2,899 research outputs found
Law in the present future : approaching the legal imaginary of smart cities with science (and) fiction
This doctoral research concerns smart cities, describing digital solutions and social issues related to their innovative technologies, adopted models, and major projects around the world. The many perspectives mentioned in it were identified by online tools used for the textual analysis of two databases that were built from relevant publications on the main subject by authors coming from media and academia. Expected legal elements emerged from the applied process, such as privacy, security, transparency, participation, accountability, and governance. A general review was produced on the information available about the public policies of Big Data in the two municipal cases of Rio de Janeiro and Montréal, and their regulation in the Brazilian and Canadian contexts. The combined approaches from science and literature were explored to reflect on the normative concerns represented by the global challenges and local risks brought by urban surveillance, climate change, and other neoliberal conditions. Cyberpunk Science Fiction reveals itself useful for engaging with the shared problems that need to be faced in the present time, all involving democracy. The results achieved reveal that this work was, in fact, about the complex network of practices and senses between (post)modern law and the imaginary of the future.Cette recherche doctorale centrée sur les villes intelligentes met en évidence les solutions numériques et les questionnements sociétaux qui ont trait aux technologies innovantes, ainsi qu’aux principaux modèles et projets développés autour d’elles à travers le monde. Des perspectives multiples en lien avec ces développements ont été identifiées à l’aide d’outils en ligne qui ont permis l’analyse textuelle de deux bases de données comprenant des publications scientifiques et des écrits médiatiques. De ce processus analytique ont émergé des éléments juridiques relatifs aux questions de vie privée, de sécurité, de transparence, de participation, d’imputabilité et de gouvernance. De plus, à partir de ces informations a été réalisée une revue des politiques publiques relatives aux mégadonnées dans les villes de Rio de Janeiro et de Montréal, ainsi que des réglementations nationales du Canada et du Brésil en lien avec ce sujet. Finalement, à travers l’exploration d’écrits scientifiques et fictionnels de la littérature, les principaux enjeux normatifs soulevés localement et mondialement par la surveillance urbaine, les changements climatiques et les politiques néolibérales ont pu être mis à jour. Le courant cyberpunk de la science-fiction s’est avéré particulièrement utile pour révéler les principaux problèmes politiques, en lien avec la préservation de la démocratie, auxquelles sont confrontées nos sociétés présentement. Les résultats de la recherche démontrent finalement la présence d’un réseau de pratiques et de significations entre le droit (post)moderne et les représentations imaginaires du futur
Perturbation of matrices and non-negative rank with a view toward statistical models
In this paper we study how perturbing a matrix changes its non-negative rank.
We prove that the non-negative rank is upper-semicontinuos and we describe some
special families of perturbations. We show how our results relate to Statistics
in terms of the study of Maximum Likelihood Estimation for mixture models.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. A theorem has been rewritten, and some
improvements in the presentations have been implemente
The bispectrum of redshifted 21-cm fluctuations from the dark ages
Brightness-temperature fluctuations in the redshifted 21-cm background from
the cosmic dark ages are generated by irregularities in the gas-density
distribution and can then be used to determine the statistical properties of
density fluctuations in the early Universe. We first derive the most general
expansion of brightness-temperature fluctuations up to second order in terms of
all the possible sources of spatial fluctuations. We then focus on the
three-point statistics and compute the angular bispectrum of
brightness-temperature fluctuations generated prior to the epoch of hydrogen
reionization. For simplicity, we neglect redshift-space distortions. We find
that low-frequency radio experiments with arcmin angular resolution can easily
detect non-Gaussianity produced by non-linear gravity with high signal-to-noise
ratio. The bispectrum thus provides a unique test of the gravitational
instability scenario for structure formation, and can be used to measure the
cosmological parameters. Detecting the signature of primordial non-Gaussianity
produced during or right after an inflationary period is more challenging but
still possible. An ideal experiment limited by cosmic variance only and with an
angular resolution of a few arcsec has the potential to detect primordial
non-Gaussianity with a non-linearity parameter of f_NL ~ 1. Additional sources
of error as weak lensing and an imperfect foreground subtraction could severely
hamper the detection of primordial non-Gaussianity which will benefit from the
use of optimal estimators combined with tomographic techniques.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, revised version accepted for publication in ApJ
(contains an improved discussion of gas temperature fluctuations
Polaron Induced Deformations in Carbon Nanotubes
We compute for the first time full elastic deformations, as well as length,
of self-trapped electronic states in carbon nanotubes of general radius and
chirality, within the unifying framework of a recently introduced two field
model for electromechanics of carbon nano-structures. We find that deformations
are highly non monotonic in the chiral angle, whereas the length of the polaron
is not. Applications include nano-mechanical devices as electrically or
optically driven nano-actuators.Comment: 4 Pages, 1 Figure Phys Rev B Brief Repor
Structure formation from non-Gaussian initial conditions: multivariate biasing, statistics, and comparison with N-body simulations
We study structure formation in the presence of primordial non-Gaussianity of
the local type with parameters f_NL and g_NL. We show that the distribution of
dark-matter halos is naturally described by a multivariate bias scheme where
the halo overdensity depends not only on the underlying matter density
fluctuation delta, but also on the Gaussian part of the primordial
gravitational potential phi. This corresponds to a non-local bias scheme in
terms of delta only. We derive the coefficients of the bias expansion as a
function of the halo mass by applying the peak-background split to common
parametrizations for the halo mass function in the non-Gaussian scenario. We
then compute the halo power spectrum and halo-matter cross spectrum in the
framework of Eulerian perturbation theory up to third order. Comparing our
results against N-body simulations, we find that our model accurately describes
the numerical data for wavenumbers k < 0.1-0.3 h/Mpc depending on redshift and
halo mass. In our multivariate approach, perturbations in the halo counts trace
phi on large scales and this explains why the halo and matter power spectra
show different asymptotic trends for k -> 0. This strongly scale-dependent bias
originates from terms at leading order in our expansion. This is different from
what happens using the standard univariate local bias where the scale-dependent
terms come from badly behaved higher-order corrections. On the other hand, our
biasing scheme reduces to the usual local bias on smaller scales where |phi| is
typically much smaller than the density perturbations. We finally discuss the
halo bispectrum in the context of multivariate biasing and show that, due to
its strong scale and shape dependence, it is a powerful tool for the detection
of primordial non-Gaussianity from future galaxy surveys.Comment: 26 pages, 16 figures. Minor modifications, version accepted by Phys.
Rev.
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Ethics and Design in the Brazilian Context
Often driven by practical and immediate requirements, more and more people are incorporating technology into a variety of aspects of their lives, often without reflecting on the consequences of using them. On the other hand, studies on interactive system development that lead to behavioral change have been gaining ground on the agenda of large HCI conferences. This movement brings to the forefront the fundamental issues of ethics in design and technology use. A designer’s intentions, when directing certain actions or behaviors, are not always explicit or desired by the stakeholders affected by the use of the technology. Systems that induce an undesired purchase, or even those that use conditioning strategies to cause a behavioral change are examples of such intentions. The challenge proposed is therefore about the relationship between design and personal freedom in a way that these technology users do not become victims, either passively or submissively, of the effects of its use. This advance allows for the redefinition of the relationship between man and technology, and the application of new forms of designing and developing interactive systems that take into account the ethical aspects of this relationship
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