Inspicio

“Inspicio” [een-spee-cho] is a Latin word meaning “inspect, examine, review.” Inspicio provides commentary on all arts disciplines with a focus on Miami and South Florida. Inspicio is simultaneously an archive of the history of art in South Florida and a megaphone to the world about the booming current art scene. Inspicio content is prepared by a blend of FIU students, faculty, and outside professionals (like writers for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal), and is published through multiple channels (website, e-Magazine, social media, e-Blasts) with print publication still being planned. Commentary in the form of video interviews, reviews, constructive criticism, written interviews, video diaries, and profiles is published on the Inspicio website on a continuous basis as soon as the material is ready for publication. The best material is published in an e-Magazine (like The New Yorker format), which is available periodically and can be viewed on tablets and smartphones

Dataset for the ReSolve Project

The RE:Solve project aim was to develop a process/proof of concept (POC), and to tackle the issue of contaminated plastic packaging from the food waste management sector in order to divert this substantial (and potentially valuable and useful) waste stream from landfill via effective separation of the material contaminated with organic residues from the plastic packaging

Exploring the use of new school buildings through post-occupancy evaluation and participatory action research

This paper presents the results of the development and testing of an integrated post-occupancy evaluation (POE) approach for teachers, staff, pupils and community members using newly constructed school buildings. It focusses on three cases of UK secondary schools, demonstrating how users can be inspired to engage with the problems of school design and energy use awareness. The cases provided new insights into the engagement of school teachers, staff and young people regarding issues of sustainability, management, functional performance and comfort. The integrative approach adopted in these cases provided a more holistic understanding of these buildings’ performance than could have been achieved by either observational or more traditional questionnaire-based methods. Moreover, the whole-school approach, involving children in POE, provided researchers with highly contextualised information about how a school is used, how to improve the quality of school experiences (both socially and educationally) and how the school community is contributing to the building's energy performance. These POE methods also provided unique opportunities for children to examine the social and cultural factors impeding the adoption of energy-conscious and sustainable behaviours

Knot Theory: from Fox 3-colorings of links to Yang-Baxter homology and Khovanov homology

This paper is an extended account of my "Introductory Plenary talk at Knots in Hellas 2016" conference We start from the short introduction to Knot Theory from the historical perspective, starting from Heraclas text (the first century AD), mentioning R.Llull (1232-1315), A.Kircher (1602-1680), Leibniz idea of Geometria Situs (1679), and J.B.Listing (student of Gauss) work of 1847. We spend some space on Ralph H. Fox (1913-1973) elementary introduction to diagram colorings (1956). In the second section we describe how Fox work was generalized to distributive colorings (racks and quandles) and eventually in the work of Jones and Turaev to link invariants via Yang-Baxter operators, here the importance of statistical mechanics to topology will be mentioned. Finally we describe recent developments which started with Mikhail Khovanov work on categorification of the Jones polynomial. By analogy to Khovanov homology we build homology of distributive structures (including homology of Fox colorings) and generalize it to homology of Yang-Baxter operators. We speculate, with supporting evidence, on co-cycle invariants of knots coming from Yang-Baxter homology. Here the work of Fenn-Rourke-Sanderson (geometric realization of pre-cubic sets of link diagrams) and Carter-Kamada-Saito (co-cycle invariants of links) will be discussed and expanded. Dedicated to Lou Kauffman for his 70th birthday.Comment: 35 pages, 31 figures, for Knots in Hellas II Proceedings, Springer, part of the series Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics (PROMS

Crossing disciplines: do architecture and planning course leaders see value in a Public Health Practitioner in Residence programme?

Highlights• We study a public health residency in a university architecture and planning department.• We assess the benefits of the residency from the perspective of the teaching staff.• The residency was successful at introducing public health issues and concepts to students.• There appeared to be a gap in the staff's understanding of public health concerns

Secrecy and absence in the residue of covert drone strikes

AbstractBy focusing on the materials and practices that prosecute drone warfare, critical scholarship has emphasised the internal state rationalisation of this violence, while positioning secrecy and absence as barriers to research. This neglects the public existence of covert U.S. drone strikes through the rumours and debris they leave behind, and the consequences for legitimisation. This article argues that by signifying the possible use of covertness, the public residue of unseen strikes materialises spaces of suspected secrecy. This secrecy frames seemingly arbitrary traces of violence as significant in having not been secreted by the state, and similarly highlights the absence in these spaces of clear markers of particular people and objects, including casualties. Drawing on colonial historiography, the article conceptualises this dynamic as producing implicit significations or intimations, unverifiable ideas from absences, which can undermine rationalisations of drone violence. The article examines the political consequences of these allusions through an historical affiliation with lynching practice. In both cases, traces of unseen violence represent the practice as distanced and confounding, prompting a focus on the struggle to comprehend. Intimations from spaces of residue position strikes as too ephemeral and materially insubstantial to understand. Unlike the operating procedures of drone warfare, then, these traces do not dehumanise targets. Rather, they narrow witnesses' ethical orientation towards these events and casualties, by prompting concern with intangibility rather than the infliction of violence itself. A political response to covert strikes must go beyond 'filling in' absences and address how absence gains meaning in implicit, inconspicuous ways

VIRTUAL MASS EFFECT ON CONSTRAINED OSCILLATION OF OPEN SHELLS

In the laboratory of constructions of Komsomolsk-on-Amur State Technical University (KnAGTU) an experiment has been carried on. The aim of the experiment was to identify patterns of influence of magnitude of fluctuations in the virtual mass on constrained oscillation of open shells. Constrained oscillation of curved and open-shell carrying the virtual mass was measured with the help of induction accelerometers. Steel shell is pin supported along the edges, rectangular in the plan. Pin supported open shells along both sides, as the most frequently used in the construction have not yet been investigated. The calculation was made based on the general equation of oscillation of a shell, as well as Donnell - Mushtari - Vlasov equations. In the theoretical calculation, assumptions about the flatness were not taken into account. But it seemed that the magnitude of the stresses from bending moments are comparable in magnitude to the stress of the effort. In consequence, substantial increase in the differentiation was obtained. As a result, values of theoretical constrained oscillation of a shell were obtained. We compared the theoretical and analytical data

The importance of green spaces to public health: a multi-continental analysis

As green spaces are a common feature of liveable cities, a detailed understanding of the benefits provided by these areas is essential. Although green spaces are regarded as a major contribution to the human well‐being in urbanized areas, current research has largely focused on the cities in developed countries and their global importance in terms of public health benefits remains unclear. In this study, we performed a multiple linear regression using 34 cities in different regions across the globe to investigate the relationship between green spaces and public health. Our analysis suggested that for richer cities, green spaces were associated with better public health; whereas a greater area of green spaces was associated with reduced public health in the poorest cities. In contrast to previous studies, which typically found positive relationships between green spaces and health benefits, we demonstrate that health benefits of green spaces could be context dependent.Southampton University’s Institute for Life Sciences Fellowship (project code 511206105) Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (PIIF-GA-2011-303221) Isaac Newton Trust (15.23(s)) The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment The Kenneth Miller Trus