Spectral Finite Element Modeling of Complex Structures for Applications in Real-time Structural Health Monitoring

In this paper we discuss the recent progresses in spectral finite element modeling of complex structures and its application in real-time structural health monitoring system based on sensor-actuator network and near real-time computation of Damage Force Indicator (DFI) vector. A waveguide network formalism is developed by mapping the original variational problem into the variational problem involving product spaces of 1D waveguides. Numerical convergence is studied using a h()-refinement scheme, where is the wavelength of interest. Computational issues towards successful implementation of this method with SHM system are discussed.

Conformal geometry processing

This thesis introduces fundamental equations and numerical methods for manipulating surfaces in three dimensions via conformal transformations. Conformal transformations are valuable in applications because they naturally preserve the integrity of geometric data. To date, however, there has been no clearly stated and consistent theory of conformal transformations that can be used to develop general-purpose geometry processing algorithms: previous methods for computing conformal maps have been restricted to the flat two-dimensional plane, or other spaces of constant curvature. In contrast, our formulation can be used to produce---for the first time---general surface deformations that are perfectly conformal in the limit of refinement. It is for this reason that we commandeer the title Conformal Geometry Processing.

The main contribution of this thesis is analysis and discretization of a certain time-independent Dirac equation, which plays a central role in our theory. Given an immersed surface, we wish to construct new immersions that (i) induce a conformally equivalent metric and (ii) exhibit a prescribed change in extrinsic curvature. Curvature determines the potential in the Dirac equation; the solution of this equation determines the geometry of the new surface. We derive the precise conditions under which curvature is allowed to evolve, and develop efficient numerical algorithms for solving the Dirac equation on triangulated surfaces.

From a practical perspective, this theory has a variety of benefits: conformal maps are desirable in geometry processing because they do not exhibit shear, and therefore preserve textures as well as the quality of the mesh itself. Our discretization yields a sparse linear system that is simple to build and can be used to efficiently edit surfaces by manipulating curvature and boundary data, as demonstrated via several mesh processing applications. We also present a formulation of Willmore flow for triangulated surfaces that permits extraordinarily large time steps and apply this algorithm to surface fairing, geometric modeling, and construction of constant mean curvature (CMC) surfaces.

Using ReefBase to create customized maps

One of the most popular sections of the ReefBase website is the online GIS that enables users to create an almost unlimited range of maps showing a wide variety of features. A new version of the GIS, offering an even larger array of facilities and data layers, is online as of early September. In this article, we will provide an introduction to the ReefBase GIS and also highlight some of the powerful but lesser used features of the system.

A Biogeographic assessment off North/Central California: In support of the National Marine Sanctuaries of Cordell Bank, Gulf of the Farallones and Monterey Bay. Phase II - Environmental setting and update to marine birds and animals

NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) conducts and supports research, monitoring, assessments, and technical assistance to meet NOAA’s coastal stewardship and management responsibilities. In 2001 the Biogeography Branch of NCCOS partnered with NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary Program (NMSP) to conduct biogeographic assessments to support the management plan updates for the sanctuaries. The first biogeographic assessment conducted in this partnership focused on three sanctuaries off north/ central California: Cordell Bank, Gulf of the Farallones and Monterey Bay. Phase I of this assessment was conducted from 2001 to 2004, with the primary goal to identify and gather the best available data and information to characterize and identify important biological areas and time periods within the study area. The study area encompasses the three sanctuaries and extends along the coastal ocean off California from Pt. Arena to Pt. Sal (35°-39°N). This partnership project was lead by the NCCOS Biogeography Branch, but included over 90 contributors and 25 collaborating institutions. Phase I results include: 1) a report on the overall assessment that includes hundreds of maps, tables and analyses; 2) an ecological linkage report on the marine and estuarine ecosystems along the coast of north/central California, and 3) related geographic information system (GIS) data and other summary data files, which are available for viewing and download in several formats at the following website: http://ccma.nos.noaa.gov/products/biogeography/canms_cd/welcome.html Phase II (this report) was initiated in the Fall of 2004 to complete the analyses of marine mammals and update the marine bird colony information. Phase II resulted in significant updates to the bird and mammal chapters, as well as adding an environmental settings chapter, which contains new and existing data and maps on the study area. Specifically, the following Phase II topics and items were either revised or developed new for Phase II: •environmental, ecological settings – new maps on marine physiographic features, sea surface temperature and fronts, chlorophyll and productivity •all bird colony or roost maps, including a summary of marine bird colonies •updated at-sea data CDAS data set (1980-2003) •all mammal maps and descriptions •new overall density maps for eight mammal species •new summary pinniped rookery/haulout map •new maps on at-sea richness for cetaceans and pinnipeds •most text in the mammal chapter •new summary tables for mammals on population status and spatial and temporal patterns

Shallow-water benthic habitats of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Coral reef ecosystems of the Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument, Virgin Islands National Park and the surrounding waters of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands are a precious natural resource worthy of special protection and conservation. The mosaic of habitats including coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves, are home to a diversity of marine organisms. These benthic habitats and their associated inhabitants provide many important ecosystem services to the community of St. John, such as fishing, tourism and shoreline protection. However, coral reef ecosystems throughout the U.S. Caribbean are under increasing pressure from environmental and anthropogenic stressors that threaten to destroy the natural heritage of these marine habitats. Mapping of benthic habitats is an integral component of any effective ecosystem-based management approach. Through the implementation of a multi-year interagency agreement, NOAA’s Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment - Biogeography Branch and the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) have completed benthic habitat mapping, field validation and accuracy assessment of maps for the nearshore marine environment of St. John. This work is an expansion of ongoing mapping and monitoring efforts conducted by NOAA and NPS in the U.S. Caribbean and replaces previous NOAA maps generated by Kendall et al. (2001) for the waters around St. John. The use of standardized protocols enables the condition of the coral reef ecosystems around St. John to be evaluated in context to the rest of the Virgin Island Territories and other U.S. coral ecosystems. The products from this effort provide an accurate assessment of the abundance and distribution of marine habitats surrounding St. John to support more effective management and conservation of ocean resources within the National Park system. This report documents the entire process of benthic habitat mapping in St. John. Chapter 1 provides a description of the benthic habitat classification scheme used to categorize the different habitats existing in the nearshore environment. Chapter 2 describes the steps required to create a benthic habitat map from visual interpretation of remotely sensed imagery. Chapter 3 details the process of accuracy assessment and reports on the thematic accuracy of the final maps. Finally, Chapter 4 is a summary of the basic map content and compares the new maps to a previous NOAA effort. Benthic habitat maps of the nearshore marine environment of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands were created by visual interpretation of remotely sensed imagery. Overhead imagery, including color orthophotography and IKONOS satellite imagery, proved to be an excellent source from which to visually interpret the location, extent and attributes of marine habitats. NOAA scientists were able to accurately and reliably delineate the boundaries of features on digital imagery using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and fi eld investigations. The St. John habitat classification scheme defined benthic communities on the basis of four primary coral reef ecosystem attributes: 1) broad geographic zone, 2) geomorphological structure type, 3) dominant biological cover, and 4) degree of live coral cover. Every feature in the benthic habitat map was assigned a designation at each level of the scheme. The ability to apply any component of this scheme was dependent on being able to identify and delineate a given feature in remotely sensed imagery.

Community workers' understandings and practices of resistance

This research is focused on Community Workers located in Southern Ireland, and their understandings and practices of resistance. It is an attempt to explore the ways in which community workers’ understandings and practices of resistance are formed and, in turn, inform their sense of identity and their responses to the wider context of community development work in Ireland today. This study is specifically located but also has wider application and relevance because of the extended international reach of neo-liberal and managerial rationalities, and their implications for politics, policy and practice. The study considers resistance in a number of inter-related ways: as a collective oppositional position (with negative and positive dimensions); a personal and/or professional value (associated with the ‘expansion of contention’); a strategy for negotiating unequal power relations (in a range of levels and spaces of power); an identity (in relation to the sustaining of ‘reflexive subjectivities’); a set of practices, (which take into account the interplay between economic, political and cultural influences); and an educational process through which practitioners assess and enact personal and professional agency. Critical theorisations of community development and of the Irish state over time, trace the ways in which neo-liberalism and managerialism has inflected community development practice and the positions of community workers and communities in that process. The study draws on James C. Scott, Gramsci, Barnes and Prior, among others, which enabled the interrogation of resistance in relation to everyday practices through engaging with ‘hidden transcripts’ and spaces. The method chosen was focus group discussions with three groups of community workers located in different counties in Southern Ireland. This method facilitated a deep discourse analysis of practitioners’ encounters with resistance in the field of community work. Key findings relate to the various interpretations of the role of resistance, practices of resistance (including current restrictions), the value of resistance work and the conditions that may be conducive to practising resistance.

Locating the transnational: representations and aesthetics of the city in contemporary European cinemas

This thesis focuses on two Western European cinematic cities, and two unique periods of their respective nations’ histories, in a bid to “locate” the transnational within a contemporary European milieu. I argue that my geo-cinematic case studies are emblematic of broader questions of the problematics of national identity in contemporary Europe in the face of cross-national flows yet, as a result of their representations as cities both “anchored” and “in flux”, they reject a European postnational identity. Through its engagement with cinematic Rome as the “Eternal City” of Europe and cinematic Dublin as the “newly Europeanised” city, my thesis traces how representations and aesthetics of the urban spaces of these two cities correspond with the tensions at the heart of the respective eras in question. Via the figures that inhabit it, navigate it and search for it, the city is utilised to highlight fixity and mobility, centrality and dislocation, in explicit and implicit ways, amid the rapidly changing landscape of its national terrain. It is through my analyses of the filmed places and sociopolitical, socioeconomic and sociocultural spaces of these capital cities under the rubric of the transnational that this research demonstrates the “pluralities” of the construct in its cinematic manifestations. It is also my aim to evaluate the concept of cinematic transnationalism when identifying and accounting for representations of a specific national, historical timeframe, when the momentousness of the changes that occur is not bound by the national, but rather is reflective of the influence of both domestic and external forces. To this end, my thesis draws attention to instances in which the nation is shown to persist and resist dilution, arguing that it is only against the backdrop and continuity of the nation (in its evershifting guises) that the transnational can be conceived in representative and aesthetic terms.

Technology and the architecture of markets: re-configuring the Canadian equity market

This paper examines the relation between technical possibilities, liberal logics, and the concrete reconfiguration of markets. It focuses on the enrolling of innovations in communication and information technologies into the markets traditionally dominated by stock exchanges. With the development of capacities to trade on-screen, the power of incumbent market makers has been challenged as a less stable array of competing quasi-public and private marketplaces emerges. Developing a case study of the Toronto Stock Exchange, I argue that narrative emphasis on the performative power of sociotechnical innovations, the deterritorialisation of financial relations, and the erosion of state capacities needs qualification. A case is made for the importance of developing an understanding of: the spaces of encounter between emerging social technologies and property rights, rules of exchange, and structures of governance; and the interplay of orderings of different institutional composition and spatial reach in the reconfiguration of market architectures. Only then can a better grasp be gained of the evolving dynamics between making markets, the regulatory powers of the state, and their delimitations.

The spatial turn: geographical approaches in the history of science

Over the past decade or so a number of historians of science and historical geographers, alert to the situated nature of scientific knowledge production and reception and to the migratory patterns of science on the move, have called for more explicit treatment of the geographies of past scientific knowledge. Closely linked to work in the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies and connected with a heightened interest in spatiality evident across the humanities and social sciences this ‹spatial turn’ has informed a wide-ranging body of work on the history of science. This discussion essay revisits some of the theoretical props supporting this turn to space and provides a number of worked examples from the history of the life sciences that demonstrate the different ways in which the spaces of science have been comprehended.

Analyticity of smooth eigenfunctions and spectral analysis of the Gauss map

We provide a sufficient condition of analyticity of infinitely differentiable eigenfunctions of operators of the form Uf(x) = integral a(x, y) f(b( x, y)) mu(dy) acting on functions f: [u, v] --> C ( evolution operators of one-dimensional dynamical systems and Markov processes have this form). We estimate from below the region of analyticity of the eigenfunctions and apply these results for studying the spectral properties of the Frobenius-Perron operator of the continuous fraction Gauss map. We prove that any infinitely differentiable eigenfunction f of this Frobenius-Perron operator, corresponding to a non-zero eigenvalue admits a (unique) analytic extension to the set C\(-infinity, 1]. Analyzing the spectrum of the Frobenius Perron operator in spaces of smooth functions, we extend significantly the domain of validity of the Mayer and Ropstorff asymptotic formula for the decay of correlations of the Gauss map.

The maximal C*-algebra of quotients as an operator bimodule

We establish a description of the maximal C*-algebra of quotients of a unital C*-algebra A as a direct limit of spaces of completely bounded bimodule homomorphisms from certain operator submodules of the Haagerup tensor product of A with itself labelled by the essential closed right ideals of A into A. In addition the invariance of the construction of the maximal C*-algebra of quotients under strong Morita equivalence is proved.

From stress to distress: Conceptualizing the British family farming patriarchal way of life

‘Rural stress’ and ‘farming stress’ are terms that have become commonly appropriated by British health-based academic disciplines, the medical profession and social support networks, especially since the agricultural ‘crises’ of B.S.E. and Foot and Mouth Disease. Looking beyond the media headlines, it is apparent that the terms in fact are colloquial catch-alls for visible psychological and physiological outcomes shown by individuals. Seldom have the underlying causes and origins of presentable medical outcomes been probed, particularly within the context of the patriarchal and traditionally patrilineal way of life which family forms of farming business activity in Britain encapsulate. Thus, this paper argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the conceptualization of the terms. They have become both over-used and ill-defined in their application to British family farm individuals and their life situations. A conceptual framework is outlined that attempts to shift the stress research agenda into the unilluminated spaces of the family farming ‘way of life’ and focus instead on ‘distress’. Drawing upon theorization from agricultural and feminist geography together with cultural approaches from rural geography, four distinct clusters of distress originate from the thoughts of individuals and the social practices now required to enact patriarchal family farming gender identities. These are explored using case study evidence from ethnographic repeated life history interviews with members of seven farming families in Powys, Mid Wales, an area dominated by family forms of farming business. Future research agendas need to be based firmly on the distressing reality of patriarchal family farming and also be inclusive of those who, having rejected the associated way of life, now lie beyond the farm gate.

Vis-á-Vis-á-Vis. The Three-dimensional and artistic view of a problem

ANPO (A Non-predefined Outcome) is an an art-making methodology that employs structuralist theory of language (Saussure, Lacan, Foucault) combined with Hegel’s dialectic and the theory of creation of space by Lefebvre to generate spaces of dialogue and conversation between community members and different stakeholders. These theories of language are used to find artistic ways of representing a topic that community members have previously chosen. The topic is approached in a way that allows a visual, aural, performative and gustative form. To achieve this, the methodology is split in four main steps: step 1 ‘This is not a chair’, Step 2 ‘The topic’, Step 3 ‘ Vis-á-vis-á-vis’ and step 4. ‘Dialectical representation’ where the defined topic is used to generate artistic representations.The step 1 is a warm up exercise informed by the Rene Magritte painting ‘This is not a Pipe’. This exercise aims to help the participants to see an object as something else than an object but as a consequence of social implications. Step 2, participants choose a random topic and vote for it. The artist/facilitator does not predetermine the topic, participants are the one who propose it and choose it. Step 3, will be analysed in this publication and finally step 4, the broken down topic is taken to be represented and analysed in different ways. 

More-than-human histories and the failure of grand state schemes: sylviculture in the New Forest, England

As James Scott’s Seeing Like a State attests, forests played a central role in the rise of the modern state, specifically as test spaces for evolving methods of managing state resources at a distance, and as the location for grand state schemes. Together, such ambitions necessitated both the elimination of local understandings of forest management – to be replaced by centrally controlled scientific precision – and a narrowing of state vision. Forests thus began to be conflated with trees (and their timber) alone. All other aspects of the forest, both human and non-human, were ignored. Through the lens of the 18th and early 19th century New Forest in southern England, this paper examines the impact of government attempts to shift the focus of state forests from being remnant medieval hunting spaces to spaces of income generation through the creation of vast sylvicultural plantations. This state scheme not only reworked the relationship between the metropole and the provinces – something effected through systematic surveys and novel bureaucratic procedures – but also dramatically impacted upon the biophysical and cultural geographies of the forest. By equating forest space with trees alone, the British state failed to legislate for the actions of both local commoners and non-human others in resisting their schemes. Indeed, subsequent oppositions proved not only the tenacity of commoners in protecting their livelihoods but also the destructive power of non-human actants, specifically rabbits and mice. The paper concludes that grand state schemes necessarily fail due to their own internal illogic: the narrowing of state vision creates blind spots in which human and non-human lives assert their own visions.

'Trusting the numbers': mineral prospecting, raising finance and the governance of knowledge

Mineral prospecting and raising finance for ‘junior’ mining firms has historically been regarded as a speculative activity. For the regulators of securities markets upon which ‘junior’ mining companies seek to raise capital, a perennial problem has been handling not only the indeterminacy of scientific claims, but also the social basis of epistemic practices. This paper examines the production of a system of public warrant and associated knowledge practices intended to enable investors to differentiate between ‘destructive’ and ‘productive’ varieties of financial speculation. It traces the use of the notion of ‘disclosure’ in constructing and legitimizing the ‘juniors’ market in Canada. It argues that though the work of ‘economics’ may be necessary in the construction of markets, it is by no means sufficient. Attention must also be given to the ways in which legal models of ‘the free-market’ can be translated and constantly re-worked across the sites and spaces of regulatory practice, animating the geographies of markets.