The European Union facing external challenges

The aim of this workshop is to encourage dialogue on the European Union and to identify and stimulate an original debate on the crucial future challenges of the EU

Italy's foreign policy in the 21st century

Italian foreign policy has often been dismissed for ‘punching below its weight’, forbeing too idiosyncratic and inconsistent. The aim of this workshop is to encourage abetter understanding of Italy's foreign policy since the turn of the century. Those invited to contribute include academics, policy researchers, specialists from the defence industry and from the wider community involved in foreign policy diplomacy at both the national and European levels

Winter: public enemy #1 for accessibility exploring new solutions

Abstract: Winter is expensive. For countries situated in the northern hemisphere, closer to the north pole, such as Canada, Russia and Scandinavia, winter requires the acquisition of special clothing, car tires, and sports equipment, snow removal or plowing from the streets, and is associated with the presence of ice patches, along with accidents and illnesses associated with cold weather. Fall-related injuries due to winter conditions have been estimated to cost the Canadian health care system $ 2.8 billion a year. However, the greatest cost snow entails every year is the social isolation of seniors as well as wheelchair and walker users. This results from the lack of accessibility, as it is difficult to circulate on snow-covered streets even for the able-bodied. Social isolation has been associated with other negative consequences such as depression and even suicide. This exploratory pilot study aimed at finding possible and feasible design solutions for improving the accessibility of sidewalks during winter conditions. For this project we used a Co-Design methodology. Stakeholders (City of Quebec representatives, designers, urban planners, occupational therapists, and adults with motor, visual and aural disabilities) were invited to participate in the design process. In order to meet the objectives, two main steps were carried out: 1. Conception of the design solutions (through Co-design sessions in a Focus-group format with seniors, designers and researchers); and 2. Validation of the design solutions (consultation with experts and stakeholders). The results are a wide variety of possible and feasible solutions, including the reorganisation of the snow-removal procedure and the development of heated curb cuts. This project was funded by the City of Quebec in partnership with the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation et intégration sociale (CIRRIS). Ultimately, the project sought to explore possible solutions to be implemented, if feasible, in the future by the municipal government.Peer Reviewe

Identifying virtual agency in Claude Debussy's music

Robert Hatten’s theory of virtual agency acknowledges the presence of characters in a musical texture portraying human actions and emotions. Through identifying an agent, we are able to understand its role and trajectory in the portrayal of musical narrative or drama. This theory implies human qualities present in the music and the texture having its own form of thought and development. The application of this theory has potential in being used to understand an individual composer’s style, in this case, the music of Claude Debussy. In this thesis, I will be exploring some of Debussy’s keyboard works in addition to one of his late instrumental works, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, identifying the agential properties and narratives present in the music. Debussy stages varying actor roles for interpretation when addressing an agent and its trajectory in its virtual environment. This study will depict a variety of gestures and energies inferring agential presence and whether or not to interpret these gestures as part of a single agent, or additional agents pursuing a single narrative. This interpretive analysis has potential in awakening new findings and understandings in the music in which a conventional analysis would not accomplish in showing us

Understanding risk in daily life of diverse persons with physical and sensory impairments

Managing risk of injury in daily life is a task common to all humans. However, people with impairments face significantly greater challenges in both assessing and managing risk of injury. To find out more about how individuals with impairments understand risk, we developed a qualitative study design based on semi-structured interviews. Seven people with a broad range of impairments were recruited for the study. The interviews were analyzed and organized into a codification tree subdivided into four main sections: safety and risk management, risk situation portrayal, perceptions of safety measures and finally loss of control and strong sensations. The study revealed that the difficulties related to managing risk in day-to-day situations are much higher than for people without impairments and, indeed, are possibly under reported in the literature. The realization that risk is ever present in the daily lives of people with impairments has led us to reconsider how we move forward on the remainder of our study.Peer Reviewe

Designing Interactive and Immersive Multimodal Installations for People with Disability

We developed an end-to-end co-creative methodology for designing interactive and immersive multisensory virtual reality experiences with a particular focus on people with disability. Our method draws on what is called “design thinking” to provide a backbone to our approach. This embraces three stages, an empathic first stage, followed by an ideation phase, during which the thematic context is elaborated, and then an iterative exploration phase during which the initial concept is refined and the implementation is achieved. Furthermore, the “cognitive design” methodology developed by one of us led us to an approach incorporating all sensory modalities, not just the audio and visual modalities (that is, it includes odor, tactile, taste and proprioceptive stimuli), in order to deliver an experience that fully enhances the user’s sense of embodiment, and also led us to place the user’s experience at the heart of the installation. Users participate in the design process through co-design protocols. We showcase the application of this methodology in a detailed way for the construction of an interactive and immersive VR installation for people with disabilities

The Deep Subsurface Biosphere in Igneous Ocean Crust: Frontier Habitats for Microbiological Exploration

We discuss ridge flank environments in the ocean crust as habitats for subseafloor microbial life. Oceanic ridge flanks, areas far from the magmatic and tectonic influence of seafloor spreading, comprise one of the largest and least explored microbial habitats on the planet. We describe the nature of selected ridge flank crustal environments, and present a framework for delineating a continuum of conditions and processes that are likely to be important for defining subseafloor microbial "provinces." The basis for this framework is three governing conditions that help to determine the nature of subseafloor biomes: crustal age, extent of fluid flow, and thermal state. We present a brief overview of subseafloor conditions, within the context of these three characteristics, for five field sites where microbial studies have been done, are underway, or have been proposed. Technical challenges remain and likely will limit progress in studies of microbial ridge flank ecosystems, which is why it is vital to select and design future studies so as to leverage as much general understanding as possible from work focused at a small number of sites. A characterization framework such that as presented in this paper, perhaps including alternative or additional physical or chemical characteristics, is essential for achieving the greatest benefit from multidisciplinary microbial investigations of oceanic ridge flanks

A house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) spleen transcriptome reveals intra- and interspecific patterns of gene expression, alternative splicing and genetic diversity in passerines

Background: With its plumage color dimorphism and unique history in North America, including a recent population expansion and an epizootic of Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG), the house finch (Haemorhous mexicanus) is a model species for studying sexual selection, plumage coloration and host-parasite interactions. As part of our ongoing efforts to make available genomic resources for this species, here we report a transcriptome assembly derived from genes expressed in spleen. Results: We characterize transcriptomes from two populations with different histories of demography and disease exposure: a recently founded population in the eastern US that has been exposed to MG for over a decade and a native population from the western range that has never been exposed to MG. We utilize this resource to quantify conservation in gene expression in passerine birds over approximately 50 MY by comparing splenic expression profiles for 9,646 house finch transcripts and those from zebra finch and find that less than half of all genes expressed in spleen in either species are expressed in both species. Comparative gene annotations from several vertebrate species suggest that the house finch transcriptomes contain ~15 genes not yet found in previously sequenced vertebrate genomes. The house finch transcriptomes harbour ~85,000 SNPs, ~20,000 of which are non-synonymous. Although not yet validated by biological or technical replication, we identify a set of genes exhibiting differences between populations in gene expression (n = 182; 2% of all transcripts), allele frequencies (76 FST ouliers) and alternative splicing as well as genes with several fixed non-synonymous substitutions; this set includes genes with functions related to double-strand break repair and immune response. Conclusions: The two house finch spleen transcriptome profiles will add to the increasing data on genome and transcriptome sequence information from natural populations. Differences in splenic expression between house finch and zebra finch imply either significant evolutionary turnover of splenic expression patterns or different physiological states of the individuals examined. The transcriptome resource will enhance the potential to annotate an eventual house finch genome, and the set of gene-based high-quality SNPs will help clarify the genetic underpinnings of host-pathogen interactions and sexual selection