This companion explores the full breadth of Scott's work, from his early lyrics and poetry, such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake, to the Waverley Novels, and his journal and ...essays including "Chivalry and Romance." It also delves into Scott's reaction to contemporaries such as Dugald Stewart and Adam Ferguson and explores his experimentation, originality and relationship to Romanticism in order to better understand his permanent and unmistakable place in literary and popular culture. Contributors include Caroline McCracken, Flesher Alexander Dick, and Alison Lumsden.
The purpose of this work is to give a contribution to the understanding of the COVID-19 contagion in Italy. To this end, we developed a modified Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Deceased (SIRD) model ...for the contagion, and we used official data of the pandemic for identifying the parameters of this model. Our approach features two main non-standard aspects. The first one is that model parameters can be time-varying, allowing us to capture possible changes of the epidemic behavior, due for example to containment measures enforced by authorities or modifications of the epidemic characteristics and to the effect of advanced antiviral treatments. The time-varying parameters are written as linear combinations of basis functions and are then inferred from data using sparse identification techniques. The second non-standard aspect resides in the fact that we consider as model parameters also the initial number of susceptible individuals, as well as the proportionality factor relating the detected number of positives with the actual (and unknown) number of infected individuals. Identifying the model parameters amounts to a non-convex identification problem that we solve by means of a nested approach, consisting in a one-dimensional grid search in the outer loop, with a Lasso optimization problem in the inner step.
Scott's Shadow Duncan, Ian
2016, 2007., 20160802, 2007, 2008-01-01
eBook
Scott's Shadowis the first comprehensive account of the flowering of Scottish fiction between 1802 and 1832, when post-Enlightenment Edinburgh rivaled London as a center for literary and cultural ...innovation. Ian Duncan shows how Walter Scott became the central figure in these developments, and how he helped redefine the novel as the principal modern genre for the representation of national historical life.
Duncan traces the rise of a cultural nationalist ideology and the ascendancy of Scott's Waverley novels in the years after Waterloo. He argues that the key to Scott's achievement and its unprecedented impact was the actualization of a realist aesthetic of fiction, one that offered a socializing model of the imagination as first theorized by Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume. This aesthetic, Duncan contends, provides a powerful novelistic alternative to the Kantian-Coleridgean account of the imagination that has been taken as normative for British Romanticism since the early twentieth century. Duncan goes on to examine in detail how other Scottish writers inspired by Scott's innovations--James Hogg and John Galt in particular--produced in their own novels and tales rival accounts of regional, national, and imperial history.
Scott's Shadowilluminates a major but neglected episode of British Romanticism as well as a pivotal moment in the history and development of the novel.
World War II is usually seen as a titanic land battle, decided by mass armies, most importantly those on the Eastern Front. Phillips Payson O'Brien shows us the war in a completely different light. ...In this compelling new history of the Allied path to victory, he argues that in terms of production, technology and economic power, the war was far more a contest of air and sea than land supremacy. He shows how the Allies developed a predominance of air and sea power which put unbearable pressure on Germany and Japan's entire war-fighting machine from Europe and the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Air and sea power dramatically expanded the area of battle and allowed the Allies to destroy over half the Axis' equipment before it had even reached the traditional 'battlefield'. Battles such as El Alamein, Stalingrad and Kursk did not win World War II; air and sea power did.
•COVID-19.•SIR-model reducible to logistic regression.•Forecast uncertainty quantification.•Revealing effect of epidemic prevention measures.
Basing on existence of the mathematically sequential ...reduction of the three-compartmental (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered/Removed) model to the Verhulst (logistic) equation with the parameters determined by the basic characteristic of epidemic process, this model is tested in application to the recent data on COVID-19 outbreak reported by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. It is shown that such a simple model adequately reproduces the epidemic dynamics not only qualitatively but for a number of countries quantitatively with a high degree of correlation that allows to use it for predictive estimations. In addition, some features of SIR model are discussed in the context, how its parameters and conditions reflect measures attempted for the disease growth prevention that is also clearly indicated by deviations from such model solutions.
In this paper, the exact analytical solution of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic model is obtained in a parametric form. By using the exact solution we investigate some explicit ...models corresponding to fixed values of the parameters, and show that the numerical solution reproduces exactly the analytical solution. We also show that the generalization of the SIR model, including births and deaths, described by a nonlinear system of differential equations, can be reduced to an Abel type equation. The reduction of the complex SIR model with vital dynamics to an Abel type equation can greatly simplify the analysis of its properties. The general solution of the Abel equation is obtained by using a perturbative approach, in a power series form, and it is shown that the general solution of the SIR model with vital dynamics can be represented in an exact parametric form.
Identifying influential nodes in complex networks persists as a crucial issue due to its practical applications in the real world. The propagation model is a special method for identifying ...influential nodes based on propagation dynamics. However, most of propagation-based methods have not delved deeply into the impact of network topology on the propagation process. In this paper, we propose a method based on the dynamic propagation probability model, called DPP. The main idea of this method is to characterize the impact of a node on the basis of its propagation capacity during propagation process by using dynamic propagation probability within its three level neighborhood. This new metric redefines the propagation probability of neighbors by refining the propagation process, which allows the propagation probability to be transmitted in accordance with the network structure. To validate the performance of the proposed method, we compare with eight different methods from four aspects in 11 real-world networks. The experimental results demonstrate that the DPP method has good performance in most cases.
•A method based on the dynamic propagation probability model is proposed to identify influential nodes in complex networks.•It measures the impact of a node on the basis of its propagation capacity during propagation process by using dynamic propagation probability within its three level neighborhood.•The performance of the proposed method is validated from four aspects in different real-world networks.
•Simulation of the Impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants and vaccines on the spread of COVID.•New θ-SIR type model ready (and freely available) to be used with real data.•Application to the case of Italy. A ...new variant may cause a new disease wave.•Current rates of vaccination might not be enough to avoid a new disease wave.•Effective reproduction number <1 is not enough for having COVID-19 under control.
The continuous mutation of SARS-CoV-2 opens the possibility of the appearance of new variants of the virus with important differences in its spreading characteristics, mortality rates, etc. On 14 December 2020, the United Kingdom reported a potentially more contagious coronavirus variant, present in that country, which is referred to as VOC 202012/01. On 18 December 2020, the South African government also announced the emergence of a new variant in a scenario similar to that of the UK, which is referred to as variant 501.V2.
Another important milestone regarding this pandemic was the beginning, in December 2020, of vaccination campaigns in several countries. There are several vaccines, with different characteristics, developed by various laboratories and research centers.
A natural question arises: what could be the impact of these variants and vaccines on the spread of COVID-19?
Many models have been proposed to simulate the spread of COVID-19 but, to the best of our knowledge, none of them incorporates the effects of potential SARS-CoV-2 variants together with the vaccines in the spread of COVID-19. We develop here a θ−ij-SVEIHQRD mathematical model able to simulate the possible impact of this type of variants and of the vaccines, together with the main mechanisms influencing the disease spread. The model may be of interest for policy makers, as a tool to evaluate different possible future scenarios.
We apply the model to the particular case of Italy (as an example of study case), showing different outcomes. We observe that the vaccines may reduce the infections, but they might not be enough for avoiding a new wave, with the current expected vaccination rates in that country, if the control measures are relaxed. Furthermore, a more contagious variant could increase significantly the cases, becoming the most common way of infection. We show how, even with the pandemic cases slowing down (with an effective reproduction number less than 1) and the disease seeming to be under control, the effective reproduction number of just the new variant may be greater than 1 and, eventually, the number of infections would increase towards a new disease wave. Therefore, a rigorous follow-up of the evolution of the number of infections with any potentially more dangerous new variant is of paramount importance at any stage of the pandemic.
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