Common Friends Research Articles

Lope e Marino: un nuovo punto della situazione sui rapporti fra i due poeti, sulle tracce di un ritratto di Lope

This article analyzes the personal relationship between Lope de Vega and Giovan Battista Marino, both great writers of the golden age, who never met in person but kept in touch trough their literary works and some common friends. Although Marino never quoted Lope de Vega’s name when he was translating some of his lyrical works into Italian, this does not mean he was culpable of plagiarism: he read Lope’s works to re-create them in his writings. He made his esteem clearly known to the Spanish playwright from the beginning, first with the help the secretar of the Duke of Monteleon, in 1619, and then through Giangiacomo Panciroli, assistant to the Papal ambassador in Madrid Giulio Sacchetti. Marino spent his short life dreaming of a perfect edition of his work La Galeria, and in such edition, Lope would stand apart as one of his models.

Predicting the Usage Intention of Social Network Games

Social network sites (SNSs) are new communication channels with which people can share information. The main functions of SNSs, such as MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut, consist of displaying a user’s social contacts, enabling people to view each other’s social networks and search for common friends or interesting content. Social networks are also connected to gaming and it is quickly becoming one of the most popular categories of applications on SNSs. The goal of this project is to gain insight into the factors that affect user intention to use a social network game. The study uses an extended technology acceptance model and focuses on combining personal innovativeness, personal involvement, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation to explain usage intentions for social network games. The proposed model was tested with data collected from potential users of a social network game. A multiple regression analysis and MANOVA analysis were then conducted to identify the key causal relationships. It is expected that personal innovativeness and personal involvement will have positive effects on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and ultimately influence usage intentions with regard to social network games.

The evolution of friendships in Chinese online social networks

We study the evolution of friendships on Douban, an online social network frequently used by the youth in China. We look at several factors that can affect the evolution of friendships, such as having memberships in the same discussion groups and sharing common interests or common friends. We compare these factors in causing the formation of online friendships. Finally, we determine how Douban users’ interests are influenced by their online friends’ interests.

Authenticating strangers in Online Social Networks

In current Online Social Networks (OSNs), it is necessary for a user to determine whether a claimed public key belongs to a target user. In this paper, we design a system to complete this task. We first find a common friend between two users and let her help to prove the ownership of the public key. The common friend is proved to exist with high probability in fast mixing OSNs. We also propose a protocol to securely compute the intersection of friend sets. The effectiveness of the system is demonstrated by simulation.

The Mahabharata: Twenty-Five Years Later

At age eighty-five, Peter Brook does all he can to avoid interviews. He has no interest in his own legend, and as for his theatrical ideas, he has said it all before, in his autobiography (Threads of Time), in his other books (The Empty Space, The Shifting Point), and in the body of influential productions that established him as one of the giants of twentieth-century theatre. At the request of a common friend, he nevertheless kindly agreed to speak to me on the subject of his magnum opus, The Mahabharata—a focus of the book I was writing at the time (Great Lengths: Seven Marathon Plays from Three Decades, forthcoming). Brook was in New York rehearsing his adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at Lincoln Center and accompanying the Theatre for a New Audience presentation of Love is My Sin, his staging of Shakespeare sonnets. Although he announced in 2008 that he was giving up day-to-day operation of his theatre in Paris, Bouffes du Nord, he has been notably active. Among his other recent projects have been: Fragments, a program of five short pieces by Samuel Beckett; Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead; The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky; and Tierno Bokar, a parable about tolerance and fundamentalism rooted in a spiritual dispute among Sufis.

Social Capital and Social Quilts: Network Patterns of Favor Exchange

We examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange, but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange. Patterns of exchange that are locally enforceable and renegotiation-proof necessitate that all links are “supported”: any two individuals exchanging favors have a common friend. In symmetric settings, such robust networks are “social quilts”: tree-like unions of completely connected subnetworks. Examining favor exchange networks in 75 villages in rural India, we find high levels of support and identify characteristics that correlate with support. (JEL D85, O12, O18, Z13)

What Do We Expect from Our Friends?

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient be- liefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocators demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.

What do we Expect from our Friends?

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients' beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e., directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity toward named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator's demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator. (JEL: C73, C91, D64)

China–Russia–India Trilateral Relations

This article seeks to raise some fundamental conceptual issues underlying the trilateral project. Theoretically, big country relationships—especially neighbouring ones—have to be built on common interests, mutual trust and greater interdependence in mutual interests so that it cannot be set aside unilaterally by any one of the parties. This article questions whether trilateral cooperation was sustainable since China, India and Russia were neither strategic allies nor enemies; none of them shared common friends or enemies and it were only potential common interests that underpinned their interaction. The author envisages the basis of their cooperation in terms of a reaction to the post-Cold War, US-dominated world but argues that such a structure was not a pre-determined imperialist scheme which had to be changed through opposition and conflict. This reflected the traditional view of international politics and needed to be modified in a scenario where the US was also promoting a market economy-based system, endorsed by the others. Trilateral cooperation, the author contends, should be seen as a new model of cooperation, seeking common economic benefits but also operating on the basis of a broad consensus about seeking improvement in the imbalanced world order, without challenging the stability of the existing order. A potentially strong bond was their shared critique of the neo-liberal trend in international relations and while it could be seen as a minimum consensus, its significance should not be underestimated. Equally important was that the economic standing of all three in the global economy was fairly high and they were seen as the big emerging markets, even as the West generally remained dominant in the world economy.

Preface II

Angelo Marcello Anile was an internationally known appliedmathematician and mathematical physicist, passed away on November 16, 2007 after one very difficult year.Angelo Marcello Anile was an internationally known appliedmathematician and mathematical physicist, passed away on November16, 2007 after one very difficult year.I personally had the privilege to know Marcello long time ago,through our common friend and colleague Giovanni Russo, who was aformer student of Marcello freshly hired that time from myDepartment.I was impressed from his results on hydrodynamical models forSemiconductor Devices and, together Peter Markowich and RobertoNatalini, on December 1993 we invited him at the CNR IAC Institute Mauro Picone, where we were organizing a workshop on thesetopics. Marcello gave a beautiful minicourse regarding Anextended thermodynamic framework for the hydrodynamical modeling ofsemiconductors.For more information please click the “Full Text” above

Extension of Strongly Regular Graphs

The Friendship Theorem states that if any two people in a party have exactly one common friend, then there exists a politician who is a friend of everybody. In this paper, we generalize the Friendship Theorem. Let $\lambda$ be any nonnegative integer and $\mu$ be any positive integer. Suppose each pair of friends have exactly $\lambda$ common friends and each pair of strangers have exactly $\mu$ common friends in a party. The corresponding graph is a generalization of strongly regular graphs obtained by relaxing the regularity property on vertex degrees. We prove that either everyone has exactly the same number of friends or there exists a politician who is a friend of everybody. As an immediate consequence, this implies a recent conjecture by Limaye et. al.

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A Date, a Place, a Name: Jacques Derrida's Holocaust Translations

f) n Rams, Jacques Derrida reflects on his un-interrupted [le dialogue / ininterrompu] with Hans Georg Gadamer.1 Across impassable caesura of German philosopher's death, Derrida extends a belated invitation to Gadamer to engage in a on Paul Celan' s poetry and prose. Interrupted yet unceasing, posthumous two infinities, poem, as stated in subtitle takes place as an act of witness to third and as a tribute to a common friend and his poetic legacy. This moment of recollection and (double) mourning also involves a translation and retranslation of Celan's poetic word word of a poet-translator, whose own poetry has been often deemed untranslatable. Indeed, question of limits of interpretation between hermeneutics and deconstruction pivots on question of limits of translation. As has often been noted, problematic of translation, of border-crossing both between languages and within each language, is central to Derrida's work.2 In his reflection on translation, Derrida acknowledges his indebtedness to Walter Benjamin's articulation of the task of translator, on one hand, and to Heidegger's writings on language on other. What is beginning to emerge here is a constellation of texts functioning as sites of textual encounters that Derrida orchestrates between Celan and Heidegger, to which Benjamin has also been invited (these are encounters that will culminate in coda of Derrida's posthumous exchange with Gadamer). For purposes of this essay, I will focus on three of these texts, which Derrida wrote between years 1984 and 1987: Des Tours de Babel, Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, and Of Spirit.5 In a way, in his respective engagements with Heidegger's texts and with Celan's poems, Derrida takes up theme of a hoped-for yet unrealized encounter between thinker and poet, as it was alluded to in Celan's Todtnauberg.JThe poem transcribes a fated meeting between Jewish German poet from Romania and German philosopher, and their walk in woods of Black Forest down path that will forever remain half-trodden (Celan 2001, 13).4 Yet, it is this irrevocably interrupted conversation that Derrida will take up and carry toward its unfulfilled promise.

The International Financial Architecture and the Limits to Neoliberal Hegemony

Unlike neoliberalism, [the] new financial architecture recognises the limits of a disembedded global economy. Yet, rather than seeking to rein in the forces of liberalisation by re-embedding intern...

Clustering by common friends finds locally significant proteins mediating modules

Much research has been dedicated to large-scale protein interaction networks including the analysis of scale-free topologies, network modules and the relation of domain-domain to protein-protein interaction networks. Identifying locally significant proteins that mediate the function of modules is still an open problem. We use a layered clustering algorithm for interaction networks, which groups proteins by the similarity of their direct neighborhoods. We identify locally significant proteins, called mediators, which link different clusters. We apply the algorithm to a yeast network. Clusters and mediators are organized in hierarchies, where clusters are mediated by and act as mediators for other clusters. We compare the clusters and mediators to known yeast complexes and find agreement with precision of 71% and recall of 61%. We analyzed the functions, processes and locations of mediators and clusters. We found that 55% of mediators to a cluster are enriched with a set of diverse processes and locations, often related to translocation of biomolecules. Additionally, 82% of clusters are enriched with one or more functions. The important role of mediators is further corroborated by a comparatively higher degree of conservation across genomes. We illustrate the above findings with an example of membrane protein translocation from the cytoplasm to the inner nuclear membrane. All software is freely available under Supplementary information.

The Peirce Brothers, John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown, and the Boundaries of Defending Homosexuality in Late- Nineteenth-Century Anglo-America

The Peirce Brothers, John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown, and the Boundaries of Defending Homosexuality in Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-America William Pencak Pennsylvania State University On 11 April 1895 the nation published one of its many anonymous reviews of recent scholarly books, Horatio Brown's biography of John Addington Symonds. Both the biography and the review are unusual. The biography, consisting to a large extent of lengthy passages from Symonds's letters and journals, says little about the great books on Renaissance art responsible for Symonds's reputation as one of the world's great art historians. Brown deals almost exclusively with Symonds's struggle to overcome inner demons and physical illnesses, find peace and satisfaction, and do his important work. The review in turn only evaluates in passing the quality of the book itself, near its conclusion. It centers instead on the reviewer's fascination with Symonds's life and discovery of Walt Whitman as the transforming influence that unleashed his genius and permitted him a modicum of happiness.1 Why this matters for the history of sexuality is that the author of the review can be proven to be the important American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, pioneer in pragmatism and semiotics. Peirce praised both Symonds and Whitman effusively, knowing that they were attracted to men, even though, like Brown's biography, Peirce could not mention that they were "inverts" or homosexuals explicitly because of censorship. That one of history's seminal thinkers spoke about as positively in print as possible about homosexuality [End Page 153] in an era when it was "the love that dare not speak its name" and that links can be made between that defense and his larger philosophy are matters of some importance.2 One reason to claim that Peirce knew about Symonds's and Whitman's sexuality is that, four years earlier, his brother James Mills Peirce had written a letter to Symonds, first correctly identified by Jonathan Ned Katz, approving of Symonds's two books on homosexuality, A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), the first serious modern books in the English language arguing that the "pure" love of men for each other was a stimulus to the greatest civilizations, openly in the case of ancient Greece, secretly in modern times.3 Not many people would have known about these books, published privately in editions of ten and fifty copies, respectively, and circulated secretly.4 When in 1897 Havelock Ellis published James Peirce's letter (by "Professor X") in Sexual Inversion, a book he coauthored with the deceased Symonds, Symonds's family insisted that his name be removed from the title page, and a British bookseller was prosecuted for selling the volume. James Peirce was able to secure a rare copy of the edition with both Symonds's and Ellis's names—it was in his collection when he died. James would also have obtained copies of the earlier books—how else could he have responded to them?—from Thomas Sargent Perry, a common friend with Symonds. Scholar Hubert Kennedy has traced their personal contacts and possible visits in the early 1890s.5 An earlier attribution of Professor X's letter to Charles Peirce himself by the prominent scholar Leon Edel would likely have gone unchallenged had not Symonds's correspondence with James Peirce emerged. While Charles Peirce was not technically a mathematics professor at Harvard, as was his brother and as Symonds identified the writer of the letter, Charles had published enough on mathematics and spent enough time lecturing at or visiting Harvard that Symonds could easily have considered him to be one. The fact that James Peirce never published anything of a philosophical nature after his undergraduate days—he was a mathematician and helped set up the graduate school at Harvard University—might lead one to conclude that Charles [End...

A mirror of the times

Beyond the Hippocratic Oath: A memoir on the rise of modern medical ethics John Dossetor University of Alberta Press; 2005 268 pp $39.95 ISBN 0–88864–453–1 Sitting beside fellow writer John Gregory Dunne at the funeral of a common friend, Gore Vidal leaned over and asked Dunne, “Are you

Nature and the politics of hope: Ermenonville and Little Sparta

My first visit to Little Sparta was an impressive experience; at the time, Finlay was in conflict with the local authorities over a question of taxes. He considered himself at war with the bureaucrats and on the gate of his garden he had appended a large round sign with the warning WAR ZONE. Having announced my visit in a letter mentioning a common friend, I felt confident enough to enter the land of rebellion, and while I was closing the gate behind me, I noticed that it bore an inscription on its inner side.

Fruitful Death: Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger on Human Sacrifice, 1937–1945

AbstractMircea Eliade, the writer and historian of religions, and Ernst Jünger, the hero of the Great War, novelist, and essayist, met in the 1950s and co-edited twelve issues of the periodical Antaios. Before they met and cooperated, however, and while the German writer knew about Eliade from their common friend, Carl Schmitt, they both dealt with the subject of human sacrifice. Eliade began to do so in the thirties, and his interest in that theme was at least in part an aspect of his political activism on behalf of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Iron Guard, the nationalistic and anti-Semitic movement lead by Corneliu Codreanu. Sacrificial ideology was a central aspect of the Legion's political theories, as well as of the practice of its members. After the Iron Guard was outlawed by its allies, and many of its members had been killed, and while the Romanian regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu was still fighting alongside the National Socialist regime in the Second World War, Eliade turned to other aspects of sacrificial ideology. In 1939 he wrote the play Iphigenia, celebrating Agamemnon's daughter as a willing victim whose death made the Greek conquest of Troy possible; and as a member of the regime's diplomatic service in Lisbon he published a book in Portuguese on Romanian virtues (1943), in which he presented what he called Two Myths of Romanian Spirituality, extolling his nation's readiness to die through the description of the sacrificial traditions of Master Manole and of the Ewe Lamb (Mioritza). Jünger's attitude to sacrifice ran along lines that were less traditional: possibly already while serving as a Wehrmacht officer, in his pamphlet Der Friede, the German writer attributed sacrificial status to all the victims of the Second World War, soldiers, workmen, and unknowing innocents, and saw their death as the ransom of a peace "without victory or defeat." In this article, the sacrificial ideologies of the two intellectuals are compared in order to reflect upon the complex interplay between traditional religious themes, more or less freely re-interpreted and transformed, political power, and violent conflict, in an age of warfare marked by fascisms and by the terrible massacre some refer to by the name of an ancient Greek sacrificial practice.

Adam Mickiewiczs „Konrad Wallenrod“ und Aleksandr Griboedovs „Gore ot urna“

Unlike the well known and often studied personal and literary relationship between Pushkin and Mickiewicz the Polish national poet's connection with Griboyedov does not belong to the items on the agenda of Slavic research. That may have to do with the fact that in spite of their personal knowledge, of their common friends (Bulgarin, Vyazemsky) and of their popularity in the contemporary literary life of Moscow and Petersburg both poets do not take notice of each other. The article departs from Stefan Chwin's statement that notwithstanding the lack of a genetic dependence the Polish romantic tale Konrad Wallenrod and the Russian neoclassical comedy Wit from woe both are typologically connected. Written in a revolutionary atmosphere, they show the psychosocial phenomena of public conspiracy (a term borrowed from Mickiewicz's Parisian lectures) from a different point-of-view. The following article shows the problems in relation with Mickiewicz's stay in Russia and discuss the presumable reasons of the mutual absence of interest and attention. The comparative analysis takes aim to deliver further analogies and differences between both works and the circumstances of their production and reception.