Marta Suarez

La leyenda fáustica, en la que el personaje principal vende su alma al diablo por conseguir lo que más anhela en ese momento, se ha convertido, desde su primera publicación en la imprenta de Johann Spiess en 1587, en un tema recurrente en diferentes medios artísticos. En la literatura en todas sus manifestaciones, en pintura, música y cine, diferentes Faustos soñaron con el placer, el conocimiento, la fama, el dinero o el poder, y aprendieron, de manera dramática, que la vida es breve y los logros humanos efímeros. Puesto que la duda primordial de qué hay después de la muerte no puede ser satisfecha, la venta del alma se convierte en una transacción fútil o trágica, según fuera la respuesta, que ningún Fausto llega a dilucidar. Mefistófeles, el mensajero del diablo, no tiene más remedio que convertirse en un mago o en un bufón para distraer a su señor terrenal, para que no piense en temas trascendentales ni se dé cuenta de las limitaciones de su siervo. Durante cuatro siglos, los personajes de esta leyenda se han adaptado a los cambios filosóficos, sociales, políticos y económicos del mundo occidental y a su reflejo en el arte. En las últimas décadas el duelo dialéctico Fausto / Mefistófeles se ha adaptado al desarrollo de la teoría y de la ciencia en nuestra sociedad; así, encontramos feminizaciones del mito, Faustos transculturales, postmodernos y altamente tecnificados. En este artículo contemplamos su transposición al cine, mencionando las películas más significativas en el desarrollo del tema.

Based on the literature on stakeholder management and family firm dynamics, this research analyses the relationship between three constructs: the identification of business families with their family firms, FFs’ orientation toward key non-family stakeholders, and the achievement of better economic performance. Data analyses from 374 family and non-family members of 173 Spanish FFs show that a high level of family identification with their firms affects the orientation of FFs toward key non-family stakeholders in setting corporate goals and that this orientation will lead to higher economic performance only when it is built on family identification with the firm. Our results also show that the significance of both relationships changes with the degree of family involvement in the management of the FF.

The call for ever-increasing model resolutions and physical processes in climate and weather models demands a continual increase in computing power. The IBM Cell processor's order-of-magnitude peak performance increase over conventional processors makes it very attractive to fulfill this requirement. However, the Cell's characteristics, 256 kB local memory per SPE and the new low-level communication mechanism, make it very challenging to port an application. As a trial, we selected the solar radiation component of the NASA GEOS-5 climate model, which: is representative of column-physics components, has an extremely high computational intensity: the ratio of computational load to main memory transfers, and exhibits embarrassingly parallel column computations. In this paper, we converted the baseline code to C and ported it to an IBM BladeCenter QS20. For performance, we manually SIMDize four independent columns and include several unrolling optimizations. Our results show that when compared with the baseline implementation running on one core of Intel's Xeon Woodcrest, Dempsey, and Itanium2, the Cell is approximately 8.8x, 11.6x, and 12.8x faster, respectively. Our preliminary analysis shows that the Cell can also accelerate the dynamics component. We believe these dramatic performance improvements make the Cell processor very competitive as an accelerator. © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When using sample data to decide whether two populations differ, laypeople attend to the difference between group means, but largely overlook within-group variability (Obrecht, Chapman, & Gelman, 2007). We show, first, that laypeople know about and use story-implied variability when making pairwise comparisons. Then we demonstrate that participants' sensitivity to variance in a dataset is boosted when presented in a context that implies consistent variance information. Statistical data were couched in stories about electrical conductivity measurements obtained from element samples (low-variability category) or body weight measurements from samples of peoples (high-variability category). We manipulated, between participants, whether the data variance matched or mismatched the story-implied variability. Participants who received data in a matching context showed high sensitivity to variance, while those in the mismatching condition did not. Laypeople use statistical data to make reasonable inferences when those data are provided in a context that makes sense