The territoriality of La Casa Invisible

Una breve exposición de la trayectoria y avatares de la Casa Invisible de Málaga, en el edificio ocupado el 11 de marzo de 2007 por parte de los invisibles con el fin de que sirviera de espacio para la creación social y cultural autónoma. Pero que más allá de lo anecdótico y noticiable de fenómenos como este, por cuanto son actos de vulneración de la legalidad vigente en lo que atañe a la propiedad privada (bien que consistentemente legitimados, y más en tiempos como el nuestro), interesa destacar el desencadenamiento de unos procesos con una profundidad insospechada, que es lo que se trata de poner de manifiesto en el artículo a través de la exploración de su dimensión territorial, más allá de lo propiamente social; en concreto, la relación con el medio físico, en este caso un edificio y su entorno urbano, y la pareja aparición de una materia que podríamos decir constituye el medio territorial de los ecosistemas de la subjetividad de sus habitantes

Maurice Godelier. Elogio y defensa de la antropología

El análisis de la obra del antropólogo Maurice Godelier tiene como punto de partida las críticas que este autor ha hecho a algunas de las verdades científicas aceptadas durante decenios por los antropólogos y que son ahora cuestionadas por carecer de base empírica. Su objetivo es encontrar una serie de principios sólidos a partir de los cuales se pueda reconstruir un saber como el antropológico, que ha estado cuestionado a través de la deconstrucción posmoderna hasta su casi disolución en los «estudios culturales». Frente a esto, Godelier señala una serie de proposiciones que conciernen al núcleo de la disciplina que tratarían de fundamentarla. Son las siguientes: 1. Al lado de las cosas que se venden y se dan, existen un tercer tipo, que son el soporte de las identidades y que tienen que ver con lo sagrado. 2. No han existido nunca sociedades fundadas sobre el parentesco, pues estos lazos no son suficientes para formar una sociedad. 3. La sexualidad humana es fundamentalmente asocial, puesto que el cuerpo sexuado de hombres y mujeres funciona como una especie de «máquina ventrilocua» que explicaría las relaciones de fuerza e interés de la sociedad. 4. El tipo de relaciones que hacen de los grupos humanos una sociedad son las denominadas «político-religiosas». 5. Todas las relaciones sociales contienen «nudos imaginarios», como elementos constitutivos que se ponen en funcionamiento a través de las prácticas simbólicas. 6. El hombre, en sus relaciones con los demás seres (humanos y divinos), utiliza las representaciones como «nexos imaginarios», que se componen de elementos «ideales y materiales» que forman una unidad.An analysis of the work of M. Godelier begins with the criticism made by this author of some of the truths long accepted by anthropologists, which are in question due to their lack of an empirical basis. Its objective is to find a series of solid principles from which to reconstruct a knowledge base such as the anthropological one which has been questioned through post-modern deconstruction until it was almost dissolved in "cultural studies". Given this situation, Godelier offers a series of proposals which reach the core of anthropology and attempt to give it a basis. These are as follows: 1. Besides the things that are sold or given away, there is a third type which form the basis of their identity and related to the sacred. 2. There have never been societies based on kinship, since these links are insufficient to form a society. 3. Human sexuality is fundamentally asocial in that the sexed body of men and woman is a sort of "ventriloquial machine" that explains the strengths and interests in relationships in society. 4. The type of relationships that make up human groups is denominated a "politico-religious" society. 5. All social relations contain "imaginary knots" as constitutive elements that function through symbolic practices. 6. Man in his relationships with other beings (human and divine) use the representations as imaginary links composed of "mental" and "material" elements forming a unified whole

Volunteer Computing on Distributed Untrusted Nodes

The growth in size and complexity of new software systems has highlighted the need of more efficient and faster building tools. The current research relies on automation and parallelization of tasks dividing and grouping software systems in dependent software packages. Some modern building systems as Open Build Service (OBS) centralize sources commitment and dependencies solving for Linux distributions. After, they distribute these heavy build tasks among several build hosts, to finally deliver the results to the community. The problem with these building services is that as they are usually supported by non-commercial communities, the resources to maintain the build hosts are less. Because of this, the idea of distributing these jobs among new building hosts owned by volunteers is tempting. However, carrying out this idea brings new challenges and problems to be solved, concerning the new pool of untrusted, unreliable workers. This thesis studies how the concept of volunteer computing can be applied to software package building, specifically to OBS. In the first part, the existing platforms of volunteer computing are examined showing the current research and the pros and cons of using them for our purposes. The research of this thesis led to a different solution called Volunteer Worker System (VWS). The main concept is to provide a centralized system that serves OBS reliable trusted workers compiling the results sent by the volunteers. Each worker acts as a proxy between the untrusted volunteers and the OBS server itself, validating by multiple cross-checking the results obtained. The volunteers from the volunteer pool are grouped to serve each surrogate depending on OBS needs. A simple proof-of-concept of the designed system was set-up on a network distributed environment. A host acting as Volunteer System groups and dispatches jobs coming from a host simulating OBS server to several volunteer workers in separate hosts. These volunteers send back their results to the Volunteer System to validate and forward them to OBS Server. Ensuring security on the designed solution is one of the needs to deploy the system on a real-environment. The OBS instance receiving the volunteers work needs to be sure that the Volunteer System offering them is fully trusted. Also, a whole front-end system to attract and maintain volunteers needs to be implemented

Time-predictable parallel programming models

Embedded Computing (EC) systems are increas-ingly concerned with providing higher performance in real-time while HPC applications require huge amounts of information to be processed within a bounded amount of time. Addressing this convergence and mixed set of requirements needs suitable programming methodologies to exploit the massively parallel computation capabilities of the available platforms in a pre-dictable way. OpenMP has evolved to deal with the programma-bility of heterogeneous many-cores, with mature support for fine-grained task parallelism. Unfortunately, while these features are very relevant for EC heterogeneous systems, often modeled as periodic task graphs, both the OpenMP programming interface and the execution model are completely agnostic to any timing requirement that the target applications may have. The goal of our work is to enable the use of the OpenMP parallel programming model in real-time embedded systems, such that many-cores architectures can be adopted in critical real-time embedded systems. To do so, it is required to guarantee the timing behavior of OpenMP applications

A static scheduling approach to enable safety-critical OpenMP applications

Parallel computation is fundamental to satisfy the performance requirements of advanced safety-critical systems. OpenMP is a good candidate to exploit the performance opportunities of parallel platforms. However, safety-critical systems are often based on static allocation strategies, whereas current OpenMP implementations are based on dynamic schedulers. This paper proposes two OpenMP-compliant static allocation approaches: an optimal but costly approach based on an ILP formulation, and a sub-optimal but tractable approach that computes a worst-case makespan bound close to the optimal one.This work is funded by the EU projects P-SOCRATES (FP7-ICT-2013-10) and HERCULES (H2020/ICT/2015/688860), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract TIN2015-65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Bioactive Absorbent Chitosan Aerogels Reinforced with Bay Tree Pruning Waste Nanocellulose with Antioxidant Properties for Burger Meat Preservation

As a transition strategy towards sustainability, food packaging plays a crucial role in the current era. This, carried out in a biorefinery context of agricultural residues, involves not only obtaining desirable products but a comprehensive utilization of biomass that contributes to the circular bioeconomy. The present work proposes the preparation of bioactive absorbent food pads through a multi-product biorefinery approach from bay tree pruning waste (BTPW). In a first step, chitosan aerogels reinforced with lignocellulose and cellulose micro/nanofibers from BTPW were prepared, studying the effect of residual lignin on the material’s properties. The presence of micro/nanofibers improved the mechanical performance (up to 60%) in addition to increasing the water uptake (42%) when lignin was present. The second step was to make them bioactive by incorporating bay leaf extract. The residual lignin in the micro/nanofibers was decisive, since when present, the release profiles of the extract were faster, reaching an antioxidant power of more than 85% after only 30 min. Finally, these bioactive aerogels were used as absorbent pads for fresh meat. With the use of the bioactive aerogels (with ≥2% extract), the meat remained fresh for 10 days as a result of delayed oxidation of the food during storage (20% metmyoglobin proportion)