Primary progressive aphasia: six questions in search of an answer

Here, we review recent progress in the diagnosis and management of primary progressive aphasia—the language-led dementias. We pose six key unanswered questions that challenge current assumptions and highlight the unresolved difficulties that surround these diseases. How many syndromes of primary progressive aphasia are there—and is syndromic diagnosis even useful? Are these truly ‘language-led’ dementias? How can we diagnose (and track) primary progressive aphasia better? Can brain pathology be predicted in these diseases? What is their core pathophysiology? In addition, how can primary progressive aphasia best be treated? We propose that pathophysiological mechanisms linking proteinopathies to phenotypes may help resolve the clinical complexity of primary progressive aphasia, and may suggest novel diagnostic tools and markers and guide the deployment of effective therapies

Sexual harassment on the London Underground: Mobilities, temporalities and knowledges of gendered violence in public transport

This thesis explores women’s experiences of sexual harassment on the London Underground network. Taking a qualitative approach, 29 semi-structured interviews with women who have experienced harassment and 15 semi-structured interviews with members of the British Transport Police form the basis of this study. The originality of this thesis is two fold. Firstly, it offers an empirical analysis of women’s experiences of sexual harassment in the London Underground, in a situation where sexual harassment in public transport has mainly been studied in the Global South. Secondly, using a novel conceptual framework built around the concepts of space, mobilities and rhythm, temporalities and knowledges, this research opens up a new perspective at the intersections of feminist research on gendered violence and a mobilities perspective. The study demonstrates that: urban space and transport are experienced in a gendered way; mobilities and rhythms intertwine with space, shaping how sexual harassment is perpetrated and how women experience it in public transport; that memories and the impact of sexual harassment are negotiated over time and space, and; that knowledge of sexual harassment is situated, varying from different perspectives (victims, police), depending on how a knowledge base is constructed. This thesis as a whole makes an important contribution to our understanding of a particular form of gendered violence happening within the transitory space of an underground in a major Western metropolis. By using the concepts of mobilities, temporalities and knowledges, this thesis provides insight into how women anticipate, experience, react to and remember sexual harassment in transport. It shows how these incidents impact on their mobilities in the city without reducing their reactions to feelings of fear and vulnerability, highlighting that the way in which women negotiate sexual harassment is often done to minimise and resist the impact of these male intrusions and reclaim space in the cit

Crime and Fear in Public Places

No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place does. A public place, whatever its nature – a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner – is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five crosscutting themes: the nature of the city’s environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals’ daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original articles contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

New perspectives on speech motor planning and programming in the context of the four- level model and its implications for understanding the pathophysiology underlying apraxia of speech and other motor speech disorders

BACKGROUND : The complexity of speech motor control, and the incomplete conceptualisation of phases in the transformation of the speech code from linguistic symbols to a code amenable to a motor system, tend to obscure the understanding of acquired apraxia of speech (AOS). The four-level framework (FLF) of speech sensorimotor control suggests the differentiation between speech motor planning, programming and execution and locate the locus of disruption in AOS in the motor planning phase. Currently, terminological confusion and uncertainty regarding phases in speech motor control still complicate the characterisation of AOS. This neuromotor disorder is inconsistently described in the literature as a “planning or programming”, “planning and programming”, or as a “planning and/or programming” disorder. PURPOSE : To describe a new version of the FLF, the FL (four-level) model, which further explicates and differentiates between speech motor planning, programming, and execution levels or phases of processing; to integrate concepts from computational modelling into the FL model and propose distinct control architectures for both the planning and programming levels; and to identify the loci and nature of disruption in the motor planning phase which could explain the pathophysiology and core features of AOS. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS : A four-level model is presented that differentiates two pre-execution phases and an execution phase. The first pre-execution phase is controlled by a motor planner and involves an inverse model, an efference copy, and a forward model for each sound or over-learnt utterance. This phase also involves a forward predictive planner which enables the system to handle the planning of several sounds and to plan coarticulation of sounds. The motor planner is operated according to an auxiliary forward model architecture. AOS is depicted as a breakdown at several possible points in the motor planning phase. The second pre-execution phase is driven by a motor program generator and predictive controller that is governed by an integral forward model architecture. The final execution phase is portrayed as being driven by closed loop control. The conceptualization of the programmer challenges the traditional view of execution and not only that of planning as is generally accepted. The implications for the classification of motor speech disorders are discussed. Future research should address the exact nature of articulatory movements and other features of speech across the range of planning, pure programming, programming-execution and pure execution disorders.https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/paph202021-05-21hj2020Speech-Language Pathology and Audiolog

Characterising and modeling the co-evolution of transportation networks and territories

The identification of structuring effects of transportation infrastructure on territorial dynamics remains an open research problem. This issue is one of the aspects of approaches on complexity of territorial dynamics, within which territories and networks would be co-evolving. The aim of this thesis is to challenge this view on interactions between networks and territories, both at the conceptual and empirical level, by integrating them in simulation models of territorial systems.Comment: Doctoral dissertation (2017), Universit\'e Paris 7 Denis Diderot. Translated from French. Several papers compose this PhD thesis; overlap with: arXiv:{1605.08888, 1608.00840, 1608.05266, 1612.08504, 1706.07467, 1706.09244, 1708.06743, 1709.08684, 1712.00805, 1803.11457, 1804.09416, 1804.09430, 1805.05195, 1808.07282, 1809.00861, 1811.04270, 1812.01473, 1812.06008, 1908.02034, 2012.13367, 2102.13501, 2106.11996

Dialogical Skirmishes

Tan was guest editor for 'And Now China?', a special print edition of the Ctrl+P journal, which critically responded to the celebratory rhetoric’s of ‘China Now’ and other celebratory markers of China's global ascent in 2008. As well as the introductory article 'Dialogical Skirmishes', Tan also interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist

Aspects of Coarticulation

The paper provides a summary of various types and aspects of coarticulation. After setting a framework that includes general considerations such as biomechanical and language-specific issues, the distinction between anticipatory and carry-over coarticulation, the discussion of articulatory pressure/resistance and its scope, it analyzes different levels at which coarticulation occurs: lips, tongue, velum and larynx. The review of the most influential models and theories from the 1960s until the present reveals that a comprehensive explanation of coarticulation is yet to be offered. In terms of neuromotor control, it shows that very little research has been done specifically on coarticulation, so most conclusions in available literature are indirectly derived from studies of speech produc- tion in general. The paper also tries to shed some light on coarticulation in populations that have been studied less extensively, such as children and clinical cases. The goal of this review is to give a brief overview of the current ‘state of affairs’ in coarticulation studies and argue for the need to extend them to more languages, less than typical populations and to higher levels of processing

The sensory screen: phenomenology of visual perception in early European avant-garde film

At the beginning of the twentieth century, certain artists, writers, and philosophers became intrigued by the profound ways in which filmic images could pervade aspects of modern thought and experience. For them, film had the potential to reveal radical new dimensions of sensory phenomena. The early development of avant-garde film-making in Europe is culturally crucial not only for its historical and conceptual context of creative transition, but also for its dynamic exploration of processes of visual perception. The central objective of this thesis is to expose and engage these profound perceptual issues within the specific sphere of graphic abstract film. The structural formation of the thesis entails the confluencing of material for analysis into a sequence of key areas comprising the central components of avant-garde cinematic visualisation. The visual implications of each area are analysed in specific depth, whilst acknowledging their respective interactivity. Significantly, the research applies analytic theories of phenomenology in order to focus incisively upon relevant early European avant-garde filmic imagery. The potential vitality of a phenomenological theorisation of early avant-garde film resides not only within their historical contemporaneity, but at the epistemological level of the mind's cognitive engagement with the realms of creative visualisation. It is a system of analysis which aims to establish a nuanced phenomenological theory of visual perception as a matter of prime sustenance to historically crucial cinematic art forms