Defragmenting public space : a guide for policymakers

While social inequalities remain key features of numerous cities globally, many still manage to provide spaces for collective social life, including public streets, market spaces and parks. Yet many countries today, with growing and significant socio-economic disparities and a rising fear of crime and violence, now see a range of strategies by their wealthiest citizens to avoid public spaces. This avoidance has generated a more fragmented engagement with the city by particular social groups. These processes, including the avoidance of public spaces and normalisation of gated communities, are reshaping cities leaving fewer shared spaces for collective life as public spaces are privatised. This report comes from a dialogue between researchers with interests in the risks and challenges for the public life of cities and these new and growing patterns of segregation and social avoidance. The collaboration between scholars and institutions seeks to understand the increasingly defensive quality of many urban centres and to identify forms of policy, practice and urban interventions capable of ensuring public safety and participation by all citizens. The purpose of this report is to engage researchers and practitioners in the discussion about the risks and challenges associated with urban fragmentation strategies and the means by which safer, more inclusive and liveable public spaces might be achieved

ESTUDIO DEL COMPORTAMIENTO ESTRUCTURAL DE LOSAS MACIZAS DE CONCRETO REFORZADO PARA VIVIENDA

A partir de resultados analíticos de ejemplos ilustrativos y del reporte de características observadas, quedó demostradoque las losas macizas de concreto reforzado para vivienda no son diseñadas ni construidas adecuadamente en el ámbitode la zona de estudio, lo que explica los altos porcentajes de fallas observadas en servicio. Fue calculado el índice deconfiabilidad en seis viviendas representativas al considerar tres posibles escenarios de la corrosión del acero de refuerzo,con lo que se mostró un alto riesgo de falla o cuantiosas inversiones en mantenimiento. Se concluyó que para el correctodiseño de las losas deberá no sólo revisarse la resistencia a flexión sino principalmente controlar las deformacionesverticales, el agrietamiento por contracción y la permeabilidad, lo cual implica especificar un concreto denso y durable.Se presentan recomendaciones específicas

Running Genetic Algorithms in the Edge: A First Analysis

Nowadays, the volume of data produced by different kinds of devices is continuously growing, making even more difficult to solve the many optimization problems that impact directly on our living quality. For instance, Cisco projected that by 2019 the volume of data will reach 507.5 zettabytes per year, and the cloud traffic will quadruple. This is not sustainable in the long term, so it is a need to move part of the intelligence from the cloud to a highly decentralized computing model. Considering this, we propose a ubiquitous intelligent system which is composed by different kinds of endpoint devices such as smartphones, tablets, routers, wearables, and any other CPU powered device. We want to use this to solve tasks useful for smart cities. In this paper, we analyze if these devices are suitable for this purpose and how we have to adapt the optimization algorithms to be efficient using heterogeneous hardware. To do this, we perform a set of experiments in which we measure the speed, memory usage, and battery consumption of these devices for a set of binary and combinatorial problems. Our conclusions reveal the strong and weak features of each device to run future algorihms in the border of the cyber-physical system.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This research has been partially funded by the Spanish MINECO and FEDER projects TIN2014-57341-R (http://moveon.lcc.uma.es), TIN2016-81766-REDT (http://cirti.es), TIN2017-88213-R (http://6city.lcc.uma.es), the Ministry of Education of Spain (FPU16/02595

Structure of smectic defect cores: an X-ray study of 8CB liquid crystal ultra-thin films

We study the structure of very thin liquid crystal films frustrated by antagonistic anchorings in the smectic phase. In a cylindrical geometry, the structure is dominated by the defects for film thicknesses smaller than 150 nm and the detailed topology of the defects cores can be revealed by x-ray diffraction. They appear to be split in half tube-shaped Rotating Grain Boundaries (RGB). We determine the RGB spatial extension and evaluate its energy per unit line. Both are significantly larger than the ones usually proposed in the literatureComment: 4 page

Regulation during the second year: Executive function and emotion regulation links to joint attention, temperament, and social vulnerability in a Latin American sample

© 2019 Gago Galvagno, De Grandis, Clerici, Mustaca, Miller and Elgier. Although a growing body of work has established developing regulatory abilities during the second year of life, more work is needed to better understand factors that influence this emerging control. The purpose of the present study was to examine regulation capacities in executive functions (i.e., EF or cognitive control) and emotion regulation (i.e., ER or control focused on modulating negative and sustaining positive emotions) in a Latin American sample, with a focus on how joint attention, social vulnerability, and temperament contribute to performance. Sixty Latin American dyads of mothers and children aged 18 to 24 months completed several EF tasks, a Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) to examine ER (Weinberg et al., 2008), and the Early Social Communication Scale to measure joint attention (Mundy et al., 2003). Parents completed the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire Very Short Form to measure temperament (ECBQ-VS, Putnam et al., 2010) and the Social Economic Level Scale (SES) from INDEC (2000). Results revealed the typical responses expected for toddlers of this age in these EF tasks and in the SFP. Also, we found associations between EF and ER and between non-verbal communication related to monitoring infants\u27 attention to objects (i.e., responding to joint attention) and initiation of pointing (e.g., pointing and showing of an object while the child alternates his gaze to an adult) with EF. Regarding social factors, family differences and type of housing contribute to regulation. For temperament, effortful control was associated with both regulatory capacities. Finally, only age predicted EF. These results suggest that many patterns regarding the development of these abilities are duplicated in the first months of life in a Latin American sample while further highlighting the importance of considering how the environment and the individual characteristics of infants may associate to these regulatory abilities, which is particularly relevant to developing public policies to promote their optimal development

De las vírgenes conquista a las vírgenes encomenderas: el caso de la ciudad de Tunja

El culto a la Virgen María tuvo durante el periodo colonial americano una notable vigencia. Desde la Conquista se desarrolló un proceso continuado y negociado de simbología icnográfica mariana, en función de su `intervención¿ en fundamentales acontecimientos históricos. El culto mariano en América se implementó con fines ideológicos y de propaganda de los valores cristianos pertenecientes al conquistador; generando un proselitismo religioso entre los indígenas; y un instrumento de poder político y cultural de las elites fundadoras, y después criollas; que determinó la vida pública y privada en los reinos y virreinatos americanos por espacio de más de tres siglos. Este trabajo supone un acercamiento a dicho proceso, y tiene como principal objeto de estudio la iconografía mariana desarrollada en la ciudad de Tunja, del Nuevo Reino de Granada, durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Teniendo presente, que en relación con el culto mariano instalado en dicha ciudad, existen dos momentos fundamentales en relación con el culto mariano: un culto a lo que llamamos las ¿Vírgenes de Conquista¿, fomentado por los fundadores de la ciudad; y un culto posterior que denominamos ¿Vírgenes Encomenderas¿ y que será promocionado por las primeras generaciones de españoles nacidas en tierras del Nuevo Reino de Granada.  During the American colonial period, devotion towards the Virgin Mary was notably present in its different manifestations and representations. Since the time of the Conquest, a continuous and negotiated process of Marian iconographic symbology was developed; it was based on its `intervention¿ in fundamental historical events. The cult to the Virgin Mary in America was implemented for ideological purposes, and acted as propaganda for christian values from the conquerors¿ viewpoint, generating a religious proselytizing among the natives and an instrument of political and cultural power of the founding elites - and later the criollo elites - which determined public and private life in American kingdoms and viceroyalties for over three centuries. This work is an approach to this process, and its main object of study is Marian iconography developed in the city of Tunja, Kingdom of the New Granada, during the 16th and 17th centuries. In relation to the cult to the Virgin Mary installed in that city, there are two fundamental moments: a cult of what we call the `Vírgenes de Conquista¿, fostered by the founders of the city, and a later cult we call `Vírgenes Encomenderas¿ promoted by the first generations of Spaniards born in the Kingdom of the New Granada.Este texto hace parte del grupo de investigación Asociación Centro de Estudios Regionales, REGIÓN, al cual pertenece el Dr. Antonio E. de PedroArtículo revisado por pare

Winding number order in the Haldane model with interactions

We study the Haldane model with nearest–neighbor interactions. This model is physically motivated by the associated implementation with ultracold atoms. We show that the topological phase of the interacting model can be characterized by a physically observable winding number. The robustness of this number extends well beyond the topological insulator phase towards attractive and repulsive interactions that are comparable to the kinetic energy scale of the model. We identify and characterize the relevant phases of the model as a function of the interaction strength

Production of α\alpha-particle condensate states in heavy-ion collisions

The fragmentation of quasi-projectiles from the nuclear reaction $^{40}Ca$ + $^{12}C$ at 25 MeV/nucleon was used to produce excited states candidates to $\alpha$-particle condensation. The experiment was performed at LNS-Catania using the CHIMERA multidetector. Accepting the emission simultaneity and equality among the $\alpha$-particle kinetic energies as experimental criteria for deciding in favor of the condensate nature of an excited state, we analyze the $0_2^+$ and $2_2^+$ states of $^{12}$C and the $0_6^+$ state of $^{16}$O. A sub-class of events corresponding to the direct 3-$\alpha$ decay of the Hoyle state is isolated.Comment: contribution to the 2nd Workshop on "State of the Art in Nuclear Cluster Physics" (SOTANCP2), Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), May 25-28, 2010, to be published in the International Journal of Modern Physics