The Philadelphia Syndrome, or an insurmountable cultural trauma: Outdated mainstream visual representations of HIV in times of undetectability

In 1981, the first case of AIDS was diagnosed in the US. Almost forty years later, the biomedical situation of people living with HIV (PLWH) in Western countries has significantly improved, and today, PLWH have a normal lifespan with few physical comorbidities. Nevertheless, current media representations of HIV do not seem to have moved past the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s. The film Philadelphia, directed by Jonathan Deeme in 1993, has had a huge cultural impact in how society perceives HIV, and many contemporary films and fiction series portraying HIV still represent the condition in the same narrative terms. This analysis sets out to define what could be referred to as the Philadelphia Syndrome, a concept intended to describe the outdated, nostalgic representations of HIV in mainstream cultural productions in the last decade, a period marked in biomedical terms by the success of antiretroviral drugs, chronification, the importance of undetectability, and the increasingly widespread use of the prophylaxis pre-exposition (PrEP). By analyzing ten mainstream blockbuster films and fiction series produced from 2013 to 2022, this study examines the main characteristics of the Philadelphia Syndrome: nostalgia and melodramatic use of the 1980s and 1990s, high stigmatization of gay sexualities, and a neglect of women with HIV

Interactive documentaries and health: combating HIV-related stigma and cultural trauma

Interactive documentaries have been growing in number and importance on the international scene in numerous fields and markets. Interactive documentaries entered the field of health about a decade ago, and since then they have proven to be a worthwhile tool for exploring various health issues, such as living with HIV. More recently, experts and academics have started to explore interactive documentaries dealing with a newly emerging topic: stigma. Stigma can be defined as the establishment of a 'mark' or characteristic identified as deviant and rejected by society. Stigma has negative consequences in every aspect of a person's life. When it comes to health, people with stigmatised conditions have the worst outcomes, a problem ultimately related to their own power and agency. There are many sources of stigma, but the structural sources are the least studied and have the biggest impact on health. The media and culture are two of these structural sources of stigmatization, and cultural trauma has been suggested as one of its mediators. This study seeks to examine interactive documentaries as a tool for raising awareness of the impact of HIV-related stigma and cultural trauma. To this end, it analyses two interactive documentaries, Vertical/Horizontal and The Graying of AIDS, focusing on the device, narrative, and textual elements used by these documentaries to deal with the impact of stigma in health, and elaborating on how these filmic pieces represent people living with stigma and whether that representation challenges or reinforces stigmatization

Spanish Civil war in the construction of Neorealist Greek Cinema: an introductory study of Nikos Koundouros' To Potami

The film director Nikos Koundouros is one of the most important representatives of the Neorealist Cinema that bloomed after the end of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). This film movement was highly influenced by another conflict that took place in the previous decade: the Spanish Civil War. This brief research overview will examine, through pictorial and semiotic analyses, the film To Potami/The River by Nikos Koundouros in order to discover the extent to which this film-maker was influenced by the Spanish conflict. Therefore, this project will shed light on the study of the common historical grounds of Greece and Spain and, at the same time, on the emergent field of Southern Europe cultural studies

Optimising 2-parameter Lambert Conformal Conic projections for ground-to-grid distortions

[EN] A Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) projection with two true-scale parallels of latitudes phi(l)and phi(u)can be recast in a LCC projection with one standard parallel of latitude phi(0)and scalek(0), having the practical advantage that the same type of definition can be used for the two conformal projections universally used: LCC and Transverse Mercator (TM). While equations giving phi(0)andk(0)in terms phi(l)and phi(u)can be found in the literature, inverse relationships are not readily found. They are derived in the present paper. These may be necessary in views of the planned future definition of the United States State Plane Coordinate System (SPCS) 2022 for the users of particular mapping software requiring to specify the two latitude values instead of the central latitude and central scale. While map projection parameters are customary selected to minimise ellipsoid-to-grid distortions for a region, in some cases it could be more convenient to study and minimise ground-to-grid distortions. Also bearing in mind the design of SPCS 2022, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of working with each type of distortion definition.Baselga Moreno, S. (2021). Optimising 2-parameter Lambert Conformal Conic projections for ground-to-grid distortions. Survey Review. 53(380):415-421. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396265.2020.17973394154215338

Fibonacci lattices for the evaluation and optimization of map projections

[EN] Latitude-longitude grids are frequently used in geosciences for global numerical modelling although they are remarkably inhomogeneous due to meridian convergence. In contrast, Fibonacci lattices are highly isotropic and homogeneous so that the area represented by each lattice point is virtually the same. In the present paper we show the higher performance of Fibonacci versus latitude-longitude lattices for evaluating distortion coefficients of map projections. In particular, we obtain first a typical distortion for the Lambert Conformal Conic projection with their currently defined parameters and geographic boundaries for Europe that has been adopted as standard by the INSPIRE directive. Further, we optimize the defining parameters of this projection, lower and upper standard parallel latitudes, so that the typical distortion for Europe is reduced a 10% when they are set to 36 degrees and 61.5 degrees, respectively. We also apply the optimization procedure to the determination of the best standard parallels for using this projection in Spain, whose values remained unspecified by the National decree that commanded its official adoption, and obtain optimum values of 37 degrees and 42 degrees and a resulting typical distortion of 828 ppm.Baselga Moreno, S. (2018). Fibonacci lattices for the evaluation and optimization of map projections. Computers & Geosciences. 117:1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2018.04.012S1811

The Philadelphia Syndrome, or an insurmountable cultural trauma: Outdated mainstream visual representations of HIV in times of undetectability

In 1981, the first case of AIDS was diagnosed in the US. Almost forty years later, the biomedical situation of people living with HIV (PLWH) in Western countries has significantly improved, and today, PLWH have a normal lifespan with few physical comorbidities. Nevertheless, current media representations of HIV do not seem to have moved past the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s. The film Philadelphia, directed by Jonathan Deeme in 1993, has had a huge cultural impact in how society perceives HIV, and many contemporary films and fiction series portraying HIV still represent the condition in the same narrative terms. This analysis sets out to define what could be referred to as the Philadelphia Syndrome, a concept intended to describe the outdated, nostalgic representations of HIV in mainstream cultural productions in the last decade, a period marked in biomedical terms by the success of antiretroviral drugs, chronification, the importance of undetectability, and the increasingly widespread use of the prophylaxis pre-exposition (PrEP). By analyzing ten mainstream blockbuster films and fiction series produced from 2013 to 2022, this study examines the main characteristics of the Philadelphia Syndrome: nostalgia and melodramatic use of the 1980s and 1990s, high stigmatization of gay sexualities, and a neglect of women with HIV

TestGrids: Evaluating and Optimizing Map Projections

[EN] In the study of map projections, it is relatively simple to obtain meaningful estimators of distortion for a small area. The definition and especially the evaluation of global distortion measures (i.e., estimators representing the distortion worldwide or in a continent-like area) are undoubtedly more troublesome. Therefore, it is relatively common to find that recommendations for the parameters to use in a particular map projection, be it devised for a continent or a country, are based on simple rules (like the one-sixth rule of thumb for conic projections), with no possibility of further improvement in terms of resulting distortions and sometimes even with no knowledge at all of the sizes of these distortions. Although the choice of map defining parameters is normally made for reasons other than distortion minimization, such as ease of use (e.g., integer or half-integer numbers may be preferable), preservation of conventional or traditional definitions, and uniformity of parameters between neighboring regions, it is always worthwhile to know the optimal set of parameters in terms of minimal distortion. Then, the cartographer may mindfully deviate from this optimal set, documenting the differences in defining parameters and in the resulting distortions. The present research provides a means to do this by extending a related work presented in a previous contribution, where the evaluation and optimization of distortions were studied for a single map projection and only two areas of interest. To this end, a new tool has been developed and presented in this paper. This tool allows users to evaluate several measures of distortion for the most common conformal and equal-area projections within user-defined geographic boundaries of interest. Also embedded in the tool and transparent to users are global optimization techniques operating on Fibonacci grids, which permit the optimization of parameters for the particular map projection and area of interest under two possible criteria: minimization of typical distortion or minimization of extreme distortions. This tool and the associated techniques are applied to several official projections to analyze their original performance and to propose new parameters that significantly improve the resulting distortions while leaving room for users to easily evaluate and optimize the tool for the lowest distortions of these projections within their regions of interest.Baselga Moreno, S. (2019). TestGrids: Evaluating and Optimizing Map Projections. Journal of Surveying Engineering. 145(3):1-8. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)SU.1943-5428.0000279S18145

Two Conformal Projections for Constant-Height Surface to Plane Mapping

[EN] Regions at high elevations may require specific mapping solutions other than the conventional ellipsoid-to-grid projections, which produce large discrepancies between ground and projected distances. These particular solutions are known as low-distortion projections (LDPs). They can be realized by using an elevated ellipsoid (EE) or a constant-height surface (ChS) above the ellipsoid as the reference surface, or by means of a scaled projection. No conformal projections have been derived thus far for the ChS-to-plane transformation. This work aims to solve this problem by deriving the formulation of direct and transverse Mercator-type projections for ChS-to-plane conformal mapping.Baselga Moreno, S. (2021). Two Conformal Projections for Constant-Height Surface to Plane Mapping. Journal of Surveying Engineering. 147(2):1-7. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)SU.1943-5428.000034517147

Determination of Volcanic Plume Three-Dimensional Structure Using CHRIS/PROBA-1 Multiangular Imagery: Case Study of Mount Etna

The recent development of Earth observation satellites with multiangular capabilities and enhanced spectral resolution has led to preliminary attempts at determining the height of atmospheric scatterers, in particular, of top-cloud heights and smoke plumes originating from forest fires. Inspired by these previous studies, the present work presents an original methodology for the determination of the three-dimensional distribution of high-contrast atmospheric aerosols using multiangular images. The method starts with the approximately known geometry of image acquisition and a set of tie points and uses a linearized and regularized functional model to obtain the position of atmospheric scatterers identified by means of a semiassisted procedure on two or more images. A subsequent application to a CHRIS/PROBA-1 scene of Mount Etna following its eruption on June 14, 2014, allows determining the volcanic plume three-dimensional structure with a precision in the 100–200 m level

Automated detection of discontinuities in EUREF permanent GNSS network stations due to earthquake events

[EN] The EUREF Permanent GNSS Network (EPN) provides the users with data and products such as station coordinate time series. These are subject to possible discontinuities and trend changes, being earthquake events one of the possible natural causes for these variations. We present here a fully automated tool for the analysis of the coordinate time series of EPN stations located in the desired neighbourhood of an earthquake epicentre. The tool is made freely available to the public and applied here to two significant earthquake events occurred in Europe in recent years, where several trend changes and jumps are revealed.Baselga Moreno, S.; Najder, J. (2022). Automated detection of discontinuities in EUREF permanent GNSS network stations due to earthquake events. Survey Review. 54(386):420-428. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396265.2021.19642304204285438