Driving places - Marc Augé, non-places, and the geographies of England's M1 motorway

In this article I provide a critical account of the 'placing' of England's M1 motor-way. I start by critiquing Marc Auge's anthropological writings on 'non-places' which have provided a common point of reference for academics discussing spaces of travel, consumption and exchange in the contemporary world. I argue that Auge's ethnology of supermodernity results in a rather partial account of these sites, that he overstates the novelty of contemporary experiences of these spaces, and that he fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity and materiality of the social networks bound up with the production of non-places/places. I suggest that, rather than focusing on the presences and absences associated with the polarities of place and non-place, academics should examine the multiple, partial, dynamic and relational 'placings' which arise through the diverse performances and movements associated with travel, consumption and exchange. I then trace the topologies of England's M1 motorway, examining some of the different ways in which the motorway has been assembled, performed and placed over the past 45 years.

Application of EMD as a novel technique for the study of tremor time series

This paper introduces the Hilbert Analysis (HA), which is a novel digital signal processing technique, for the investigation of tremor. The HA is formed by two complementary tools, i.e. the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert Spectrum (HS). In this work we show that the EMD can automatically detect and isolate tremulous and voluntary movements from experimental signals collected from 31 patients with different conditions. Our results also suggest that the tremor may be described by a new class of mathematical functions defined in the HA framework. In a further study, the HS was employed for visualization of the energy activities of signals. This tool introduces the concept of instantaneous frequency in the field of tremor. In addition, it could provide, in a time-frequency energy plot, a clear visualization of local activities of tremor energy over the time. The HA demonstrated to be very useful to perform objective measurements of any kind of tremor and can therefore be used to perform functional assessment.