Consecuencias literarias del 11-S: la representación de la violencia en la novela angloamericana

In my eight years as a professional journalist, I have been a front line observer of the extreme level of violence which occurs everyday in our society. As victims, consumers or perpetrators of violence, this phenomenon is now a part of our existence. As a reporter for the Spanish national newspaper El País I have been witness to the most terrible acts of violence. In Venezuela, with one of the highest rates of criminality in the world, I saw piles of bodies stacked up in mortuaries. In Argentina, I reported on the most brutal crimes including the rape of children by policemen. I believe that my interest in the manifestations and causes of violence was aroused during my time as a journalist. On a personal level, I was deeply affected by the twin poles of attraction/repulsion which the violent images produced in me. The first time I visited New York in 2003, I talked to various people who were selling photos of the victims of the Twin Tower attacks. They had laid out their wares along the wire fence that separated Ground Zero from the main public areas. One particular photograph made an indelible impression on my mind: a ghost like corpse covered in white dust which was streaked with blood. It is an image I will never forget. If I remember well, a complete album of these gruesome images cost about ten dollars. At the same time, I also became interested in islamic terrorism: its complexity and the great impact it has made on Western society. One only has to look at the front page of the press around the world to read about war, terrorism or the constant violation of human rights. The words Al-Qaeda, Daesh, Boko Haram and Islamic State have sadly become parts of our everyday language. The nihilistic philosophy which promisess eternal life in exchange for self-inmolation is a new, highly worrying reality, especially painful when it involves young people who become indoctrinated through the social media. They have become the most loyal supporters of a fanatical and uncompromising version of Islam. The stark reality is that these young recruits to Jihad (holy war) were born in places like London, Paris, Rome or Madrid...

SAFARI optical system architecture and design concept

SpicA FAR infrared Instrument, SAFARI, is one of the instruments planned for the SPICA mission. The SPICA mission is the next great leap forward in space-based far-infrared astronomy and will study the evolution of galaxies, stars and planetary systems. SPICA will utilize a deeply cooled 2.5m-class telescope, provided by European industry, to realize zodiacal background limited performance, and high spatial resolution. The instrument SAFARI is a cryogenic grating-based point source spectrometer working in the wavelength domain 34 to 230 μm, providing spectral resolving power from 300 to at least 2000. The instrument shall provide low and high resolution spectroscopy in four spectral bands. Low Resolution mode is the native instrument mode, while the high Resolution mode is achieved by means of a Martin-Pupplet interferometer. The optical system is all-reflective and consists of three main modules; an input optics module, followed by the Band and Mode Distributing Optics and the grating Modules. The instrument utilizes Nyquist sampled filled linear arrays of very sensitive TES detectors. The work presented in this paper describes the optical design architecture and design concept compatible with the current instrument performance and volume design drivers.