On the threshold of forgetting: Amnesiac identities and the Brazilian capital

Centuries after Locke asserted the importance of memory to identity, Freudian psychology argued that what was forgotten was of equal importance as to what was remembered. The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw a rising interest in the nature of forgetting, resulting in a reassessment and newfound distrust of the long revered faculty of memory. The relationship between memory and identity was inverted, seeing forgetting also become a means for forging identity. This newfound distrust of memory manifested in the writings of Nietzsche who in 1874 called for society to learn to feel unhistorically and distance itself from the past - in what was essentially tantamount to a cultural forgetting. Following the Nietzschean call, the architecture of Modernism was also compelled by the need to 'overcome' the limits imposed by history. This paper examines notions of identity through the shifting boundaries of remembering and forgetting, with particular reference to the construction of Brazilian identity through the ‘repression’ of history and memory in the design of the Brazilian capital. Designed as a forward-looking modernist utopia, transcending the limits imposed by the country's colonial heritage, the design for Brasilia exploited the anti-historicist agenda of modernism to emancipate the country from cultural and political associations with the Portuguese Empire. This paper examines the relationship between place, memory and forgetting through a discussion of the design for Brasilia.

Estimation of crystalline phase present in the glucose crystal-solution mixture by water activity measurement

The amount of crystalline fraction present in monohydrate glucose crystal-solution mixture up to 110% crystal in relation to solution (crystal:solution=110:100) was determined by water activity measurement. It was found that the water activity had a strong linear correlation (R-2=0.994) with the amount of glucose present above saturation. Difference in the water activities of the crystal-solution mixture (a(w1)) and the supersaturated solution (a(w2)) by re-dissolving the crystalline fraction allowed calculation of the amount of crystalline phase present (DeltaG) in the mixture by an equation DeltaG=846.97(a(w1)-a(w2)). Other methods such as Raoult's, Norrish and Money-Born equations were also tested for the prediction of water activity of supersaturated glucose solution. (C) 2003 Swiss Society of Food Science and Technology. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Variation of the crystalline structure of coal char during gasification

The variation of the crystallite structure of several coal chars during gasification in air and carbon dioxide was studied by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques. The XRD analysis of the partially gasified coal chars, based on two approaches, Scherrer's equation and Alexander and Sommer's method, shows a contradictory trend of the variation of the crystallite height with carbon conversion, despite giving a similar trend for the crystallite width change. The HRTEM fringe images of the partially gasified coal chars indicate that large and highly ordered crystallites exist at conversion levels as high as 86%. It is also demonstrated that the crystalline structure of chars can be very different although their pore structures are similar, suggesting a combination of crystalline structure analysis with pore structure analysis in studies of carbon gasification.