The Urban Future, Back and Forth: Utopias and Dystopias

Does the future of cities matter as a research topic? If we are powerless to predict or to control their trajectory, exercising such an investigation may in fact be pointless. Disregarding this possibility, urban society seems to enjoy making predictions about the kind of settlements it creates and lives in, as do scientific researchers who hypothesize a possible rational alignment between the past, present and times to come. This paper is a discussion on perspectives looking towards urban futures demonstrated in one world newspaper and in selected academic papers. The New York Times newspaper was chosen due to its global impact, the considerable amount of material available on its website, and the quantity of archived material it provides. Academic articles were chosen from SAGE Publications, due to the large number and variety of academic journals in its database. Assumption adopted is that key factors throughout history, not only necessarily those closely related to cities, play a decisive role in the way we envision the future of our own settlements. Discussion indicates that despite predictions may commonly fail exercises for envisioning times to come may help to transform current circumstances

The role played by exotic plants in urban ecosystems: comments on Spennemann, 2019

The article written by Dirk HR Spennemann, and published in the European Journal of Ecology, addresses the role played by a palm tree species native to the Canary Islands as food source for several frugivore species found in Australian cities. This palm tree bears fruit throughout the year; therefore, it is a reliable food source in winter and helps increasing wildlife support. Spennemann avoids the native versus exotic dogmatic simplism; instead, he assesses the palm tree species based on its positive environmental impact

William L. Westermann entre el Anticuarismo y la Historia Ccomparativa de la Esclavitud: Una Nueva Lectura de The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity

O livro de William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, publicado em 1955, é até hoje uma referência para o estudo da escravidão antiga. No entanto, este livro é frequentemente criticado por sua estrutura antiquária e, portanto, pela falta de qualquer abordagem teórica sobre a escravidão no mundo antigo. Esse ponto de vista foi enfatizado principalmente por Moses Finley, com sua obra Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), e tornou-se, desde então, um certo consenso na historiografia da escravidão. Este artigo argumenta que tal abordagem negligencia o lugar do livro de Westermann nos debates sobre a história comparada da escravidão que ocorreram nos Estados Unidos durante a segunda metade do século XX. Existem semelhanças entre a tese de Frank Tannenbaum sobre os diferentes níveis de severidade nos sistemas escravistas nas Américas, apresentados em seu Slave and Citizen (1946), e a visão de Westermann acerca dos antigos sistemas escravistas. Essa semelhança é compreensível se levarmos em conta que ambos participaram de seminários sobre a história do trabalho e da escravidão na Universidade de Columbia.  William L. Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, published in 1955, is until today a reference guide to the study of ancient slavery. However, this book is often criticized for its antiquarian structure and, therefore, for a lack of any theoretical approach to slavery in the ancient world. This viewpoint was mainly stressed by Moses Finley, with his Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), and became since then a kind of consensus in the historiography of slavery. This paper argues that such approach neglects the place of Westermann’s book in the debates on the comparative history of slavery that took place in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. There are similarities between Frank Tannenbaum’s thesis of the different levels of severity in the slave systems in the Americas, presented in his Slave and Citizen (1946), and Westermann’s view of ancient slave systems. This similarity is quite understandable if we take into account that both scholars participated in seminars on the history of labor and slavery at Columbia University.El libro de William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, publicado en 1955, sigue siendo una referencia al estudio de la antigua esclavitud. Sin embargo, este libro a menudo es criticado por su estructura anticuaria y, por lo tanto, por la falta de un enfoque teórico sobre la esclavitud en el mundo antiguo. Este punto de vista fue enfatizado principalmente por Moses Finley, con su trabajo Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980), y desde entonces se ha convertido en un consenso en la historiografía de la esclavitud. Este artículo argumenta que tal enfoque descuida el lugar del libro de Westermann en los debates sobre la historia comparativa de la esclavitud que ocurrió en los Estados Unidos durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Hay similitudes entre la tesis de Frank Tannenbaum sobre los diferentes niveles de severidad en los sistemas de esclavos en las Américas, presentada en su Slave and Citizen (1946), y la visión de Westermann de los antiguos sistemas de esclavos. Esta similitud es comprensible dado que ambos asistieron a seminarios sobre la historia del trabajo y la esclavitud en la Universidad de Columbia

Structural Building Damage Detection with Deep Learning: Assessment of a State-of-the-Art CNN in Operational Conditions

Remotely sensed data can provide the basis for timely and efficient building damage maps that are of fundamental importance to support the response activities following disaster events. However, the generation of these maps continues to be mainly based on the manual extraction of relevant information in operational frameworks. Considering the identification of visible structural damages caused by earthquakes and explosions, several recent works have shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) outperform traditional methods. However, the limited availability of publicly available image datasets depicting structural disaster damages, and the wide variety of sensors and spatial resolution used for these acquisitions (from space, aerial and UAV platforms), have limited the clarity of how these networks can effectively serve First Responder needs and emergency mapping service requirements. In this paper, an advanced CNN for visible structural damage detection is tested to shed some light on what deep learning networks can currently deliver, and its adoption in realistic operational conditions after earthquakes and explosions is critically discussed. The heterogeneous and large datasets collected by the authors covering different locations, spatial resolutions and platforms were used to assess the network performances in terms of transfer learning with specific regard to geographical transferability of the trained network to imagery acquired in different locations. The computational time needed to deliver these maps is also assessed. Results show that quality metrics are influenced by the composition of training samples used in the network. To promote their wider use, three pre-trained networks—optimized for satellite, airborne and UAV image spatial resolutions and viewing angles—are made freely available to the scientific community

PROCEDA para el cuidado y protección de la quebrada Tres Esquinas y el río Bahamón de la inspección de Peña Negra - Cachipay - Cundinamarca

El presente trabajo describe el diseño de un Proyecto Ciudadano de Educación Ambiental, con el objetivo de mejorar la calidad ambiental de la quebrada Tres Esquinas y al río Bahamón de la Inspección de Policía de Peña Negra del Municipio de Cachipay. Que dé respuesta a la pregunta problémica ¿Cómo el PROCEDA permite preservar y controlar el impacto ambiental generado por el vertido de aguas servidas y residuos a la quebrada Tres Esquinas y al río Bahamón de la Inspección de Policía de Peña Negra del Municipio de Cachipay? La propuesta se desarrolla desde la perspectiva de investigación cualitativa y enmarcada en el diseño de la investigación acción participativa, sustentada metodológicamente desde la dimensión de la animación sociocultural, así como, el taller pedagógico sugerido dentro de las acciones en el proceso formativo del PROCEDA, creando sinergia de modo activo entre los actores involucrados, las IED Sorrento – IED Instituto Técnico Agropecuario y la comunidad. Como resultado se plantea la propuesta del PROCEDA para la recuperación y preservación de la quebrada Tres esquinas y el río Bahamón de la Inspección de Peña Negra - Cachipay - Cundinamarca mediado por técnicas de evaluación cualitativa, que monitorean las fases de intervención. Se espera que la fase de implementación genere en la comunidad un cambio de actitud frente a sus prácticas cotidianas que repercutan en acciones ambientales que mantengan inalterada la calidad del agua.This work describes the design of a Citizan Project of Environmental Education, with the aim of improving the environmental quality of the Tres Esquinas creek and the Bahamón river of the Inspection of the Police of Peña Negra of the municipality of Cachipay. How can PROCEDA preserve and control the environmental impact generated by the discharge of sewage and residues to the Tres Esquinas Creek and the Bahamón river of Peña Negra Police Inspection of the municipality of Cachipay? The proposal is developed from the perpective of qualitative research and framed in the design of participatory action research, methodologically supported from the socio cultural animation dimensión, as well as th pedagogical worshop suggested within the actions in the training process of PROCEDA, creating synergy between the involved, the IED Sorrento – IED Instituto Técnico Agropecuario and the community. As a result, PROCEDA´s proposal for the recovery and perservation of the Tres Esquinas creek, and the Bahamón river of the Peña Negra – Cachipay Cundinamarca, mediated by qualitative evaluation techniques, wich monitor the intervention phases. It is epected that the implementation phase will generate a chage in the community´s acttitude towards its daily practices that will havere percussions on environmental actions that maintain the quality of the wáter unchanged

Freedom and slavery in Roman Stoic thought: a reading of Seneca’s Consolatio ad Polybium

The Consolatio ad Polybium, written by Seneca during his exile in Corsica and addressed to Polybius, an imperial freedman of Claudius, has been interpreted by modern historiography from two perspectives. On the one hand, it is analyzed its literary structure, taking the consolatio as a literary genre in Antiquity. On the other hand, historical approaches to this work try to understand how the philosopher presents the Emperor Claudius according to a Stoic reflection on imperial power. Although both types of studies are relevant, the purpose of this article is the very image of Polybius drawn by Seneca. The argument is that this image relates to a particular Stoic view of slavery, in which the freedman is portrayed as inextricably tied to his servile past.A Consolatio ad Polybium, escrita por Sêneca durante seu exílio na Córsega, e endereçada a Políbio, liberto imperial de Cláudio, tem sido interpretada pela historiografia moderna sob duas perspectivas. Por um lado, é discutida sua estrutura literária, tendo em vista o gênero da consolação na Antiguidade. Por outro lado, análises históricas buscam perceber como o filósofo apresenta o imperador Cláudio nos quadros de uma reflexão estoica sobre o poder imperial. Embora ambas as análises sejam pertinentes, o objetivo deste artigo volta-se para o próprio retrato do liberto por Sêneca e como este se conforma a um determinado pensamento estoico sobre a escravidão em que o liberto é retratado como inelutavelmente preso ao passado servil, uma vez que sua forma de pensar e agir não consegue desvencilhar-se do período de escravidão.

Robust Place Recognition using an Imaging Lidar

We propose a methodology for robust, real-time place recognition using an imaging lidar, which yields image-quality high-resolution 3D point clouds. Utilizing the intensity readings of an imaging lidar, we project the point cloud and obtain an intensity image. ORB feature descriptors are extracted from the image and encoded into a bag-of-words vector. The vector, used to identify the point cloud, is inserted into a database that is maintained by DBoW for fast place recognition queries. The returned candidate is further validated by matching visual feature descriptors. To reject matching outliers, we apply PnP, which minimizes the reprojection error of visual features' positions in Euclidean space with their correspondences in 2D image space, using RANSAC. Combining the advantages from both camera and lidar-based place recognition approaches, our method is truly rotation-invariant and can tackle reverse revisiting and upside-down revisiting. The proposed method is evaluated on datasets gathered from a variety of platforms over different scales and environments. Our implementation is available at https://git.io/imaging-lidar-place-recognitionComment: ICRA 202

La tensión entre el particularismo y el Universalismo en la teoría de la justicia como Igualdad compleja de Michael Walzer

Filósofo (a)Pregrad

Shopping centers e recuperação urbana: estudo empírico de uma contradição teórica

A reconversão de edificações históricas industriais de grande porte em shopping centers é um tema polêmico. A opinião geral entre estudiosos é que esses empreendimentos comerciais são uma privatização da vida urbana, e destroem a riqueza e diversidade que são próprias da cidade, fazendo com que apenas uma parcela mais abastada da população, e exclusivamente quando passam de cidadãos a consumidores, usufruam desse patrimônio. Moralmente, estamos de acordo com esses autores. A ressalva que fazemos, contudo, é que faltam estudos empíricos e dados à grande maioria dessas análises. A intenção neste artigo é justamente verificar se essa premissa moral (a leitura dos artigos a respeito não nos permite identificar neles premissas teóricas) sai ilesa de um confronto com a realidade. Para isto, analisamos o histórico da dinâmica imobiliária no entorno de dois grandes shopping centers de Curitiba que ocupam edificações históricas industriais, levantando como hipótese que eles podem ter contribuído para a dinamização e requalificação de seu entorno