30 research outputs found

    Closed circuits : kinship, neighborhood and incarceration in urban Portugal

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    The notion that prisons are a ‘world apart’, with their walls severing prisoners from their external relationships, and incarceration an interruption, ‘time away’ spent in a separate social universe, has provided an adequate framework for understanding the social realities of imprisonment in the past. But it has also created an analytical dead angle that prevents us from identifying the ramifying social effects of concentrated incarceration upon both the prison and heavily penalized lower-class neighborhoods. This article addresses these effects with data from an ethnographic revisit of a major women’s prison in Portugal, where the recomposition of the inmate population that has accompanied the rapid inflation of the country’s carceral population is especially pronounced and entails the activation of wide-ranging carceralized networks bringing kinship and neighborhood into the prison as well as the prison into the domestic world. The analysis focuses on the ways whereby these constellations have transformed the experience of confinement and the texture of correctional life, calling for a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the prison as a ‘total institution’ and for exploring anew the boundary that separates it (or not) from outside worlds.Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

    Highly-parallelized simulation of a pixelated LArTPC on a GPU

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    The rapid development of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is allowing the implementation of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo simulation chains for particle physics experiments. This technique is particularly suitable for the simulation of a pixelated charge readout for time projection chambers, given the large number of channels that this technology employs. Here we present the first implementation of a full microphysical simulator of a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) equipped with light readout and pixelated charge readout, developed for the DUNE Near Detector. The software is implemented with an end-to-end set of GPU-optimized algorithms. The algorithms have been written in Python and translated into CUDA kernels using Numba, a just-in-time compiler for a subset of Python and NumPy instructions. The GPU implementation achieves a speed up of four orders of magnitude compared with the equivalent CPU version. The simulation of the current induced on 10^3 pixels takes around 1 ms on the GPU, compared with approximately 10 s on the CPU. The results of the simulation are compared against data from a pixel-readout LArTPC prototype
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