Mobile cameras as new technologies of surveillance? How citizens experience the use of mobile cameras in public nightscapes.

In Surveillance Studies the terms ‘sousveillance’ and ‘inverse surveillance’ describe forms of surveillance that have a bottom-up and democratic character. However, in this paper this democratic notion is questioned by looking into practices and experiences with both Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) and mobile cameras by Dutch citizens. By intervening in the nightlife district of the\ud Rotterdam1 city centre, data has been gathered on both mobile- and CCTV camera confrontations. From this, an exploration is made into how mobile cameras are experienced in the nightlife landscape. Comparing these experiences with CCTV provides insight into new surveillance issues that emerge due to the mobile camera. The perspective of analyzing surveillance technologies as hybrid collectives that may take different shapes in different places, allows for a contribution that attempts to improve our understanding of the current changes in the surveillance technology landscap

Like a Bridge over Troubled Water - en studie om ledarskap inom socialtjänsten vid organisationsförändringar

A common experience is that leadership could be better handled during reorganizations within the social services. The purpose of this study is to examine how social welfare secretaries experience their managers during reorganizations. How do social welfare secretaries experience the manger’s role and actions? While developing the interview questions it became relevant to illustrate further aspects: To describe how social welfare secretaries experience the reorganizations that they have gone through and their experience of the everyday leadership around the managers’; openness, availability, clarity, trust and skills regarding managing stress among their staff. The study is built on qualitative interviews with six social welfare secretaries within units working with economical social assistance in different districts in the city of Gothenburg. The interviewees have been chosen through a snowball effect where colleagues have been asked if they know social welfare secretaries, working with economical social assistance in different districts, who have gone through a reorganization. The main research questions are: What do the social welfare secretaries consider to be good leadership? How do the social welfare secretaries experience the every day leadership? How do the social welfare secretaries experience the reorganizations they have gone through? Which role did the manager play during the reorganization? Visible, invisible, pursuing and/or passive? How shall the manager act during a reorganization? The used theoretical perspectives are about: conflict, change, leadership and human service organizations. The analysis is divided in four themes where the interviews are presented and analyzed: the reorganizations, actual leadership, managing stress and sick-leave and desired leadership. The following conclusions are presented: The social welfare secretaries consider good leadership to be: sensitive, have clear, available, good in judgment, professionally experienced, secure and able to change ones mind, reflective, supportive, acknowledge, able to create a creative atmosphere, able to listen, able to figure out needs, able to show respect and give responsibility. The interviewees mostly give a negative image of the every day leadership. Most of the interviewees talk about an inability to communicate with their manager and who often is unavailable. The social welfare secretaries have not been sure who has initiated the reorganization, what the purpose of it was and have not been able to influence the reorganization. Many of the interviewees consider the managers to be pursuance and active if the managers themselves are behind the idea of the reorganization or if they can agree to it. Otherwise the managers tend to be invisible and passive. The social welfare secretaries want managers during a reorganization to: inform, listen, gain approval for the reorganization, process and watch over the staff’s well being during the reorganization. The study shows that there maybe are too high demands on the managers and that the manager’s role can be very complicated in a human service organization

Physics of Solid and Liquid Alkali Halide Surfaces Near the Melting Point

This paper presents a broad theoretical and simulation study of the high temperature behavior of crystalline alkali halide surfaces typified by NaCl(100), of the liquid NaCl surface near freezing, and of the very unusual partial wetting of the solid surface by the melt. Simulations are conducted using two-body rigid ion BMHFT potentials, with full treatment of long-range Coulomb forces. After a preliminary check of the description of bulk NaCl provided by these potentials, which seems generally good even at the melting point, we carry out a new investigation of solid and liquid surfaces. Solid NaCl(100) is found in this model to be very anharmonic and yet exceptionally stable when hot. It is predicted by a thermodynamic integration calculation of the surface free energy that NaCl(100) should be a well ordered, non-melting surface, metastable even well above the melting point. By contrast, the simulated liquid NaCl surface is found to exhibit large thermal fluctuations and no layering order. In spite of that, it is shown to possess a relatively large surface free energy. The latter is traced to a surface entropy deficit, reflecting some kind of surface short range order. Finally, the solid-liquid interface free energy is derived through Young's equation from direct simulation of partial wetting of NaCl(100) by a liquid droplet. It is concluded that three elements, namely the exceptional anharmonic stability of the solid (100) surface, the molecular short range order at the liquid surface, and the costly solid liquid interface, all conspire to cause the anomalously poor wetting of the (100) surface by its own melt in the BMHFT model of NaCl -- and most likely also in real alkali halide surfaces.Comment: modified version of JCP 123, 164701 15 pages, 25 figure

Managing Wolves: Biopolitics, Knowledge and Wilderness in the Debate around Swedish Wolf Management

The research of this thesis aims at exploring, and adding a contribution to, the academic work devoted to analyzing techniques for wildlife management using Foucauldian Biopolitics. This case study researches the attitudes of six pro-wolf people toward techniques for wildlife management. This research finds that in order to understand these attitudes, one has to combine the understanding of biopolitics with an understanding for the social constructedness of “Wilderness”. Moreover, this thesis argues that the interviewees’ attitudes toward techniques for wolf management reflect their understanding of the wolf, the wolf opponent and the pro-wolf person, through a review of their separate characteristics

Pore-scale study on porous media flows with chemical reaction using lattice Boltzmann method

Porous media flows with chemical reaction are common in nature and widely exist in many scientific and industrial applications. However, due to the complexity of coupled mechanisms, numerical modelling and comprehensive understanding of such flows face significant challenges. Therefore, this thesis develops novel lattice Boltzmann (LB) models to undertake pore-scale simulations of porous media flows with chemical reaction. These models, with new reaction source terms and boundary schemes, can describe both homogeneous reaction between two fluids and heterogeneous reaction (dissolution or combustion) at the fluid-solid interface. Unlike previous studies, current models recast heat and mass transfer equations to correctly consider the thermal expansion effects and the conjugate heat transfer and species conservation conditions. Separate LB equations are also developed to include different species properties. Density fingering with homogeneous reaction is studied at the pore scale. By changing species contributions to density, diffusion coefficients, initial concentrations, and medium heterogeneities, results obtained demonstrate that reaction can enhance, suppress, or trigger fingering. Then, pore-scale simulations of viscous fingering with dissolution reaction are performed. Effects of fluid diffusion, chemical dissolution, and viscosity contrast are extensively assessed. Results illustrate four fingering regimes as stable, unstable, reactive stable, and reactive unstable. Finally, pore-scale coke combustion in porous media is studied. General combustion dynamics are correctly produced, verifying the superior performance of the present LB model over previous ones. A parametric study demonstrates that the inlet air temperature and the driving force are influential factors and should be constrained within certain ranges for stable combustion fronts. These pore-scale findings provide valuable insights, like temperature fluctuations at the fluid-solid interface, porous structure evolutions, exact reaction and diffusion rates, and medium heterogeneity effects, which are more precise and explicit than macroscopic results. Furthermore, detailed fingering and combustion dynamics under diverse conditions are helpful in scientific and industrial fields

Melting and nonmelting of solid surfaces and nanosystems

We present an extensive but concise review of our present understanding, largely based on theory and simulation work from our group, on the equilibrium behavior of solid surfaces and nanosystems close to the bulk melting point. In the first part we define phenomena, in particular surface melting and nonmelting, and review some related theoretical approaches, from heuristic theories to computer simulation. In the second part we describe the surface melting/nonmelting behavior of several different classes of solids, ranging from van der Waals crystals, to valence semiconductors, to ionic crystals and metals. In the third part, we address special cases such as strained solids, the defreezing of glass surfaces, and rotational surface melting. Next, we digress briefly to surface layering of a liquid metal, possibly leading to solid-like or hexatic two dimensional phases floating on the liquid. In the final part, the relationship of surface melting to the premelting of nanoclusters and nanowires is reviewed.Comment: 54 pages, 26 figure

Book review of " Giuseppina Pellegrino and Alessandro Mongili (eds.) Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Ecologies, Multiplicity, Cam- bridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014, pp. 337"

book revie