Monumentalidade e espaço público em Lourenço Marques nas décadas de 1930 e 1940

Lourenço Marques, actual Maputo (Moçambique), é, durante as décadas de 1930 e 1940, objecto de uma série de intervenções estéticas no espaço público que visam “monumentalizar” e “portugalizar” a cidade, respondendo ao seu estatuto recém-adquirido de capital da Colónia. Dois monumentos destacam-se pela sua importância e carácter exemplar: o Padrão de Guerra, comemorativo da Primeira Guerra Mundial (1935), e o Monumento ao herói das “campanhas de pacificação” da última década do século XIX, Mouzinho de Albuquerque (1940). À volta destes monumentos desenvolve-se um largo leque de práticas comemorativas e celebrativas. Tais práticas postulam o monumento como “alegoria da Nação” e reproduzem, no contexto de uma cidade moderna, valores auráticos e cultuais. Desempenham, assim, um importante papel político na reformulação autoritária do espaço público da cidade como espaço “imperial” e na putativa hegemonização das representações da comunidade imaginada como “Nação”. Permitem, por isso, abordar o uso e a utilidade político-ideológica do monumento do ponto de vista da organização do espaço públicoLourenço Marques, actual Maputo (Mozambique), is subjected to a series of aesthetic interventions in its public space during the 1930s e 1940s. These seek to “monumentalize” and “portugalize” the city, responding to its recently acquired status as capital of the Colony. Two monuments appear as especially important and exemplary: the Padrão de Guerra, a lately built First War memorial (1935), and the monument to the hero of the “pacification campaigns” of the 1890s, Mouzinho de Albuquerque (1940). Around these monuments, a large number of commemorative and celebrative practices are developed. Such practices posit the monument as a “national allegory” and reproduce, in the context of a modern city, auratic and cult values. As such, they add an important dimension to the monument’s role in the authoritarian reformulation of the city’s public space as an “imperial” space, as well as in the putative hegemonization of the representations of the community imagined as a “Nation”. They allow, therefore, to approach the political-ideological use and utility of the monument within the organization of public space

Recent equivalent source methods for quantifying airborne and structureborne sound transfer

Characteristically noise reduction in technical products like road vehicles, ships, aircraft and machines is complicated by the multitude of primary sources and transfer paths. Examples of well-known approaches for transfer path investigations are selective shielding, mechanical uncoupling, "reduced" impedance methods and simple substitution methods (e.g. loudspeakers). This paper presents a brief survey of some recently developed substitution methods which are somewhat more advanced. A characteristic feature of these methods is that the excitation of an individual transfer path is modeled on the basis of in-situ measured source or path responses. Transfer functions to receiver points are measured by invoking the reciprocity principle. For airbome sound transfer two methods are described that model a radiating surface with the aid of a distribution of point monopole sources. A "deterministic" variant uses the volume acceleration distribution and a "Statistical" variant the radiated power distribution. For structure-bome sound transfer two methods are discussed which reproduce approximately the in-situ measured vibrational response on a transfer path. One method uses linear responses (i.e. accelerations) to characterise the vibration field. The other method uses structural intensities. Some experimental results are shown as examples

Anchored narratives and dialectical argumentation

Trying criminal cases is hard. The problem faced by a judge in court can be phrased in a deceptively simple way though, as follows: in order to come to a verdict, a judge has to apply the rules of law to the facts of the case. In a naïve and often criticized model of legal decision making (reminding of the bouche de la loi view on judges), the verdict is determined by applying the rules of law that match the case facts. This naïve model of legal decision making can be referred to as the subsumption model. A problem with the subsumption model is that neither the rules of law nor the case facts are available to the legal decision maker in a sufficiently well-structured form to make the processes of matching and applying a trivial matter. First, there is the problem of determining what the rules of law and the case facts are. Neither the rules nor the facts are presented to the judge in a precise and unambiguous way. A judge has to interpret the available information about the rules of law and the case facts. Second, even if the rules of law and the case facts would be determined, the processes of matching and applying can be problematic. It can for instance be undetermined whether some case fact falls under a particular rule's condition. Additional classificatory rules are then needed. In general, it can be the case that applying the rules of law leads to conflicting verdicts about the case at hand, or to no verdict at all. In the latter situation, it is to the judge's discretion to fill the gap, in the former, he has to resolve the conflict

On the existence and multiplicity of extensions in dialectical argumentation

In the present paper, the existence and multiplicity problems of extensions are addressed. The focus is on extension of the stable type. The main result of the paper is an elegant characterization of the existence and multiplicity of extensions in terms of the notion of dialectical justification, a close cousin of the notion of admissibility. The characterization is given in the context of the particular logic for dialectical argumentation DEFLOG. The results are of direct relevance for several well-established models of defeasible reasoning (like default logic, logic programming and argumentation frameworks), since elsewhere dialectical argumentation has been shown to have close formal connections with these models.Comment: 10 pages; 9th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR'2002