Labor Movements: From the Specifications of the Panama Canal to Robotic Patents

This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between architecture faculty and students. The paper highlights two student projects from a recent research studio focused on the link between regulatory documents (specifications, laws, codes, patents, etc.) and the political territories that connect building technology with the movements of construction labor. Each project interconnects two types of movement: (1) physical movements of people, materials, and machines (2) political movements and colonial structures of power. The former are visible and have limited durations, while the latter are seemingly invisible but with enduring consequences. The contemporary effects of these movements are latent in the underexamined histories of written regulatory documents. In the first project, these two types of movement intersect in the construction of the Panama Canal. The strategy for this analysis is based on visualizing concrete specifications, sanitation laws, and construction images collected from the Nichols Notebook Archive. These documents juxtapose unpredictable site conditions, yellow fever and the movement of people, with the pursuit of material predictability, such as engineered concrete. These two scales collide at the margins of the oceanic trade route, stressing the tensions between exploitative imperialist bodies and the bodies of local and migrant workers. Overlapping with the timeline of the Panama Canal construction, the second student project connects the language of twentieth century U.S. Labor Acts with the evolution of KUKA Robotic Patents. The influx of twentyfirst century industrial construction robots highlights the political implications of choreographing movement on the worksite. Both projects resulted in a series of strategies used to visualize the movements of labor, arguing that labor conditions are central to technological processes, yet peripheral to traditional architectural discourse. Examining postcolonial theory and automation discourse through the study of written regulations makes a case for expanding transdisciplinary knowledge across multiple scales of visible and invisible movements

High-throughput sequencing of African chikanda cake highlights conservation challenges in orchids

Source at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-017-1343-7 .Chikanda is a traditional dish made with wild-harvested ground orchid tubers belonging to three orchidioid genera, Disa, Satyrium and Habenaria, all of which are CITES appendix II-listed. Identification of collected orchid tubers is very difficult and documentation of constituent species in prepared chikanda has hitherto been impossible. Here amplicon metabarcoding was used in samples of six prepared chikanda cakes to study genetic sequence diversity and species diversity in this product. Molecular operational taxonomic unit identification using similarity-matching reveals that species of all three genera were present in the chikanda samples studied. Disa was present in all of the samples, Satyrium in five out of six and Habenaria in one of the samples, as well as a number of other plants. The fact that each sample contained orchids and the presence of a wide variety of species from all genera in this traditional dish raise serious concerns about the sustainability of this trade and the future of wild orchid populations in the main harvest areas. This proof-of-concept study shows that Ion-Torrent PGM is a cost-effective scalable platform for metabarcoding using the relatively long nrITS1 and nrITS2 regions. Furthermore, nrITS metabarcoding can be successfully used for the detection of specific ingredients in a highly-processed food product at genus level, and this makes it a useful tool in the detection of possible conservation issues arising from commercialized trade or processed plant products

Cultural safety, diversity and the servicer user and carer movement in mental health research

This study will be of interest to anyone concerned with a critical appraisal of mental health service users' and carers' participation in research collaboration and with the potential of the postcolonial paradigm of cultural safety to contribute to the service user research (SUR) movement. The history and nature of the mental health field and its relationship to colonial processes provokes a consideration of whether cultural safety could focus attention on diversity, power imbalance, cultural dominance and structural inequality, identified as barriers and tensions in SUR. We consider these issues in the context of state-driven approaches towards SUR in planning and evaluation and the concurrent rise of the SUR movement in the UK and Australia, societies with an intimate involvement in processes of colonisation. We consider the principles and motivations underlying cultural safety and SUR in the context of the policy agenda informing SUR. We conclude that while both cultural safety and SUR are underpinned by social constructionism constituting similarities in principles and intent, cultural safety has additional dimensions. Hence, we call on researchers to use the explicitly political and self-reflective process of cultural safety to think about and address issues of diversity, power and social justice in research collaboration

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements