale. E' inoltre valutata l’influenza delle classiche variabili strutturali e del capitale culturale formale, attraverso l'analisi delle correlazioni tra consumi di informazione culturale e livelli di istruzione

    Moving through fear: A conversation with Susan Campbell Bartoletti

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    Prior to its release in August 2010, Susan Campbell Bartoletti\u27s newest book, They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (2010), received an incredibly positive response in the form of starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Publisher\u27s Weekly, Horn Book, and Kirkus Reviews. Through her impeccable research and ability to weave a compelling story out of the place where darkness and light smack up against each other (Bartoletti & Zusak, 2008), she has made it possible for children and young adults to access and understand the horror of the Third Reich in Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler\u27s Shadow (2005), famine in Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine (2001), and child labor in Kids on Strike! (1999) and Growing Up in Coal Country (1996). Richie Partington (2010), in his Richie\u27s Pick review of They Called Themselves the K.K.K., writes It is, of course, through reading a book like this -- and understanding the Why? -- that we gain the insight necessary to help stop the flames of hatred and fear from spreading in whatever direction they next travel. We had the occasion to talk with Susan shortly after she turned in the manuscript for They Called Themselves the K.K.K., and she graced us with her delightful sense of humor and answered questions about her writing process and body of work -- a perfect fit with this issue\u27s theme: literature that promotes healing, compassion, and activism. You can find out more about Susan at her website, http://www.scbartoletti.com

    Orti e giardini collettivi: pratiche grassroots e politiche urbane

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    The Author focus on the recent resurgence of urban gardening in Western cities and on the effects of this grassroots cultural and social innovation on the evolution of urban public policies. Traditionally vegetable gardens (allotments) are associated to popular classes and subsistence economy, but recently we register a new movement in collective and critical gardening that redesign their identity, purposes and meanings. The analysis focus on three case studies of innovative urban policies: the pioneering experience of community gardens in New York City and the Green Thumb municipality program; the Main Verte shared gardens program (jardins partagés) of the municipality of Paris (France); and the public program of «social » allotments for elderly people of the municipality of Bologna (Italy), recently reformed in order to open the policy to all citizens and generations. The aim is to analyse challenges, opportunities and problems for urban public policies interested in a dialogue with grassroots practices in collective and critical gardening

    A true concurrent model of smart contracts executions

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    The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state of smart contracts is collaboratively maintained by a peer-to-peer network of mutually untrusted nodes, which collect from users a set of transactions (representing the required actions on contracts), and execute them in some order. Once this sequence of transactions is appended to the blockchain, the other nodes validate it, re-executing the transactions in the same order. The serial execution of transactions does not take advantage of the multi-core architecture of modern processors, so contributing to limit the throughput. In this paper we propose a true concurrent model of smart contracts execution. Based on this, we show how static analysis of smart contracts can be exploited to parallelize the execution of transactions

    A theory of transaction parallelism in blockchains

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    Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which collaboratively maintain an append-only ledger of transactions, called blockchain. Transactions represent the actions required by users, e.g. the transfer of some units of crypto-currency to another user, or the execution of a smart contract which distributes crypto-assets according to its internal logic. Part of the nodes of the peer-to-peer network compete to append transactions to the blockchain. To do so, they group the transactions sent by users into blocks, and update their view of the blockchain state by executing these transactions in the chosen order. Once a block of transactions is appended to the blockchain, the other nodes validate it, re-executing the transactions in the same order. The serial execution of transactions does not take advantage of the multi-core architecture of modern processors, so contributing to limit the throughput. In this paper we develop a theory of transaction parallelism for blockchains, which is based on static analysis of transactions and smart contracts. We illustrate how blockchain nodes can use our theory to parallelize the execution of transactions. Initial experiments on Ethereum show that our technique can improve the performance of nodes

    Figure della morte e forme della fine, a partire da CHERNOBYL

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    Nella prima parte di queste riflessioni ci soffermeremo su due forme di rappresentazione della morte al cinema e nelle serie tv, mettendo in contrasto la morte violenta (per arma da fuoco o per impiccagione) con quella per malattia (nello specifico per sindrome acuta da irradiazione). Tenteremo quindi di delineare alcune “figure delle morte” nelle loro rappresentazioni audiovisive. Nella seconda parte del saggio riprenderemo queste configurazioni per metterle al servizio delle forme narrative seriali, per soffermarci sul finale sospeso della serie Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) e sull’espansione intermediale della sua lunga sequenza di chiusura
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