On the reception of aboriginal art in German art space

German art history and ethnology have led to a binary reading of art that has inhibited the exhibition of Aboriginal art as contemporary art in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This thesis addresses the question of how Australian Aboriginal art is displayed in the institutional spaces of art galleries and museums in Germany. I argue that there is an underlying current in Germany that divides the representation of art into European and “other”, particularly Aboriginal art. Within German culture, ethnological museums are ranked differently from art institutional spaces. The art museum or gallery is at the top of the hierarchy, enhancing the self-reflexive notion of culture, while the ethnological museum provides the context against which European, specifically German, identity and culture are pitched. Aboriginal art that is contextualised as ethnographic and not as contemporary continues a Modernist perspective on cultural exchange, one that emphasises an essential difference between European and non-European art in a universal progress of humanity. This essentialising of culture in Germany does not reflect the globalised situation that evokes regional cultural inflections based on experiences and expressions of hybridity and fragmentation. In order to understand how German art institutions and ethnographic museums stand for a Eurocentric art discourse, the thesis analyses the cultural parameters of nineteenth century Germany, the socio-political cataclysm of the Third Reich in the twentieth century, and the reversion to Modernism in its aftermath. In comparison, I outline the exhibition history and reception of Aboriginal art in Australia where the positioning of Indigenous and European traditions has shifted markedly into a postcolonial, postmodern situation since the1980s. My study investigates this categorisation into two entities through Western concepts of literacy and orality. Since the Enlightenment, the Western emphasis on alphabetic literacy as a system superior to oral transmission of knowledge has governed the way we make sense of the world around us. The written word underpins modes of exhibition display and reception, so that representation is read as text. As a consequence, institutions and galleries, as part of visual culture, treat knowledge that is transmitted orally as inferior. This thesis explores strategies that allow the viewing of art outside the conventions of the written word. I examine the modes of display and reception of Aboriginal art through fundamental ideas first put forward by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), and also through Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970). My main focus, however, relates to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts surrounding Cultural Capital, Symbolic Capital and Symbolic Violence in his publications The Field of Cultural Production (ed. Randal Johnson 1993) and Language and Symbolic Power (trans. by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson 1991) which allow an analysis of power relations in cultural exchange within the hierarchies of art institutions

Limits on new long range nuclear spin-dependent forces set with a K-3He co-magnetometer

A magnetometer using spin-polarized K and $^3$He atoms occupying the same volume is used to search for anomalous nuclear spin-dependent forces generated by a separate $^3$He spin source. We measure changes in the $^3$He spin precession frequency with a resolution of 18 pHz and constrain anomalous spin forces between neutrons to be less than $2 \times 10^{-8}$ of their magnetic or less than $2\times 10^{-3}$ of their gravitational interactions on a length scale of 50 cm. We present new limits on neutron coupling to light pseudoscalar and vector particles, including torsion, and constraints on recently proposed models involving unparticles and spontaneous breaking of Lorentz symmetry.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, latest version as appeared in PR

Cavitation Induction by Projectile Impacting on a Water Jet

Following the work of Field et al. [4], who experimentally visualised cavity formation and shock propagation in impacted liquids at high velocities, the present study focuses on the simulation of the high velocity impact of a solid projectile on a water jet. The undeformable solid projectile is modelled through a direct forcing Immersed Boundary Method. The simulation is carried out using an explicit density based compressible solver, developed by Kyriazis et al. [6], which employs a two-phase flow model and includes phase change. This study gives a better insight on the phenomena following the impact of solids on liquids, including shock propagation and vapour formation, and demonstrates the capabilities of the presented Immersed Boundary Method to handle compressible cavitating flows

Improving sensor network performance with wireless energy transfer

Through recent technology advances in the field of wireless energy transmission Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks have emerged. In this new paradigm for wireless sensor networks a mobile entity called mobile charger (MC) traverses the network and replenishes the dissipated energy of sensors. In this work we first provide a formal definition of the charging dispatch decision problem and prove its computational hardness. We then investigate how to optimise the trade-offs of several critical aspects of the charging process such as: a) the trajectory of the charger; b) the different charging policies; c) the impact of the ratio of the energy the Mobile Charger may deliver to the sensors over the total available energy in the network. In the light of these optimisations, we then study the impact of the charging process to the network lifetime for three characteristic underlying routing protocols; a Greedy protocol, a clustering protocol and an energy balancing protocol. Finally, we propose a mobile charging protocol that locally adapts the circular trajectory of the MC to the energy dissipation rate of each sub-region of the network. We compare this protocol against several MC trajectories for all three routing families by a detailed experimental evaluation. The derived findings demonstrate significant performance gains, both with respect to the no charger case as well as the different charging alternatives; in particular, the performance improvements include the network lifetime, as well as connectivity, coverage and energy balance properties

A Trust-Based Intrusion Detection System for RPL Networks: Detecting a Combination of Rank and Blackhole Attacks

Routing attacks are a major security issue for Internet of Things (IoT) networks utilising routing protocols, as malicious actors can overwhelm resource-constrained devices with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, notably rank and blackhole attacks. In this work, we study the impact of the combination of rank and blackhole attacks in the IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy (RPL) networks, and we propose a new security framework for RPL-based IoT networks (SRF-IoT). The framework includes a trust-based mechanism that detects and isolates malicious attackers with the help of an external intrusion detection system (IDS). Both SRF-IoT and IDS are implemented in the Contiki-NG operating system. Evaluation of the proposed framework is based on simulations using the Whitefield framework that combines both the Contiki-NG and the NS-3 simulator. Analysis of the simulations of the scenarios under active attacks showed the effectiveness of deploying SRF-IoT with 92.8% packet delivery ratio (PDR), a five-fold reduction in the number of packets dropped, and a three-fold decrease in the number of parent switches in comparison with the scenario without SRF-IoT. Moreover, the packet overhead introduced by SRF-IoT in attack scenarios is minimal at less than 2%. Obtained results suggest that the SRF-IoT framework is an efficient and promising solution that combines trust-based and IDS-based approaches to protect IoT networks against routing attacks. In addition, our solution works by deploying a watchdog mechanism on detector nodes only, leaving unaffected the operation of existing smart devices

Battery draining attacks against edge computing nodes in IoT networks

Many IoT devices, especially those deployed at the network edge have limited power resources. In this work, we study the effects of a variety of battery draining attacks against edge nodes. Specifically, we implemented hello flooding, packet flooding, selective forwarding, rank attack, and versioning attack in ContikiOS and simulated them in the Cooja simulator. We consider a number of relevant metrics, such as CPU time, low power mode time, TX/RX time, and battery consumption. Besides, we test the stretch attack with three different batteries as an extreme scenario. Our results show that versioning attack is the most severe in terms of draining the power resources of the network, followed by packet flooding and hello flooding attacks. Furthermore, we find that selective forwarding and rank attacks are not able to considerably increase the power resource usage in our scenarios. By quantifying the effects of these attacks, we demonstrate that under specific scenarios, versioning attack can be three to four times as effective as packet flooding and hello flooding attacks in wasting network resources. At the same time, packet flooding is generally comparable to hello flooding in CPU and TX time usage increase but twice as powerful in draining device batteries

Comparative susceptibility of mosquito populations in North Queensland, Australia to oral infection with dengue virus.

Dengue is the most prevalent arthropod-borne virus, with at least 40% of the world's population at risk of infection each year. In Australia, dengue is not endemic, but viremic travelers trigger outbreaks involving hundreds of cases. We compared the susceptibility of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from two geographically isolated populations to two strains of dengue virus serotype 2. We found, interestingly, that mosquitoes from a city with no history of dengue were more susceptible to virus than mosquitoes from an outbreak-prone region, particularly with respect to one dengue strain. These findings suggest recent evolution of population-based differences in vector competence or different historical origins. Future genomic comparisons of these populations could reveal the genetic basis of vector competence and the relative role of selection and stochastic processes in shaping their differences. Lastly, we show the novel finding of a correlation between midgut dengue titer and titer in tissues colonized after dissemination

Non-extremal Black Hole Microstates: Fuzzballs of Fire or Fuzzballs of Fuzz ?

We construct the first family of microstate geometries of near-extremal black holes, by placing metastable supertubes inside certain scaling supersymmetric smooth microstate geometries. These fuzzballs differ from the classical black hole solution macroscopically at the horizon scale, and for certain probes the fluctuations between various fuzzballs will be visible as thermal noise far away from the horizon. We discuss whether these fuzzballs appear to infalling observers as fuzzballs of fuzz or as fuzzballs of fire. The existence of these solutions suggests that the singularity of non-extremal black holes is resolved all the way to the outer horizon and this "backwards in time" singularity resolution can shed light on the resolution of spacelike cosmological singularities.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figure

Multihost experimental evolution of a plant RNA virus reveals local adaptation and host specific mutations

[EN] For multihost pathogens, adaptation to multiple hosts has important implications for both applied and basic research. At the applied level, it is one of the main factors determining the probability and the severity of emerging disease outbreaks. At the basic level, it is thought to be a key mechanism for the maintenance of genetic diversity both in host and pathogen species. Using Tobacco etch potyvirus (TEV) and four natural hosts, we have designed an evolution experiment whose strength and novelty are the use of complex multicellular host organism as hosts and a high level of replication of different evolutionary histories and lineages. A pattern of local adaptation, characterized by a higher infectivity and virulence on host(s) encountered during the experimental evolution was found. Local adaptation only had a cost in terms of performance on other hosts in some cases. We could not verify the existence of a cost for generalists, as expected to arise from antagonistic pleiotropy and other genetic mechanisms generating a fitness trade-off between hosts. This observation confirms that this classical theoretical prediction lacks empirical support. We discuss the reasons for this discrepancy between theory and experiment in the light of our results. The analysis of full genome consensus sequences of the evolved lineages established that all mutations shared between lineages were host specific. A low degree of parallel evolution was observed, possibly reflecting the various adaptive pathways available for TEV in each host. Altogether, these results reveal a strong adaptive potential of TEV to new hosts without severe evolutionary constraints.We thank Francisca de la Iglesia and Angels Prosper for excellent technical assistance and Mark Zwart and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant BFU2009-06993 to S. F. E. S. B. was supported by the JAE-doc program from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and G. L. was supported by the Human Frontier Science Program, grant RGP0012/2008.Bedhomme, S.; Lafforgue, G.; Elena Fito, SF. (2012). Multihost experimental evolution of a plant RNA virus reveals local adaptation and host specific mutations. Molecular Biology and Evolution. 29(5):1481-1492. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msr314S1481149229