Thomas Hobbes y Sigmund Freud: pensadores del (des)orden

This paper traces how two authors from seemingly different theoretical fields address the tragedy of Modernity in similar ways. The concept of tragedy indicates that the order of the world is no longer pre-determined by a divine will, but is instead the outcome of human action. To illustrate this point, Thomas Hobbes’ natural condition and Sigmund Freud’s primal horde will be revisited to examine the contingent character of that which is human. Following these two perspectives this paper will account for the notion of order as required —though impossible— social production. In Freud’s work this notion stems from the idea of Kultur whereas Hobbes connects it to the Leviathan itself. According to both theoretical perspectives the State and Culture constitute social artifacts intended to put in order the constitutive disorder of Society.En este trabajo nos proponemos rastrear la manera en que dos teóricos provenientes de campos disciplinares en apariencia distintos, interpretan en términos comunes la tragedia de la modernidad. Se trata de la tragedia que viene a mostrarnos que el orden del mundo ya no está predeterminado por ninguna voluntad divina y que su construcción deviene objeto de la acción humana. Para ilustrar esto nos referiremos al modo en que Thomas Hobbes y Sigmund Freud indagan el carácter contingente de lo humano en las respectivas representaciones del estado de naturaleza y de la horda primitiva. Al mismo tiempo veremos cómo se articula en ambos planteos la idea de orden como producción social necesaria pero al mismo tiempo imposible. en el caso de Freud esta operación se asocia a la figura de la Kultur y en Hobbes a la del Leviathan. De este modo mostraremos que el estado y la Cultura se constituyen en el artificio para dar un orden —institucional y simbólico— al desorden constitutivo de la sociedad

Cultura política y democracia: el debate intelectual en la revista Controversia para el análisis de la realidad argentina.

Este artigo revisa os debates da revista acadêmica Controvérsia para a análise da realidade argentina sobre a questão da democracia. Esses debates articulam tradições políticas antigas e novos significados em torno de um conceito de democracia que leva em consideração suas dimensões formal e susbtantiva. Argumentamos que o significado da democracia argentina – formalmente iniciada em 1983 – herdou um debate entre tradições políticas distintas e conceitos contraditórios. Estes embates tornam altamente complexos a cultura política e o papel dos intelectuais no processo de reconstrução democrática.This article reviews the Controversia (journal) debates about the democracy idea. We will account for the strenuous required efforts to connect old political traditions and the new meanings surrounding a concept that encompassed democracy‟s formal and real dimensions. It will be argued that the meaning of Argentinian democracy –formally initiated in 1983– contains a debate between contradictory traditions and political conceptions. These contradictions turned the political culture and the role of the intellectuals highly controversial in the process of democratic reconstruction.Fil: Reano, Ariana. Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Acceleration-as-a-Service: Exploiting Virtualised GPUs for a Financial Application

'How can GPU acceleration be obtained as a service in a cluster?' This question has become increasingly significant due to the inefficiency of installing GPUs on all nodes of a cluster. The research reported in this paper is motivated to address the above question by employing rCUDA (remote CUDA), a framework that facilitates Acceleration-as-a-Service (AaaS), such that the nodes of a cluster can request the acceleration of a set of remote GPUs on demand. The rCUDA framework exploits virtualisation and ensures that multiple nodes can share the same GPU. In this paper we test the feasibility of the rCUDA framework on a real-world application employed in the financial risk industry that can benefit from AaaS in the production setting. The results confirm the feasibility of rCUDA and highlight that rCUDA achieves similar performance compared to CUDA, provides consistent results, and more importantly, allows for a single application to benefit from all the GPUs available in the cluster without loosing efficiency.Comment: 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience (IEEE eScience) - Munich, Germany, 201

Multi-Tenant Virtual GPUs for Optimising Performance of a Financial Risk Application

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are becoming popular accelerators in modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. Installing GPUs on each node of the cluster is not efficient resulting in high costs and power consumption as well as underutilisation of the accelerator. The research reported in this paper is motivated towards the use of few physical GPUs by providing cluster nodes access to remote GPUs on-demand for a financial risk application. We hypothesise that sharing GPUs between several nodes, referred to as multi-tenancy, reduces the execution time and energy consumed by an application. Two data transfer modes between the CPU and the GPUs, namely concurrent and sequential, are explored. The key result from the experiments is that multi-tenancy with few physical GPUs using sequential data transfers lowers the execution time and the energy consumed, thereby improving the overall performance of the application.Comment: Accepted to the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), 10 June 201

The origin of Peruvian professional militarism

The process of professionalization initiated by the Peruvian army in 1896 under French influence did not withdraw the military from political involvement. On the contrary, as the process of professionalization advanced, the army developed a “professional militarism,” that is, military political participation for reasons based on the institution’s professional ethos. The Peruvian army had traditionally claimed a broad military jurisdiction including extra-military roles. French instructors reinforced such claimed incorporating a broad military jurisdiction into the army’s professional ethos, which justified military coups during the twentieth-century as well as the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (1968-1980). Historians Frederick M. Nunn and Daniel M. Masterson do not take sufficiently into account the impact of nineteenth-century militarism on Peruvian military thought. These scholars argued that Peruvian officers were aping their French mentors when twentieth-century military magazines claimed nation building as a defense prerequisite or when “Francophile” officers declared a civilizing and social mission for the army. However, in 1888, over 120 Peruvian officers established the Centro Militar del Perú and published the Revista Militar y Naval, which systematized the “military mind” born from the century’s military experience. The articles in the Revista demonstrate that before the process of professionalization initiated in 1896, the Peruvian military mind consisted of attitudes and perspectives stressing the necessity of a strong military, the supremacy of society over the individual, the destructiveness of civilian partisan politics, and a broad military jurisdiction, which included administrative, nation-building, civilizing, and constitutional guardian functions. Consequently, this thesis focuses on nineteenth-century militarism and political culture arguing that by late 1880s the essential elements of the Peruvian military mind behind twentieth-century “professional militarism” had already come together

L'immagine dell'Italia nelle riviste di architettura inglesi (1830-1870)

L’obiettivo della mia ricerca di dottorato è stato lo studio dell’immagine dell’Italia così come tracciata dai periodici d’architettura vittoriani, veicoli mediatici che più hanno rappresentato la complessa società ottocentesca inglese. Il lavoro è stato condotto attraverso un articolato spoglio delle riviste che interessano dieci titoli nell'arco di quarant'anni: all'interno di una mole considerevole di articoli, trafiletti e illustrazioni è stato possibile delineare il rapporto tra Italia e Inghilterra. I quattro decenni scelti come arco cronologico vanno dalla nascita dei primi architectural periodicals a partire dagli anni trenta dell’Ottocento, sino al 1870, data individuata come termine per indicare il periodo di profonde trasformazioni che cambiano l’ambiente professionale e la società inglese. L’anno coincide, inoltre, con il completamento dell’unificazione del Regno d’Italia e l’apertura del tunnel del Frejus: tali eventi mutano il Paese intero e la percezione che gli inglesi hanno del patrimonio culturale di quest’ultimo. Lo spoglio delle testate d’architettura permette allo sguardo del ricercatore di svariare su diversi temi, ma soprattutto concede un punto di vista ancora poco esplorato. I periodici inglesi nascono in un complesso contesto poggiando le proprie fondamenta sull'associazionismo vittoriano, espressione della nascente classe professionale di architetti. Si è quindi esaminato questo ambiente eterogeneo studiando gli scritti inglesi, i corrispondenti italiani, i loro contributi e i loro rapporti con il panorama inglese, cercando, in ultimo, di capire se le riviste oggetto di studio fossero lette in Italia. L’immagine che affiora è dunque un complesso ritratto del Paese descritto dai corrispondenti inglesi, in cui, alla classica rappresentazione del patrimonio architettonico italiano decadente e in rovina, si affiancano ammodernamenti e infrastrutture del nuovo Regno d’Italia

Using Indigenous Research Frameworks in the Multiple Contexts of Research, Teaching, Mentoring, and Leading

Indigenous research frameworks can be used to effectively engage Indigenous communities and students in Western modern science through transparent and respectful communication. Currently, much of the academic research taking place within Indigenous communities marginalizes Indigenous Knowledge, does not promote long-term accountability to Indigenous communities and their relations, and withholds respect for the spiritual values that many Indigenous communities embrace. Indigenous research frameworks address these concerns within the academic research process by promoting values such as: relationality, multilogicality, and the centralization of Indigenous perspectives. Indigenous research frameworks provide a framework that can be used in multiple contexts within higher education to bring equitable practices to research, teaching, mentoring, and organizational leadership. In this article, as a researcher who uses Indigenous research frameworks, I utilize autoethnography to engage in critical, reflexive thinking about how my perspective as an Indigenous researcher has developed over time. The purpose of this autoethnography is to reveal how Indigenous research frameworks may enhance higher education, especially for Indigenous students

THE GEOLOGIC FRAMEWORK OF ACOMA PUEBLO AND ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT: A WESTERN & NATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The sequence of sedimentary rocks at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, are important both in terms of their cultural significance for the Native people of Acoma Pueblo and the insight they provide into the long term geologic history of the Colorado Plateau. In this thesis we present the first stratigraphic and provenance analysis of the Mesozoic strata at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, based on field observations and detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology. Acoma Pueblo was located in the distal part (i.e. backbulge) of a foreland basin system during most of the Mesozoic. Acoma Pueblo has not been included in previous regional studies of the Colorado Plateau, which focused on proximal (i.e. foredeep) portions of the Cordilleran foreland basin system. However, field observations and detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology provide insight into how the sources of sediment for depositional environments at Acoma Pueblo changed throughout the Mid-Late Mesozoic as the Cordilleran foreland basin system evolved. The depositional environments of strata exposed at Acoma Pueblo, include aeolian dunes (Entrada Sandstone and Zuni Sandstone), lacustrine, fluvial playa (Morrison Formation), and shallow marine environments (Dakota Sandstone). Key provenance findings include: The end of sediment delivery from the East Mexico Magmatic Arc after Entrada time, an increase in Cordilleran Arc grains after Entrada time, an increase in Yavapai and Mazatzal age grains after Entrada time, and a more uniform distribution of zircon peak ages within the Dakota Sandstone. In addition to this western science geologic knowledge, this thesis also integrates the traditional cultural perspectives of a trained geologist who is a member of Acoma Pueblo. Thus, in describing/recognizing geologic formations we also draw on the cultural knowledge a tribal member has of the significance and value of the strata exposed at Acoma Pueblo

Enhancing resistance against African weevils through development of transgenic sweetpotato cultivars (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.) expressing cry7Aa1, cry3Ca1 and ET33-34 genes.

Sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) is one of the most important food crops in tropical and subtropical countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, sweetpotato is mainly produced for consumption and as a source of income by resource-poor farmers. However, their production is limited by severe damage caused by pests and diseases. The African weevils Cylas puncticollis and C. brunneus are the main biological constraints that may cause losses between 50 and 100%. Biotechnological approaches to control weevils include the introduction of genes encoding Cry proteins found to be active against these pests. To that end, several protocols for sweetpotato regeneration and transformation by organogenesis or somatic embryogenesis have been developed but their efficiency remains largely genotype-dependent and time-consuming. In this study, 31 African sweetpotato cultivars from CIP genebank were screened for regeneration and transformation efficiencies by organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis. Additionally, “Jewel” and “Jonathan” cultivars were used as organogenic and embryogenic controls, respectively. Regeneration by organogenesis was conducted using a two-step protocol including 2,4-D then thidiazuron, zeatin or kinetin while regeneration by embryogenesis was performed using a three-step protocol, each one using a different hormone (2,4,5-T, ABA and AG3). Higher than 40% regeneration efficiencies were obtained for 8 cultivars (Jewel, Imby, Kawogo, Luapula, Mafutha, CIP440163, Zambezi and Ukerewe) with an organogenesis protocol and 8 cultivars (Jonathan, Imby, K51/3251, Bwanjule, CIP440163, SPK004, New Kawogo and KSP 11) with an embryogenesis protocol. Genetic transformation of sweetpotato with Jewel by organogenesis and Imby, CIP440163 and Jonathan by somatic embryogenesis has been achieved using chimerical genes coding for three of the most active proteins (Cry7Aa1, ET33-34, and Cry3Ca1) against African weevils. Transgenic events have been confirmed by kanamycin resistant calli test, PCR and Southern blot. Transcriptional activity and Cry protein accumulation are being tested in leaves and storage roots by Real time PCR and DAS-ELISA respectively

Empirical Assessment of Performance of Tests of Equal Variance in the Presence of Within and Between Dependence and Under Small Sample Size: Application to Craniofacial Variability Index in Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SLOS)

Craniofacial variability index (CVI), estimated by the standard deviation of z-scores obtained from craniofacial measurements of one or more individuals, is considered in the medical literature as a useful and relatively simple quantitative measure of the degree of dysmorphogenesis in the head and face. CVI obtained from patients diagnosed with syndromes such as Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SLOLS) is often compared with CVI for healthy individuals. Moreover, CVI is commonly used to compare degree of dysmorphogenesis among individuals and groups characterized by the presence or absence of certain syndromes and abnormalities. However, the type of comparison provided is often subjective with no statistical comparison of values provided to account for sample to sample variability. We performed a simulation study to compare the performance of tests of variance under the presence of within and between individual dependencies. We compare empirical level and power obtained from 10,000 simulations to assess performance. We considered four variance comparison tests: F-test, Levene’s Test, Fligner-Killeen test and permutation F test. We also provided a detailed analysis of a real data set to illustrate our results. Overall, results from our simulation indicate that the performances of the F and the permutation F tests are better than the other methods. However, for all the tests considered, power for detecting small differences in variance is very low when the sample size is small. An interesting finding in our simulation is that the performance of the tests was actually enhanced by the presence of within individual or group dependence, where the power of the tests increased with increased correlation. On the other hand, between dependence and within and between individual dependence have the effect of lowering the power in comparison with the scenarios of independence and within dependence. It is also observed that the higher the correlation the lower the power. It should be noted that in the case of group comparison the simulation scenario of within and between dependence shows opposite results to those observed in the individual comparison. A higher correlation is associated to both a higher level and power. On another note, the analysis of the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SLOS) dataset has shown that comparison of pattern profile between individuals is a useful tool to identify influential z-scores of craniofacial measurements that affect CVI and the subsequent results of hypothesis testing of equal variances using the classical F test versus Levene-median and Fligner-Killeen tests.Master of Science (MSc