Flight tracks of homing pigeons measured with GPS

Flight paths of homing pigeons were measured with a newly developed recorder based on GPS. The device consists of a GPS receiver board, a logging facility, an antenna, a power supply, a DCDC converter and a casing. It has a weight of 33g and works reliably with a sampling rate of 1/s with an operation time of about 3 h, providing timeindexed data on geographic positions, ground speed and altitude. The data are downloaded when the bird is recaptured. The devices are fixed to the birds with a harness. The measured complete flight paths show many details: e.g. initial loops flown immediately after release and large detours flown by some pigeons. We are here presenting 3 examples of flight paths from a release site 17.3 km Northeast of the home loft in Frankfurt. Mean speed in flight, duration of breaks and length of the flight path were calculated. The pigeons chose different routes and have different individual tendencies to fly loops over the village close to the release site

Politics that matter in Nas’s "Illmatic"

This essay focusses on a single, seminal piece of American hip-hop music: Nas’s "Illmatic". Taking prompts from ANT and new materialism, and from Bruno Latour more specifically, I argue that "Illmatic" can and should be read as an exploration of the specific urban ecology from which it originated. This ecology is one of the urban landscape of New York’s housing projects as much as of the social practices of their inhabitants. At the same time, it is a concrete articulation, to borrow Latour’s famous phrase, of the racist policies that those who planned and oversaw its construction aimed to enforce. Though Nas’s music is often thought of as not as explicitly political as that of Public Enemy or KRS-One, a reading of it in this context reveals that it has no less political potential. Throughout the album, there is a detailed and complex engagement with the housing projects and how they contain and modify the possible mental landscapes of those who inhabit them. Incarceration, a central question for both Nas and Black America, must then be thought of as something that is not limited to the milieu of the prison. Instead, it is the prevailing condition in the urban ecologies of the housing projects. This imprisonment Nas understands in two ways: materially and mentally, working on bodies and working on minds. The very possibilities of thought are limited and formed by the ecologies of concrete that they take place in. Ultimately, through a close and careful reading of "Illmatic", it becomes clear that the oppression of African Americans is not simply a social one: it is material. The housing projects themselves are an attempt to construct an urban environment that constrains thought, to make impossible the imagination of an alternative.Este ensayo se centra en una obra fundadora de la música hip-hop estadounidense: "Illmatic" de Nas. Tomando como base las propuestas teóricas de ANT y del nuevo materialismo, específicamente las de Bruno Latour, argumento que "Illmatic" puede y debería leerse como una exploración de la ecología urbana específica desde la cual se originó. Esta ecología es aquella del paisaje urbano de la planificación urbanística de la ciudad de Nueva York tanto como la de las prácticas de sus pobladores. Al mismo tiempo, es una articulación concreta, tomando prestada la famosa frase de Latour, de las políticas racistas de aquellos que la planificaron y supervisaron con el fin de reforzar una situación que les convenía. A pesar de que la música de Nas no se percibe como política en primera instancia, por lo menos no tanto como la de Public Enemy o KRS-One, se revela con un similar potencial político cuando se hace una lectura en este contexto. En todo el álbum hay un detallado y complejo compromiso con la planificación urbanística y con la manera en que se incorporan y modifican los posibles paisajes mentales de aquellos que habitan esos lugares. El encarcelamiento, un tema central para ellos y la América Negra, debe ser considerado entonces como algo que no se limita al mundo de la cárcel. En lugar de eso, afirmo que la prisión es la condición predominante de las ecologías urbanas relacionadas con la planificación urbanística. Nas entiende el encarcelamiento de dos maneras: material y mentalmente, como un trabajo de cuerpos y mentes. Las propias posibilidades de pensamiento están limitadas al tiempo que formadas por las ecologías de hormigón en las que tienen lugar. En última instancia, a través de una atenta y cuidadosa lectura de "Illmatic", se revela de manera clara que la opresión sufrida por los afroamericanos no es únicamente social, sino también material. La propia planificación urbanística es un intento de construir un medio ambiente urbano que limite el pensamiento con el fin de hacer imposible imaginar una alternativa

Neurotransmitter MIPs for the Potential Use in Amperometric Sensors

Molecular imprinting technology is a field where polymer technology is utilised to synthesise high affinity particles, much like antibodies. This project has dealt with the imprinting of the neurotransmitter molecules serotonin and histamine. Serotonin polymers were synthesised using methacrylic acid and acrylamide as functional monomers relying on hydrogen bonding for the imprinting effect. None of the produced batches showed any sign of imprinting. Instead histamine polymers were successfully synthesised showing specific binding with the average binding affinity Kd = 0:61 mM and the approximate number of binding sites N = 50 μmolgThe common ways of measuring different analyte concentrations in the human blood are often based on antibodies. These biomolecules possess the best chemical recognition known and can easily distinguish friend from foe. Their perfection does however come at a very high price. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIP) are a way around this. Easily chemically produced and much cheaper, these artifical antibodies can be incorporated in simple electrochemical devices for fast and precise concentration measurements, hopefully revolutionising the field of medical analysis

The GPS flight recorder for homing pigeons works : design and first results

This paper describes a first version of the GPS flight recorder for homing pigeons. The GPS recorder consists of a hybrid GPS board, a patch antenna 19*19 mm, a 3 V Lithium battery as power supply, a DCDC converter, a logging facility and an additional microprocessor. It has a weight of 33g. Prototypes were tested and worked reliably with a sampling rate of 1/sec and with an operation time of about 3 h. In first tests on homing pigeons 9 flight paths were recorded, showing details like loops flown immediately after the release, complete routes over 30 km including detours, rest periods and speed

Reading (with) Bateman: Mapping Potentiality of/in Reading

Starting from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of paranoid reading and her call for reparative reading, this article proposes two experimental readings of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho“ (1991). Drawing on the writings of Roland Barthes and Eugenie Brinkema, we consider the text’s affective possibilities and potentialities as well as moments when it may surprise its readers, in order to ask what a reparative reading can look like in the case of American Psycho“. First, we read the novel for its potentialities of different affective modes—in this case, boredom and disgust—by looking closely at its syntactic structure. Second, we impose formal constraints on our reading itself, reading the novel as if it was a comedy. Through these modes of reading, our approach opens up new possibilities for parallel interpretations, instead of positing another master reading of the text

On the Duality of Global Finite Element Discretization Error-Control in Small Strain Newtonian and Eshelbian Mechanics

In this paper global a posteriori error estimators are presented for the error obtained during the finite element discretization of the linear elasticity problem. Thereby, the duality of global error measures is established that are chosen within the framework of traditional Newtonian mechanics as well as within the framework of Eshelbian mechanics. In Newtonian mechanics we are concerned with the (physical) Cauchy stress tensor that reflects the internal resistance of an elastic body to an applied physical force, whereas in Eshelbian mechanics the applied force is a material force acting on a defect of the elastic body with associated (material) (Newton-)Eshelby stress tensor which is the dual stress tensor of the Cauchy stress tensor. The derivation of a posteriori error estimators is based on the well-established strategy of solving an auxiliary dual problem in order to control the global error measures defined in terms of bounded non-linear functionals. In this paper, two principally different strategies are presented to estimate the error measure. The first strategy rests upon an equilibrated residual error estimator based on local Neumann problems, whereas the second one makes use of averaging techniques. The paper is concluded by a numerical example that illustrates our theoretical results