Representations of madness in Indo-Caribbean literature

This thesis presents a critical reading of selected Indo-Caribbean prose and poetry and explores their shared concern with issues of madness and insanity. Before approaching literary texts, however, the thesis investigates the colonial treatment of mental illness in Trinidad and British Guiana in order to establish a pragmatic link between the East Indians’ experience of mental illness during indentureship and its later emergence in literature. The study of the development of local colonial psychiatry is based on the examination of original sources, including relevant Parliamentary Papers and previously unexamined material. A critical reading of Edward Jenkins’s writings provides the link between history and literature, whilst contemporary theories on the construction of the collective imaginary help to sustain the argument of a transference of the trope of madness from facts to fiction, from reality to imagination. This project contributes both to the growing field of Indo-Caribbean literary criticism and to the embryonic area of the history of mental health in the Caribbean. Concentrating on the relation between the social history of medicine and literary imagination it suggests a new approach to Indo-Caribbean literature based on the close relationship between health and culture

Des poissons aux masses d'eau : les usages militants du droit pour faire entendre la parole d'êtres qui ne parlent pas

Cet article relate les efforts entrepris par l'association ANPER-TOS depuis 1958 pour dénoncer et faire réprimer les pollutions aquatiques. Il montre comment certains pêcheurs, aidés par des juristes, sont devenus les porte-parole d'entités non-humaines jusque-là exclues de la représentation. Il pose le problème de leur prise en charge politique étant donné leurs singularités et les médiations techniques souvent lourdes qu'elles requièrent avant de pouvoir être entendues. L'article évoque plus particulièrement une affaire de porcherie industrielle survenue en Lozère qui pose la question de la matérialité et des êtres à prendre en compte pour la composition des mondes ruraux communs. / This articles account for the efforts made by ANPER-TOS (NGO) since 1958 to blow the whistle and get water pollution acts santioned. It shows how some fishermen, helped by legal professionals, became the spoke-persons for non-human entities which were until then excluded from representation. It discusses the problem of their political acknowledgement and management considering their singularities and the highly technical mediations they need to be heard. The article evokes particularly a trial concerning a pig factory farming located in Lozère, in France, and questions the materiality and entities that should be taken into account in the making of common rural worlds

L’eau : un bien commun à composer

"S’il est un domaine où les praticiens, les acteurs de terrain ont su inventer des cosmopolitiques avant l’heure, c’est bien celui de l’eau. Il ne faudra jamais oublier comment, avec les mouvements liés aux parcs naturels, les associations de pêcheurs ont constitué très tôt des espaces de débat et d’inventions pour préserver la ressource puis le milieu naturel dans son ensemble. Dès qu’ils eurent placé ce souci avant leurs exigences de performance de pêche, ils durent rassembler et se confronter à toute la chaîne des acteurs qui compose ces chevelus que sont les problèmes de l’eau. Malgré la radicalité des propos ou des actions, la capacité à faire des alliances, à convaincre, est restée un souci constant. Souvent, les tribunaux furent leurs seuls espaces de controverses ouverts. Les manifestations n’ont pas manqué non plus. Et cette mobilisation à la fois forte, régulière et capable pourtant de composer avec les parties prenantes du milieu des rivières fait une différence avec la plupart des mobilisations environnementales. On se prend à rêver que les qualités de ces pêcheurs-là devenus protecteurs de leurs milieux au sens large, puissent un jour se retrouver aussi vraiment dans le milieu de la pêche professionnelle en mer, qui ne sait plus comment se sortir de la course à la destruction de la ressource qu’elle a mise en place.

Off-line incentive mechanism for long-term P2P backup storage

This paper presents a micro-payment-based incentive mechanism for long-term peer-to-peer storage systems. The main novelty of the proposed incentive mechanism is to allow users to be off-line for extended periods of time without updating or renewing their information by themselves. This feature is enabled through a digital cheque, issued by the user, which is later employed by the peers to get a gratification for storing the user's information when the user is off-line. The proposed P2P backup system also includes a secure and lightweight data verification mechanism. Moreover, the proposed incentive also contributes to improve the availability of the stored information and the scalability of the whole system. The paper details the verification and cheque-based incentive mechanisms in the context of a P2P backup service and analyzes its scalability and security properties. The system is furthermore validated by means of simulation, proving the effectiveness of the proposed incentive.This work has been funded by the Regional Government of Madrid under the MEDIANET project (S2009/TIC-1468) and has also received funding from the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, under the QUARTET project (TIN2009-13992-C02-01).Publicad

Network-based localized IP mobility management: Proxy Mobile IPv6 and current trends in standardization

IP mobility support has been a hot topic over the last years, recently fostered by the role of IP in the evolution of the 3G mobile communication networks. Standardization bodies, namely IETF, IEEE and 3GPP are working on different aspects of the mobility aiming at improving the mobility experience perceived by users. Traditional IP mobility support mechanisms, Mobile IPv4 or Mobile IPv6, are based on the operation of the terminal to keep ongoing sessions despite the movement. The current trend is towards network-based solutions where mobility support is based on network operation. Proxy Mobile IPv6 is a promising specification that allows network operators to provide localized mobility support without relying on mobility functionality or configuration present in the mobile nodes, which greatly eases the deployment of the solution. This paper presents Proxy Mobile IPv6 and the different extensions that are been considered by the standardization bodies to enhance the basic protocol with interesting features needed to offer a richer mobility experience, namely, flow mobility, multicast and network mobility support.European Community's Seventh Framework ProgramThe research leading to the results presented in this paper has received funding from the Spanish MICINN through the I-MOVING project (TEC2010-18907) and from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 258053 (MEDIEVAL project).Publicad

Platelets activate a pathogenic response to blood-stage Plasmodium infection but not a protective immune response

© 2017 by The American Society of Hematology. Clinical studies indicate that thrombocytopenia correlates with the development of severe falciparum malaria, suggesting that platelets either contribute to control of parasite replication, possibly as innate parasite killer cells or function in eliciting pathogenesis. Removal of platelets by anti-CD41 mAb treatment, platelet inhibition by aspirin, and adoptive transfer of wild-type (WT) platelets to CD40-KO mice, which do not control parasite replication, resulted in similar parasitemia compared with control mice. Human platelets at a physiologic ratio of 1 platelet to 9 red blood cells (RBCs) did not inhibit the in vitro development or replication of blood-stage Plasmodium falciparum. The percentage of Plasmodium-infected (iRBCs) with bound platelets during the ascending parasitemia in Plasmodium chabaudi- and Plasmodium berghei-infected mice and the 48-hour in vitro cycle of P falciparum was <10%. P chabaudi and P berghei iRBCs with apoptotic parasites (TdT1) exhibited minimal platelet binding (<5%), which was similar to nonapoptotic iRBCs. These findings collectively indicate platelets do not kill bloodstage Plasmodium at physiologically relevant effector-to-target ratios.Pchabaudi primary andsecondary parasitemiawassimilar in mice depleted of platelets by mAb-injection just before infection, indicating that activation of the protective immune response does not require platelets. In contrast to the lack of an effect on parasite replication, adoptive transfer ofWTplatelets to CD40-KOmice, which are resistant to experimental cerebral malaria, partially restored experimental cerebral malaria mortality and symptoms in CD40-KO recipients, indicating platelets elicit pathogenesis and platelet CD40 is a key molecule

High speed DSC (hyper-DSC) as a tool to measure the solubility of a drug within a solid or semi-solid matrix

Conventional differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) techniques are commonly used to quantify the solubility of drugs within polymeric-controlled delivery systems. However, the nature of the DSC experiment, and in particular the relatively slow heating rates employed, limit its use to the measurement of drug solubility at the drug's melting temperature. Here, we describe the application of hyper-DSC (HDSC), a variant of DSC involving extremely rapid heating rates, to the calculation of the solubility of a model drug, metronidazole, in silicone elastomer, and demonstrate that the faster heating rates permit the solubility to be calculated under non-equilibrium conditions such that the solubility better approximates that at the temperature of use. At a heating rate of 400 degrees C/min (HDSC), metronidazole solubility was calculated to be 2.16 mg/g compared with 6.16 mg/g at 20 degrees C/min. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.</p

Speeding IPv6 Address Autoconfiguration for VANETs through Caching

GeoSAC is a mechanism that enables IPv6 address autoconfigur ation in vehicular networks based on geographic routing. It is built using one of the most know networking stack in the field of VANET, the one proposed by the car-to-car conso rtium. GeoSAC adapts the existing IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration prot ocol to VANETs. In this thesis we analytically model GeoSAC in order to evaluate its perfomance, especially in terms of configuration times. Then we propose an optimization for this protocol using router advertisement caching which has also been modeled. We validate both the model we proposed by means of simulation. Simulation results show that our optimization significantly improves the performance in terms of configuration time but also for si gnalling overhead.Telematics EngineeringUniversidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spainpu

VANET-Based optimization of infotainment and traffic efficiency vehicular services

The design, standardization and future deployment of vehicular communications systems have been driven so far by safety applications. There are two more aspects of the vehicular networking that have increased their importance in the last years: infotainment and traffic efficiency, as they can improve drivers' experience, making vehicular communications systems more attractive to end-users. In this thesis we propose optimization mechanisms for both types of vehicular services. Infotainment services are related to the provision of classic IP applications, like browsing, reading e-mail or using social networks. Traffic efficiency services are those accessing new capabilities to the car-navigation systems, aiming at optimizing the usage of road infrastructures, reducing travel times and therefore minimizing the ecological footprint. Bringing infotainment services to the vehicular environment requires to comply with standard protocols and mechanisms that allow heterogeneous networks to be interconnected in the Internet. There are three main functionalities that have to be provided: i) address autoconfiguration, ii) efficient routing and iii) mobility management. Regarding infotainment services, this thesis proposes mechanisms tackling the above-named aspects: an overhearing technique to improve an already standardized address autoconfiguration protocol; a tree-based routing algorithm especially tailored for vehicle-to-Internet communications and an optimized mobility management approach for vehicular environments. Regarding traffic efficiency, this thesis proposes two algorithms that make use of vehicular communication techniques to monitor and forecast short-term traffic conditions. We first improved our knowledge on drivers' behavior by analyzing real vehicular data traces, and proposes a mixture model for the vehicles interarrival time. This outcome was used for validating the proposed infotainment optimization as well. All the algorithms and analytical models described in this thesis have been validated by simulations and/or implementations using standard hardware.Telematics EngineeringUniversidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spainpu