1,512 research outputs found
Toute décolonisation est une réussite: Les damnés de la terre and the African Spring
Iâm certainly not alone in noting that the year 2011 brings, for those of us who are students of the work of Frantz Fanon, two different anniversaries. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Les damnĂ©s de la terre, Fanonâs final book and, for many, his most lasting achievement. But it also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Fanonâs death: he died, tragically young, on December 6, 1961, not long after the bookâs publication. It is no exaggeration to say that Les damnĂ©s de la terre was composed by Fanon from his deathbed, and that he was well aware that he was racing death as he rushed to complete the manuscript, as his publisher François Maspero remarked, âin pitiful haste.â Fanon had managed to complete it by July, although, as he told a friend, âI should have liked to have written something more.â As David Macey notes in his indispensable biography, âFanon did see copies of his last book, but for its first readers, Les damnĂ©s de la terre was a posthumous work.â The book and Fanonâs death thus come to us bound inextricably together, fifty years later. So it would seem that we have an anniversary to celebrate (and in doing so, we would thus be celebrating the continuing relevance of a classic work, as this special issue intends us to do), but also a death to mourn. If I proceed to make a suggestion that will seem at first to be the height of perversity, let me preface it by saying that this suggestion is occasioned by what I believe to be Fanonâs greatest legacy, a legacy of unsparing intellectual and political commitment. For I want to begin by suggesting that this year brings us the mournful fact that fifty years on, Les damnĂ©s de la terre remains, in many ways, as relevant to our contemporary world as it was in 1961; but conversely, the anniversary of Fanonâs death offers us a cause for celebration.
Demonstration of an electrostatic-shielded cantilever
The fabrication and performances of cantilevered probes with reduced
parasitic capacitance starting from a commercial Si3N4 cantilever chip is
presented. Nanomachining and metal deposition induced by focused ion beam
techniques were employed in order to modify the original insulating pyramidal
tip and insert a conducting metallic tip. Two parallel metallic electrodes
deposited on the original cantilever arms are employed for tip biasing and as
ground plane in order to minimize the electrostatic force due to the capacitive
interaction between cantilever and sample surface. Excitation spectra and
force-to-distance characterization are shown with different electrode
configurations. Applications of this scheme in electrostatic force microscopy,
Kelvin probe microscopy and local anodic oxidation is discussed.Comment: 4 pages and 3 figures. Submitted to Applied Physics Letter
Comparison of different dispersion models with tracer experiment
An intercomparison between three different models is presented. The simulated case is a tracer experiment performed in complex terrain. Two dispersion models are initialised with a meteorological model that can use as input the ECMWF analysis only or both these analysis and local measurements. The results demonstrate that the best performances are obtained by using the dispersion models
coupled with a meteorological model. Moreover the Lagrangian model seems to slightly better perform when the local measurements are accounted for
Path integral evaluation of Dbrane amplitudes
We extend Polchinski's evaluation of the measure for the one-loop closed
string path integral to open string tree amplitudes with boundaries and
crosscaps embedded in Dbranes. We explain how the nonabelian limit of
near-coincident Dbranes emerges in the path integral formalism. We give a
careful path integral derivation of the cylinder amplitude including the
modulus dependence of the volume of the conformal Killing group.Comment: Extended version replacing hep-th/9903184, includes discussion of
nonabelian limit, Latex, 10 page
Diffeomorphic approximation of Sobolev homeomorphisms
Every homeomorphism h : X -> Y between planar open sets that belongs to the
Sobolev class W^{1,p}(X,Y), 1<p<\infty, can be approximated in the Sobolev norm
by diffeomorphisms.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure
The Humanism Effect: Fanon, Foucault, and Ethics without Subjects
This article addresses a tendency within postcolonial studies to place the work of Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in opposition. This has obscured the real, and potentially very productive, similarities between them. The most important of these links has to do with their shared critique of the sovereign subject of humanism: for Fanon and Foucault, this critique of the traditional humanist subject provides a way of opposing what they both see as the dangerous nostalgia for a lost moment of origin. Furthermore, Fanon and Foucault both end in a moment of ethics, but it is an ethics without the sort of stable subjects assumed by humanism. I offer a consideration of some of the links that can be found in several texts by Fanon and Foucault. I then attempt to define the term I will be using to describe their shared strategy of an ethics without subjects: the âhumanism effect.â I conclude by trying to suggest some of the strategic possibilities of an ethics without subjects in the postcolonial context
Remotely sensed variables explain microhabitat selection and reveal buffering behaviours against warming in a climate-sensitive bird species
Fine-scale habitat selection modelling can allow a mechanistic understanding of habitat selection processes, enabling better assessments of the effects of climate and habitat changes on biodiversity. Remotely sensed data provide an ever-increasing amount of environmental and climatic variables at high spatio-temporal resolutions, and a unique opportunity to produce fine-scale habitat models particularly useful in challenging environments, such as high-elevation areas. Working at a 10-m spatial resolution, we assessed the value of remotely sensed data for investigating foraging habitat selection (in relation to topography, microclimate, land cover) in nestling-rearing white-winged snowfinch (Montifringilla nivalis), a high-elevation species highly sensitive to climate change. Adult snowfinches foraged at locations with intermediate vegetation cover and higher habitat heterogeneity, also avoiding extremely warm or extremely cold microclimates. Temperature interacted with other environmental drivers in defining habitat selection, highlighting trade-offs between habitat profitability and thermoregulation: snowfinches likely adopted mechanisms of behavioural buffering against physiologically stressful conditions by selecting for cooler, shaded and more snowy foraging grounds at higher temperatures. Our results matched those from previous studies based on accurate field measurements, confirming the species' reliance on climate-sensitive microhabitats (snow patches and low-sward grassland, in heterogeneous patches) and the usefulness of satellite-derived fine-scale modelling. Habitat suitability models built on remotely sensed predictors can provide a cost-effective method for periodic monitoring of species' habitats both at fine grain and over large extents. Fine-scale models also enhance our understanding of the actual drivers of (micro)habitat selection and of possible buffering behaviours against warming, allowing more accurate and robust distribution models, finer predictions of potential future changes and carefully targeted conservation strategies and habitat management
Nonlinear Dynamic System Identification in the Spectral Domain Using Particle-Bernstein Polynomials
System identification (SI) is the discipline of inferring mathematical models from unknown dynamic systems using the input/output observations of such systems with or without prior knowledge of some of the system parameters. Many valid algorithms are available in the literature, including Volterra series expansion, HammersteinâWiener models, nonlinear auto-regressive moving average model with exogenous inputs (NARMAX) and its derivatives (NARX, NARMA). Different nonlinear estimators can be used for those algorithms, such as polynomials, neural networks or wavelet networks. This paper uses a different approach, named particle-Bernstein polynomials, as an estimator for SI. Moreover, unlike the mentioned algorithms, this approach does not operate in the time domain but rather in the spectral components of the signals through the use of the discrete KarhunenâLoĂšve transform (DKLT). Some experiments are performed to validate this approach using a publicly available dataset based on ground vibration tests recorded from a real F-16 aircraft. The experiments show better results when compared with some of the traditional algorithms, especially for large, heterogeneous datasets such as the one used. In particular, the absolute error obtained with the prosed method is 63% smaller with respect to NARX and from 42% to 62% smaller with respect to various artificial neural network-based approaches
Monitoring of procalcitonin, IL-6 and brain natriuretic peptide for sepsis diagnosis in cardiac surgery
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