fictional names

Unravelling Names of Fictional Characters

In this paper we explore the correlation between the sound of words and their meaning, by testing if the polarity (‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’) of a character’s role in a work of fiction can be predicted by the name of the character in the absence of any other context. Our approach is based on phonological and other features proposed in prior theoretical studies of fictional names. These features a...

Fictional Women in Mathematics

This article will argue that the situation for female mathematicians in fiction has improved, but that there is still cause for concern. You may wonder why you should care about this at all since these fictional women are (by definition) not real and therefore unlikely to be dues paying members of the AWM! With this in mind, in addition to providing examples of female mathematicians in literatu...

Mirroring Fictional Others

Fictional Planet Ballardia

The Rock Cycle is a useful pedagogical device. Science-fiction novelist James G. Ballard published a colorful description of a nameless fictional world in 1957 that has an artificially closed Rock Cycle. Were such an anthropogenic cycle instigated for Earth, it would be consistent with James Hutton’s viewpoint on the Earth as a self-repairing machine without an endogenetic end to planetary Geol...

Fictional Game Elements 2016

Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop explores the gamification design space from a critical perspective, by using design fictions to help res...

Fictional Separation Logic

Separation logic formalizes the idea of local reasoning for heap-manipulating programs via the frame rule and the separating conjunction P ∗ Q, which describes states that can be split into separate parts, with one satisfying P and the other satisfying Q. In standard separation logic, separation means physical separation. In this paper, we introduce fictional separation logic, which includes mo...