Art, Power and Knowledge: Claiming Public Space in Tunisia

Charles Tripp argues that through artistic interventions – graffiti, visual street art, performances, demonstrations, banners, slogans – citizens have appropriated the public sphere. Despite the monitoring of political dissent through persuasion or coercion, an activist public has created highly visible public spaces, assisted and encouraged by citizen artists. They have generated debates and have helped to give substance to competing visions of the republic

Battlefields of the Republic - the struggle for public space in Tunisia

This paper argues that the Tunisian revolutionary moment of 2011 and its aftermath have opened up spaces that are capable of providing a framework for the agonistic politics associated with democratic possibility. Insurgent public space, an emerging plural public, as well as adversarial contests over the constitution of the republic display features that may help to build ‘conflictual consensus’ as part of a democratic future. These possibilities are constantly being re-enacted by Tunisians whose disagreements are real enough, but whose struggles are also establishing the boundaries of an emerging political field, loosely thought of as the ‘Tunisian Republic’. This is a bold and challenging undertaking, with potentially revolutionary implications, but it is also a precarious enterprise, given the forces that may yet threaten to encroach on public space and on the rights of the citizen

Measuring the Energy Consumption and Efficiency of Deep Neural Networks: An Empirical Analysis and Design Recommendations

Addressing the so-called ``Red-AI'' trend of rising energy consumption by large-scale neural networks, this study investigates the actual energy consumption, as measured by node-level watt-meters, of training various fully connected neural network architectures. We introduce the BUTTER-E dataset, an augmentation to the BUTTER Empirical Deep Learning dataset, containing energy consumption and performance data from 63,527 individual experimental runs spanning 30,582 distinct configurations: 13 datasets, 20 sizes (number of trainable parameters), 8 network ``shapes'', and 14 depths on both CPU and GPU hardware collected using node-level watt-meters. This dataset reveals the complex relationship between dataset size, network structure, and energy use, and highlights the impact of cache effects. We propose a straightforward and effective energy model that accounts for network size, computing, and memory hierarchy. Our analysis also uncovers a surprising, hardware-mediated non-linear relationship between energy efficiency and network design, challenging the assumption that reducing the number of parameters or FLOPs is the best way to achieve greater energy efficiency. Highlighting the need for cache-considerate algorithm development, we suggest a combined approach to energy efficient network, algorithm, and hardware design. This work contributes to the fields of sustainable computing and Green AI, offering practical guidance for creating more energy-efficient neural networks and promoting sustainable AI.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, for associated dataset see https://data.openei.org/submissions/599

UV Absorption Lines from High-Velocity Gas in the Vela Supernova Remnant: New insights from STIS Echelle Observations of HD72089

The star HD72089 is located behind the Vela supernova remnant and shows a complex array of high and low velocity interstellar absorption features arising from shocked clouds. A spectrum of this star was recorded over the wavelength range 1196.4 to 1397.2 Angstroms at a resolving power lambda/Delta lambda = 110,000 and signal-to-noise ratio of 32 by STIS on the Hubble Space Telescope. We have identified 7 narrow components of C I and have measured their relative populations in excited fine-structure levels. Broader features at heliocentric velocities ranging from -70 to +130 km/s are seen in C II, N I, O I, Si II, S II and Ni II. In the high-velocity components, the unusually low abundances of N I and O I, relative to S II and Si II, suggest that these elements may be preferentially ionized to higher stages by radiation from hot gas immediately behind the shock fronts.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, Latex. Submitted for the special HST ERO issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letter

Back to the future : the Arab uprisings and state (re)formation in the Arab world

This article contributes to debates that aim to go beyond the “democratization” and “post-democratization” paradigms to understand change and continuity in Arab politics. In tune with calls to focus on the actualities of political dynamics, the article shows that the literatures on State Formation and Contentious Politics provide useful theoretical tools to understand change/continuity in Arab politics. It does so by examining the impact of the latest Arab uprisings on state formation trajectories in Iraq and Syria. The uprisings have aggravated a process of regime erosion – which originated in post-colonial state-building attempts – by mobilizing sectarian and ethnic identities and exposing the counties to geo-political rivalries and intervention, giving rise to trans-border movements, such as ISIS. The resulting state fragmentation has obstructed democratic transition in Syria and constrained its consolidation in Iraq.PostprintPeer reviewe

The Quasar / Galaxy Pair PKS 1327-206 / ESO 1327-2041: Absorption Associated with a Recent Galaxy Merger

We present HST/WFPC2 broadband and ground-based Halpha images, H I 21-cm emission maps, and low-resolution optical spectra of the nearby galaxy ESO 1327-2041, which is located 38 arcsec (14 kpc in projection) west of the quasar PKS 1327-206. Our HST images reveal that ESO 1327-2041 has a complex optical morphology, including an extended spiral arm that was previously classified as a polar ring. Our optical spectra show Halpha emission from several H II regions in this arm located ~5 arcsec from the quasar position (~2 kpc in projection) and our ground-based Halpha images reveal the presence of several additional H II regions in an inclined disk near the galaxy's center. Absorption associated with ESO 1327-2041 is found in H I 21-cm, optical, and near-UV spectra of PKS 1327-206. We find two absorption components at cz = 5255 and 5510 km/s in the H I 21-cm absorption spectrum, which match the velocities of previously discovered metal-line components. We attribute the 5510 km/s absorber to disk gas in the extended spiral arm and the 5255 km/s absorber to high-velocity gas that has been tidally stripped from the disk of ESO 1327-2041. The complexity of the galaxy/absorber relationships for these very nearby H I 21-cm absorbers suggests that the standard view of high redshift damped Lyman-alpha absorbers is oversimplified in many cases.Comment: Replaced with accepted version; 16 page