Lineament Domain of Regional Strike-Slip Corridor: Insight from the Neogene Transtensional De Geer Transform Fault in NW Spitsbergen

Lineaments on regional scale images represent controversial features in tectonic studies. Published models explain the presence of the lineament domains in most geodynamic environments as resulting from the enhanced erosion along strikes normal to the upper crustal regional extension. Despite their success in many tectonic frameworks, these models fail to explain the existing lineament domains in the regional strike-slip corridors that separate regional blocks, including the transform faults. The present paper investigates the lineament distribution in such environments, and specifically presents the results from a study along the shear corridor of the De Geer Transform Fault in the North Atlantic, responsible for the separation and drifting away between Northern Greenland and the Svalbard Archipelago since Oligocene times. The study spans from satellite image analysis and outcrop scale investigations to a more regional analysis on a digital bathymetric model of the North Atlantic\u2013Arctic Ocean. Lineaments were automatically detected in the spectral band 8 (0.52\u20130.9 lm) of a Landsat 7 image (15 m/pixel resolution). A total of 320 image lineaments were extracted from both the regional and the local scale investigations and statistically analyzed. Results from the multi-scalar lineament analyses revealed the existence of a main N\u2013S lineament domain regionally persistent from the De Geer corridor to the western margin of northern Spitsbergen where it relates to the youngest, post-Oligocene, tectonics observed onshore. This is confirmed by field observations showing that the N\u2013S faults represent the youngest brittle deformation system and systematically cut the deformations associated with the building of the Tertiary West Spitsbergen fold and thrust belt. The N\u2013S lineament domain is the result of the activity of a larger, regional scale tectonic feature, NW\u2013SE oriented and responsible for the localized extension within its deformation corridor, the De Geer Transform Fault. A model is presented that involves the presence of a thin upper crust with brittle behavior lying above a deeper crustal layer characterized by a more ductile deformation. The lower layer suffers more diffuse, homogeneous strain. This strain is transmitted to the upper brittle layer, forming clusters of enhanced fracturing zones aligned following the induced stress trajectories. Lineaments develop along these weaker fractured zones, preferentially etched by erosional processes, and align perpendicular to the least horizontal compression (sigma3), which in turn forms an angle to the shear kinematics. In the western part of Spitsbergen, this angle is smaller than 45 due to the transtensional tectonic regime. The proposed model for lineament domain origin in strike-slip environments well integrates the existing models in literature and could be applied to other similar geodynamic contests

The regulation of acupuncture in France and the UK: Shifts and fragmentation in contrasting healthcare systems

This article explores the regulation of acupuncture in the UK and France. It focuses on the dilemmas such regulation has raised, and the effects of two contrasting approaches to the regulatory organisation of acupuncture within healthcare systems on practices and care. Although the question of how acupuncture, like other complementary, alternative or traditional therapies, should be regulated has often been reduced to a question of scientific knowledge, it is also dependent on the intricacies of national health system governance, state rationales and professional identities. France and the UK provide exemplary instances of contrasting systems, in which each of these factors has come to shape the regulation of the highly heterodox practice that is acupuncture. Overall, exploring the challenges of regulating acupuncture provides useful perspectives on how the make-up of legitimate therapies is constituted in particular healthcare contexts

Gobierno democrático y ambivalencia

Borrowing from Echeverria’s Baroque modernity, this article investigates the relevance of sequential and dissymmetricmodernities as starting point to quest the possibility of rethinking radical practices of governance for a democraticsociety. Ambivalence in this sense is proposed as a counterpoint to the centrality of equivalence in the protestant and realist modernity. This contraposition allows to question the oppositional separation between use and exchange value,a shift especially significant to think the complexity of urban life and governance where the circuits of monetarian and social value permanently overlap and compose among themselves. Building upon both the crisis of an unitarian conception of modernity and the explosion of equivalence as resolving term for the contradictions of contemporary social dynamics, I propose a dialogue between the rationale of the Sumak Kawsay and the contemporary debate about postcolonial governance in India to explore what means to think “radical democratic governance” as a practice to empower society in learning how not to be governed. The ambivalence of a project like this, that situate the governingbodies in the impossible task of dissolving their own Power, configures the dynamic of constituent power as a permanentprocess of interaction among the destitution of the existing forms of governance and the institution of new democraticand provisional “governing” bodies.Partiendo de la idea de la “modernidad barroca” propuesta por Echeverría, este artículo se propone investigar la relevancia de las modernidades secuenciales y asimétricas como punto de partida para poner el foco sobre la posibilidad de repensar practicas radicales de gobernanza en una sociedad realmente democrática. En este sentido propongo “ambivalencia” como término contrapuesto a la centralidad de la “equivalencia” en la modernidad realista y protestante. Esta contraposición nos permite cuestionar la separación entre valor de uso y de cambio como términos opuestos, un giro particularmente significativa a la hora de reflexionar sobre la complejidad de la vida y del gobierno urbano donde los circuitos de valor monetario y social siguen componiéndose y sobreponiéndose. A partir de la crisis de cualquier concepción unitaria de la modernidad así como de la explosión de la equivalencia como término resolutivo de las contradicciones de las dinámicas sociales contemporáneas, propongo aquí un dialogo entre la racionalidad del Sumak Kawsay y el debate contemporáneo sobre la gobernanza postcolonial en la India para explorar que significa pensar la “gobernanza radical democrática” como práctica que apunta a empoderar la sociedad y aprender ella cómo no ser gobernada. La ambivalencia de tal proyecto, que sitúa a los cuerpos gubernamentales en la imposible tarea de disolver su propio poder, configura las dinámicas del poder constituyente como proceso de interacción permanente entre la destitución de las formas actuales de la gobernanza y la institución de nuevos cuerpos gobernantes democráticos y siempre provisionales

Struggles for the right to the city: assembling politics on the streets of Barcelona

PhDIn recent years, the ‘right to the city’ has emerged as a key concept and practice amongst both academics and social movements around which to organise a response to the crisis of Fordist production and political representation. In Spain this response has taken to the streets, with millions of people coming together and shouting ‘They don’t represent us!’. As a key site of both neoliberal urban governance and political insurgency, Barcelona provides a powerful site through which to examine the relationships between urban social movements, urban governance and struggles around the right to the city. In this thesis I build a (partial and provisional) genealogy of the right to the city, examining the relevance of those struggles that have emerged inside and against neoliberal governmentality since the early 1980s in an effort to assemble the right to the city through the material combination of struggles around urban production and citizenship rights. To do this, I return to the relation between genesis and management as an uneven dialectic in the production of rights; drawing on and building new connections between post-colonial studies, autonomous marxist debates, critical studies of citizenship and urban studies to investigate how strangers, outsiders and the governed challenge European capitalism from inside and assert a different imagination of contemporary urban life. I also explore my own role in these dynamics. In contrast to an understanding of academic knowledge as analytical and objective representation, my position as both a militant and a researcher provides the ground upon which I analyse social movements as a factory of concepts and practices capable of assembling an instituent politics against neoliberal governmentalit

Ground Motion Polarization in Fault Zones:Its Relation with Brittle Deformation Fields

Many recent studies indicate that ambient noise and seismic signals in fault zones tend to be polarized on the horizontal plane with a predominant orientation. Here we present a summary of past experiments as well as new study cases showing evidence of this effect. The approach combines the H/V technique in the frequency domain with the covariance matrix diagonalization method in the time domain. Common features are: i) a high stability of results at each site, independently of the nature and location of the source of seismic signals, ii) a predominant polarization characteristic for each fault, and iii) polarization is not parallel to the fault strike as it would be expected for fault-trapped wave generation. In previous papers, a role of fluid-filled microcracks in the damage zone was hypothesized. If this is true, a correlation is expected between seismic anisotropy and polarization. In the studied faults, when anisotropy results are available, the horizontal ground motion polarization is found to be perpendicular to the fast wave splitting component, confirming the role of fluid-filled microcracks in the damage zone. We have then checked this interpretation in terms of the fracture field orientation in the damage zone by applying the package FRAP3 (Salvini, 2002) to model the brittle deformation field expected in the damage zone of the studied faults. We have found a consistent orthogonal relation between the observed polarizations and the orientation of the predicted fracture systems. The quick and relatively inexpensive character of the method encourages to further tests for an extensive application to many fields of theoretical and applied geophysics

FPGA implementations of feed forward neural network by using floating point hardware accelerators

This paper documents the research towards the analysis of different solutions to implement a Neural Network architecture on a FPGA design by using floating point accelerators. In particular, two different implementations are investigated: a high level solution to create a neural network on a soft processor design, with different strategies for enhancing the performance of the process; a low level solution, achieved by a cascade of floating point arithmetic elements. Comparisons of the achieved performance in terms of both time consumptions and FPGA resources employed for the architectures are presented

Hybrid Neural Network Approach Based Tool for the Modelling of Photovoltaic Panels

A hybrid neural network approach based tool for identifying the photovoltaic one-diode model is presented. The generalization capabilities of neural networks are used together with the robustness of the reduced form of one-diode model. Indeed, from the studies performed by the authors and the works present in the literature, it was found that a direct computation of the five parameters via multiple inputs and multiple outputs neural network is a very difficult task. The reduced form consists in a series of explicit formulae for the support to the neural network that, in our case, is aimed at predicting just two parameters among the five ones identifying the model: the other three parameters are computed by reduced form. The present hybrid approach is efficient from the computational cost point of view and accurate in the estimation of the five parameters. It constitutes a complete and extremely easy tool suitable to be implemented in a microcontroller based architecture. Validations are made on about 10000 PV panels belonging to the California Energy Commission database