Wind Risk Assessment in Urban Environments: The Case of Falling Trees During Windstorm Events in Lisbon

Trees bring many benefits to the urban environment. However, they may also cause hazards to human population, being the major causes of injuries and infrastructural damage during strong wind events. In the city of Lisbon, strong winds rather frequently result in tree falls, depending on the season and meteorological conditions. This paper presents a methodology to analyse tree damage due to strong wind events in urban environments. Each occurrence has been recorded by the Lisbon Fire Brigade and Rescue Services (Regimento de Sapadores Bombeiros de Lisboa - RSBL). Information provided by RSBL relating to the period of 1990-2005 was considered along with hourly wind speed and direction, species, fitossanitary conditions and urban parameters. To ensure that the fallen trees were caused by strong winds, only days with three or more occurrences of fallen trees were selected. It was found that in summer, northerly winds are responsible for 11% of tree falls, with winds from other directions (west, southwest and south) responsible for 5%. From autumn to spring, perturbed weather conditions originating from the west, southwest and south are responsible for 84% of fallen trees. The majority of tree falls occurred when wind speed surpassed 7 m/s in the six hours prior to their fall. Some recommendations to the Civil Protection Agency and the Fire Department are presented to improve the mission of collecting information. This research is a contribution to the assessment of wind risk in Lisbon

HEP@Home - A distributed computing system based on BOINC

Project SETI@HOME has proven to be one of the biggest successes of distributed computing during the last years. With a quite simple approach SETI manages to process large volumes of data using a vast amount of distributed computer power. To extend the generic usage of this kind of distributed computing tools, BOINC is being developed. In this paper we propose HEP@HOME, a BOINC version tailored to the specific requirements of the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. The HEP@HOME will be able to process large amounts of data using virtually unlimited computing power, as BOINC does, and it should be able to work according to HEP specifications. In HEP the amounts of data to be analyzed or reconstructed are of central importance. Therefore, one of the design principles of this tool is to avoid data transfer. This will allow scientists to run their analysis applications and taking advantage of a large number of CPUs. This tool also satisfies other important requirements in HEP, namely, security, fault-tolerance and monitoring.Comment: 4 pages, 4 Postscript figures, uses CHEP2004.cls, submitted to CHEP200

Manchas Eritematosas Policíclicas de Instalação Aguda e Rapidamente Progressivas

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Transcultural Cinema debated in a Knowledge Network: postcolonial hybrid meanings within resistance cinema

This paper aims to present a Knowledge Network on Transcultural Communication, a work in progress organized in Archives, Knowledge Bases and Virtual Museums. One of its substantive parts, the Knowledge Node Transcultural Cinema, gathers knowledge and sources (Film Studies texts, photos, videos, etc.) about critical cinema and resistance cinema. This node articulates theories and postcolonial concepts to analysis/interpretations based on examples of film images and videos that include postcolonial representations. The “clash of civilizations” is a core idea underlying the debate on dissent and / or consensus among cultures and about postcolonialism. The dissimilarity between colonial / postcolonial societies and cultures, often takes the form of a “conflict of meanings.” And the discursive resistance against colonialism is often based on mobilizing hybridizations. Contemporary cultures are essentially “hybrid cultures”. Such hybrid nature is present in many images and sounds of resistance cinema, and it is urgent to emphasize its characteristics, for example central dichotomies transmitted by authors of this cinema genre: “colonizer / colonized,” “identity / difference,” “power / no power”. Resistance film audiences can see and criticize, in a participatory way, the worldviews and discourses shared by cinema imagination / activism in cinema, contributing to a common, global and critical culture / knowledge

Communication of art via open research: on cultural policies, heritage and reception of innovation in art

This article debates some main modes of art communication within the urban public space, and their interpretation through Open Research. In particular, it discusses communication regimes in places where cultural and artistic events occur, such as the museum. One of the communicative phenomena circulating there is informal art literacy, which is a different and sometimes opposite process in relation to the formal education at school. Having this aim in mind, firstly two core concepts within Art Communication Studies, which are crucial to this debate, are defined: Public Communication of Art-PCA and art literacy. Secondly, questions pertaining to art communication are raised: the definition of cultural policies that allow cultural inclusion of diverse art publics segments; the role of digital devices to improve the understanding of cultural heritage; the more adequate communication and management strategies for improving publics literacy; the reception process undertaken by cultural audiences around art ideas and concepts shared through art events. Thirdly, such questions are framed within the main theoretical and authors’ positioning in Art Communication Studies. Next, some brief practical advices and recommendations concerning how to develop a research on communication within art worlds are exposed in two parts: the first part suggests some hypothesis corresponding to the previous formulated questions. The second part establishes a synthetic and practical agenda for doing a research on this subject. Some emergent sociological apparatuses, produced to improve the social and cultural impact of art communication, are also presented. Finally, specific modes and targets of this impact are discussed

Sociological ontology of the digital public sphere: the case of Web 2.0/3.0

Digital public sphere is immersed in the present conjuncture of accelerated transformation and probable rupture, which certainly will affect the way we exercise our citizenship in contemporary times. This social and political tsunami is partly based on the change of paradigm of Web 2.0 or Social Web to Web 3.0 or Semantic Web. To clarify such a process, this paper discusses some of the key issues and theoretical positions on public space, from seminal Habermas’s perspective to new problematics raised by the networked society. The author suggests the construction of a Sociological Ontology of Social and Semantic Web, based on a Semantic-Logical Sociology and Methodology. These procedures are applied through the analysis and hermeneutics of a Wikipedia page entitled ‘Web 2.0’, where sociological experimental tools are used, as Semantic-Logical fields, trees and networks, central and peripheral concepts, and trichotomies

Review of CERN Data Centre Infrastructure

The CERN Data Centre is reviewing strategies for optimizing the use of the existing infrastructure and expanding to a new data centre by studying how other large sites are being operated. Over the past six months, CERN has been investigating modern and widely-used tools and procedures used for virtualisation, clouds and fabric management in order to reduce operational effort, increase agility and support unattended remote data centres. This paper gives the details on the project’s motivations, current status and areas for future investigation

Epistemology and methodology of urban cultural tourism: the case of the artistic sociology of mobile cultures and tourism communication in urban social networks

The epistemological, theoretical and methodological debates that aim at scientific credibility, cannot ignore the corresponding application to the social fabric. Conversely, action should always inform reflection. This article rationally demonstrates and sensorialy exhibits the following: one of the sociological genres, Artistic Sociology, transports sociology and its scientific language, from the academia to creative extension activities such as the exhibition of sociological knowledge within urban public space, for example in the case of the art gallery. In the same way, artistic knowledge and language should contaminate sociological discussion through an innovative sensibility. This is possible through the insertion, within a sociological text, not only of images from an art exhibition, presented as ‘Figures’ (1,2 ... n). In addition, the art exhibition itself can be understood as a social and sociological configuration that is an organic part of the very body of the traditional sociological text. Thus, a profound hybridization of knowledge is sought, which can enrich, but also subvert, both sociological debates and art exhibitions. This purpose is accomplished here by several interconnected means: an epistemological approach between Artistic Sociology and Hybridogy; the theoretical problematization of mobile cultures; the empirical field work in the context of urban communication at City 3.0 and tourism communication in the context of Tourism 3.0; and the exhibition ‘New Art Fest’17, as the field for the application of innovative sociological and artistic methodological approaches. A first step was Sociological Exibition on Tourism 3.0 / Cidade 3.0, that demonstrated and showed the urban and travel knowledge, within the space of the art gallery. In a second phase, this knowledge tested through the exhibition audience, is reintroduced in a scientific journal article. Such a double research movement hybridizes and confronts, in both originary and original forms, scientific and artistic knowledge and practice