阿瑟·米勒戏剧《推销员之死》中美国梦的体现

在＂美利坚＂这个新世界被意大利探险家亚美瑞格·韦斯普奇发现后,千千万万的人为着所谓的＂美国梦＂涌向那里并定居下来。从此,＂美国梦＂便成了该民族永恒的话题。＂美国梦＂让人们相信在美国,不论种族、性别和阶级,只要不懈努力就有可能获得成功,人们必须通过自己的决心、勇气以及勤奋实现理想。因此,上百年来,＂美国梦＂几乎成了所有渴望成功的美国人的精神支柱和动力源泉。美国剧作家阿瑟.米勒的代表作《推销员之死》便深刻地反应了＂美国梦＂在一群普通民众的生活中是怎样被塑造、被极力追寻的。他们之中,有的人成功了,实现了自己的梦想,过上了更好、更富裕、更幸福的生活;还有的却经历着一代又一代的失败与毁灭。     

死亡哲学:《额尔古纳河右岸》另一种历史的书写

迟子建的《额尔古纳河右岸》是一部为少数民族书写百年历史的长篇小说。让死亡成为人与自然最后的融合是鄂温克民族独特的生死观,与自然生死相依中的艰难抉择使他们向现代社会迁徙过程中对逝去生活的无奈。萨满教是这个弱小民族对死亡和自然敬畏的强大的精神信仰。人类历史的发展中存在的不可克服的悖论,那就是文明对自然生态的绞杀。     

解读方方小说的死亡叙事

中国当代女作家方方的小说因从不同角度、以不同形式呈现死亡而展示给读者独特的风景。方方小说的死亡叙事具有多样性和复杂性,死亡或是方方小说叙事的主轴、舞台的主角,或是小说暗藏的玄机、命运的密码;更或是人性脆弱妥协、变异扭曲的必然结果。方方正是以独特的死亡叙事坚守了自己关注人性、关注人的命运的文学信念。     

合理的景观设计抵制城市死角达到犯罪预防——以上海市徐家汇某高架公园环境分析为例

城市化进程不仅改变了传统土地组织结构与社会文化,也导致了日益严重的都市犯罪问题．特别是有些大城市随着城市发展出现了“城市死角”。该文主要探讨以合理的设计手法来倡导符合具体都市功能的环境设计,达到预防犯罪的目的,抵制城市死角。研究选取上海市典型的高架桥底舟固为模型,找出较为合理的设计通用手法来处理高架公园问题,旨在尽可能地使用城市集约空间,消除城市“死角”现象,     

Evaluation of a selective distributed discovery strategy in a fully decentralized biologically inspired environment

The increased demand and complexity of services operating within open distributed environments has emphasized the need for systems that are adaptive, self-organizing and more robust. In order to address these issues some agent oriented approaches have adopted ideas from natural systems as possible solutions. The introduction of biological properties, especially birth and death of agents as expected events, generates an extremely dynamic environment where it is difficult to maintain the overall connectivity of the overlay network and facilitate efficient discovery processes. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a selective discovery mechanism in a distributed bio-inspired multi-agent community through a simulation study. The primary focus of the study is on the impacts which death and (sexual/asexual) reproduction events have on the effectiveness of the discovery process in different overlay networks.     

Hierarchical Bayesian modelling of spatial age-dependent mortality

Hierarchical Bayesian modelling is considered for the number of age-dependent deaths in different geographic regions. The model uses a conditional binomial distribution for the number of age-dependent deaths, a new family of zero mean Gaussian Markov random field models for incorporating spatial correlations between neighbouring regions, and an intrinsic Gaussian model for including correlations between age-dependent mortality rates. Age-dependent mortality rates are estimated for each region, and approximate credibility intervals based on summaries of samples from the posterior distribution are obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. The consequent maps of mortality rates are less variable and smoother than those which would be obtained from naive estimates, and various inferences may be drawn from the results. The prior spatial model includes some of the common conditional autoregressive spatial models used in epidemiology, and so model uncertainty in this family can be accounted for. The methodology is illustrated with an actuarial data set of age-dependent deaths in 150 geographic regions of Hungary. Sensitivity to the prior distributions is discussed, as well as relative risks for certain covariates (males in towns, females in towns, males in villages, females in villages).     

无支座约束结构在Excel中有限元求解的初步研究

针对水利工程设计中常遇到的无支座约束结构内力计算，以涵洞倒虹吸工程结构为背景，拟探索一种能够在设计中应用的方便快捷的计算方法。经过研究与对比分析，初步确定了用有限单元法原理作为基本理论依据，采用“单元生与死”的技术，以Microsoft Excel 2000作为载体，研究设计出了此类结构的计算模型，并结合此模型研制了一个通用的内力计算表格。给出实例的计算结果与理论值的对比分析曲线。证明了此方法的有效性。     

An Architecture of Exception: Transgressing the Everyday – Superflex's Flooded McDonald's

In Flooded McDonald's, a film by Danish artists' collective Superflex, the familiar sight of the fast-food restaurant is replaced by ‘a slowly emerging apocalyptical composition’, as the interior floods, objects are displaced and the retail space fills with water. Jonathan Mosley describes how this destabilised and other disaster-invoked visions of architecture – structures and spaces breaking down – enable us to use our imagination to test the parameters of the everyday.     

Food bioactives, apoptosis, and cancer

Apoptosis interchangeably referred to as programmed cell death is a key pathway for regulating homeostasis and morphogenesis of mammalian cells and is connected with several diseases, in particular, cancer. It is widely believed that misregulation of this pathway leads to the development of cancer. Reflecting this knowledge, the mechanism of action for many currently used anticancer agents were specifically targeted to regulate the apoptotic pathway further stressing the role of programmed cell death in maintaining normal homeostasis. Another widely accepted concept is the consumption of a variety of colorful foods with strong antioxidant properties. These dietary components also referred to as bioactives would help maintain a healthy body. Although for many of these bioactives exact nutritional benefits are not yet well defined, there is demonstrated scientific evidence suggesting a role for them in cancer prevention. This review summarizes the current knowledge of food bioactives that act through the signaling pathway inducing programmed cell death, thus providing the evidence for these substances in cancer prevention.     

An adaptive hybrid memetic algorithm for thermal-aware non-slicing VLSI floorplanning

Floorplanning is a crucial step in very large scale integration design flow. It provides valuable insights into the hardware decisions and estimates a floorplan with different cost metrics. In this paper, to handle a multi-objective thermal-aware non-slicing floorplanning optimization problem efficiently, an adaptive hybrid memetic algorithm is presented to optimize the area, the total wirelength, the maximum temperature and the average temperature of a chip. In the proposed algorithm, a genetic search algorithm is used as a global search method to explore the search space as much as possible, and a modified simulated annealing search algorithm is used as a local search method to exploit information in the search region. The global exploration and local exploitation are balanced by a death probability strategy. In this strategy, according to the natural mechanisms, each individual in the population is endowed with an actual age and a dynamic survival age. Experimental results on the standard tested benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm is efficient to obtain floorplans, with decreasing the average and the peak temperature.