A GeoSocial Intelligence Framework for Studying & Promoting Resilience to Seasonal Flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia

PetaJakarta.org is a web-based platform developed to harness the power of social media to gather, sort, and display information about flooding for Jakarta residents in real time. The platform runs on the open source software CogniCity—an OSS platform developed by the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong—which allows data to be collected and disseminated by community members through their location-enabled mobile devices. The project uses a GeoSocial Intelligence Framework to approach the complexity of Jakarta’s entangled hydraulic, hydrological and meteorological systems and thereby converts the noise of social media into knowledge about urban infrastructure and situational conditions related to flooding and inundation. In this paper, PetaJakarta.org co-directors Dr Tomas Holderness, Geomatics Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Dr Etienne Turpin, Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, and Dr Rohan Wickramasuriyam, GIS Research Fellow at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, will discuss their GeoSocial Intelligence Framework as it applies to their current research in Jakarta. They will also present their preliminary findings from their 2014 Twitter #DataGrant, which has allowed them to develop a correlative analysis between historic social media information, the Jakarta government’s flood maps, and the infrastructure used to manage critical flood emergencies. Finally, they will speculate on several future applications of the CogniCity OSS and suggest how it might be developed to further promote an integrated civic co-management platform with the support of business, industry, government and community organizations

W. E. B. Du Bois’ ambiguous politics of liberation: race, Marxism and pan Africanism

W. E. B. Du Bois summons the restless and provocative spirit of a Pan Africanism that, despite its association with the collapse of Kwamah Nkumah’s Ghanaian revolution, has not failed as an idea. Commentators have realised, to some extent, the ambiguities of Du Bois’ Pan Africanism. However, they have not shown how Du Bois’ deployment of the concept opens up a more radical political thinking. This Essay will trace the various twists and turns of Du Bois’ Pan Africanism as narrated in the text Dusk of Dawn. Pan Africanism demands a social, economic, and political revolution that goes beyond the civil liberties struggle and its focus on constitutional recognition. In leaving America for Ghana, Du Bois committed himself to a very specific understanding of the African revolution. Using the ideas of Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, this Essay will argue that Du Bois’ Pan Africanism evoked energies of revolution that point at an unfinished, rather than failed, radical project

Lo schema genealogico: razza o cultura?

L'articolo di Etienne Balibar mette a fuoco criticamente la nozione di "schema genealogico" interrogandosi sulle sue controverse relazioni con quelle di "razza" e di "cultura"

Tommaso Chetcuti : the man in the light of his times

This paper describes the life of the pioneer Maltese Psychiatrist, Tommaso Chetcuti as depicted by his esteemed friend and biographer Gavino Gulia and explores the advances in local psychiatric practice which he established in the Maltese Islands in the light of advances being made in Europe during his time, especially the prime works of Philippe Pinel and Etienne Esquirol.peer-reviewe

Integrating damping and non-linearities in a vibration design process

Classical vibration design uses modes and transfer functions generated with the superposition principle to allow the verification of design objectives. If redesign is needed, one optimizes mass and stiffness in order to modify the transfer until the specification is met. Integrating damping and non-linearities in the optimization of detailed industrial models is however still considered a major difficulty, even though the physical mechanisms are well known. Approaches to handle viscoelastic damping and time domain modal damping are thus discussed. Distributed non-linearities, such as contact and friction, are becoming accessible to transient simulation, but lead to responses where modes are no longer defined. It is however illustrated that operational deflection shapes, associated with a singular value decomposition of the response, give similar information. Finally, a fundamental aspect of non-linear vibration simulation is the volume of output and the associated numerical cost. Model reduction is a key ingredient of practical approaches and a perspective on related issues is given

Milestones for Teaching the Spreadsheet Program

There are different manners of teaching a spreadsheet program. In any case, it is intended that the teacher settles the objectives of the course and adapts them to the particular audience he/she has to deal with. This paper aims at providing any teacher whatever his/her specific objectives and his/her audience with elements to help him/her building a course. It focuses mainly on two important issues: 1 - select in all that may be said about such complex tools, what is prior to know and to teach, i.e. what leads to autonomy in using but also to autonomy in learning (because everything cannot be taught) and 2 - show how concepts are closely related to good formatting considerations. A method based on the "invariants of information processing" is outlined, partially illustrated and an implementation is described throughout a course designed for students preparing a master in Education Sciences.Comment: 11 Page

Geographic Variation of Cirques on Iceland: Factors Influencing Cirque Morphology

Cirques are one of the most common glacial landforms in alpine settings. They also provide important paleoclimate information (e.g. Meierding 1984; Evans 2006). The purpose of this study is to fill in gaps in the climate record of Iceland by conducting a quantitative analysis of cirques in three regions in Iceland: Tröllaskagi, the East Fjords, and Vestfirðir. Iceland, located in the center of the North Atlantic Ocean, contains many small glaciers, in addition to large ice caps. The glaciers on Iceland are particularly sensitive to variations in oceanic and atmospheric circulation (Andresen et al. 2005; Geirsdóttir et al., 2009; Ólafsdóttir et al. 2010). Iceland thus provides an excellent case study to examine factors influencing glacial landforms such as cirques. (excerpt