Changing humanity: a study of four dystopias at the dawn of the biotechnological age

This thesis analyses two British and two German technological dystopias published between the First and Second World Wars: Konrad Loele’s Züllinger und seine Zucht (1920), John Bernard’s The New Race of Devils (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Paul Gurk’s Tuzub 37 (1935). While there has been a considerable amount of scholarly research into interwar British dystopias, German texts have rarely been analysed; furthermore, dystopian studies have often focused on a small number of novels that were considered canonical and particularly influential. This thesis compares Huxley’s canonical Brave New World with Bernard’s less known The New Race of Devils and the two German texts, reading all of them from the standpoint of the early twentieth-century crisis of the traditional notion of humanism. Chapter 1 focuses on the two earlier novels and on their portrayal of the creation of ‘perfect’ workers and soldiers with the use of eugenics. Chapter 2 centres on the two later novels and on their depiction of a completely mechanized World State where citizens are mass produced and incapable of independent thought. The thesis shows that the four dystopias envision a radical change in the nature of men and women as a result of the mechanization of society, and concludes that they all speculate on the future of the human race once the traditional conceptualization of humanity has been destroyed by contemporary technology. Loele’s and Bernard’s texts introduce the idea of a partly artificial ‘eugenic liminal being’ who is difficult to fit into the established taxonomy of living beings. Huxley and Gurk highlight how the inhabitants of the technocracy will not be capable of meaningful action and traditional rebellion will become impossible. The four texts prove more radical than other contemporary technological dystopias and anticipate some of the most important issues of late twentieth-century posthumanism

Bedding attitudes as a sequence stratigraphy proxy : A case study from borehole images, Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Leg 313, Hole M28

International audienceIn this study we investigate the relationship between the dips of seismic reflectors, which are used to define sequence boundaries, and the orientation (dip and dip direction) of bedding surfaces at core scales. Sequence boundaries from seismic data and lithostratigraphic boundaries from cores and logs are compared with the bedding orientations measured on borehole images of Miocene siliciclastic sediments at Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 313 Site M28. It is not surprising that bedding orientations show huge variations at scales that are too small to be detected on seismic profiles. However, changes of orientation defined as rotation between two successive intervals match the depths of approximately half of the seismic sequence boundaries. While they do not match boundaries between lithostratigraphic units, changes of orientation frequently correlate with maxima and minima in the gamma ray signal, suggesting that they are related to changes in depositional processes rather than to changes in lithology. This study suggests for the first time that bedding attitudes can be used as a stratigraphic tool at various scales from bed to bed across depth intervals of tens of meters

Analysis and modeling of wind directions time series

This work aims at studying some aspects of wind directions in Italy and supplying appropriate models. A comparison is presented between independent mixture and Hidden Markov models, which seem to be appropriate as far as the series we studied

Laboratory Experiments on Long Waves Interacting with Rigid Vertical Cylinders

The impact of waves caused by storm surges or floods could lead to significant damage to marine and fluvial structures. Hydraulic forces add significant hydrodynamic loads on bridges built in coastal and fluvial environments; therefore, the effect of the wave impact on bridge substructures must be properly considered for the safe and cost-effective design of the piers. The use of laboratory-scale models is a direct approach to investigate the effects of long waves on simple structures, mimicking bridge piers. The present study describes a laboratory-scale model, where the propagation of two different long waves in a flume, in the presence of two rigid cylinders, was investigated. The velocity measurements were acquired by the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) technique, providing instantaneous flow velocity vectors on 2D planes. For each experimental condition, the instantaneous velocity field close to the cylinders was analysed, in order i) to depict how it changes during the wave transit, and thus how the drag force acting on the cylinders could change, ii) to detect the spatial distributions of vorticity downstream. Some first interesting results have been obtained, showing a quite uniform distribution of the longitudinal velocity along the depth of the vertical plane upstream of the cylinders, with increasing values during the wave transit. No interactions in the central part of the flow downstream of the two cylinders was observed in the horizontal plane which are spaced approximately ten times their diameter. Finally, the vorticity has also been studied, displaying a phase-varying behaviour, which appears to lose symmetry during wave transit

Energy transfer in a fast-slow Hamiltonian system

We consider a finite region of a lattice of weakly interacting geodesic flows on manifolds of negative curvature and we show that, when rescaling the interactions and the time appropriately, the energies of the flows evolve according to a non linear diffusion equation. This is a first step toward the derivation of macroscopic equations from a Hamiltonian microscopic dynamics in the case of weakly coupled systems