Spectacles of military urbanism in online representations of the Elite Squad of the military police of Rio de Janeiro: a multimodal approach

This paper presents a multimodal analysis of online self-representations of the Elite Squad of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, the Special Police Operations Battalion BOPE. The analysis is placed within the wider context of a “new military urbanism”, which is evidenced in the ongoing “Pacification” of many of the city’s favelas, in which BOPE plays an active interventionist as well as a symbolic role, and is a kind of solution which clearly fails to address the root causes of violence which lie in poverty and social inequality. The paper first provides a sociocultural account of BOPE’s role in Rio’s public security and then looks at some of the mainly visual mediated discourses the Squad employs in constructing a public image of itself as a modern and efficient, yet at the same time “magical” police force.

A biological survey method applied to seafloor massive sulphides (SMS) with contagiously distributed hydrothermal-vent fauna

Strategies for mitigation of seafloor massive sulphide (SMS) extraction in the deep sea include establishment of suitable reference sites that allow for studies of natural environmental variability and that can serve as sources of larvae for re-colonisation of extracted hydrothermal fields. In this study, we characterize deep-sea vent communities in Manus Basin (Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea) and use macrofaunal data sets from a proposed reference site (South Su) and a proposed mine site (Solwara 1) to test the hypothesis that there was no difference in macrofaunal community structure between the sites. We used dispersion weighting to adjust taxa-abundance matrices to down-weight the contribution of contagious distributions of numerically abundant taxa. Faunal assemblages of 3 habitat types defined by biogenic taxa (2 provannid snails, Alviniconcha spp. and Ifremeria nautilei; and a sessile barnacle, Eochionelasmus ohtai) were distinct from one another and from the vent peripheral assemblage, but were not differentiable from mound-to-mound within a site or between sites. Mussel and tubeworm populations at South Su but not at Solwara 1 enhance the taxonomic and habitat diversity of the proposed reference site. © Inter-Research 2012.