Events Of May Research Articles

The Role of Commercial Radio Stations in the Media Vacuum of <i>Mai 68</i> in Paris

Commercial radio stations RTL and Europe n°1 played an important role during the events of May 1968 in Paris by maintaining the news coverage of the protests, the riots and the strikes. By analyzing the entanglements of the various audiovisual media and surviving audio material,this article defends the idea that a vacuum created by the crisis that affected the French public broadcasting agency is one of the main reasons that brought the commercial radio stations at the centre of the events.

Jamaica: A State of Language, Music and Crisis of Nation

The paper examines the evolution of language use in popular Jamaican music over six decades, between the two coexisting and simultaneously competing languages of Jamaica. English, a colonial linguistic inheritance, the official language of the post-colonial Jamaican State, competes for a place in music lyrics with the Jamaican Language (Jamaican Creole, Patwa). This is the native language of the mass of the population and the de facto national language. The paper discusses how this battle plays out in terms of which language varieties are predominantly associated with which Jamaican popular music genres. It culminates in examining the role which the Jamaican Language came to play, via its use in music, in the most significant challenge to the existence of the Jamaican State since independence, the military confrontation in West Kingston/Tivoli Gardens events of May 2010, around the arrest and extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke.

Fort Mcmurray Wildfire 2016: Conflating Human-Caused Wildfires With Human-Caused Global Warming

As the debate over the ratio of human versus natural influence on climate change continues, proponents of the theory of catastrophic human-caused global warming often cite various extreme events as alleged evidence of human-caused climate change. This was the immediate reaction by anti-oil activists such as Naomi Klein to Alberta’s Fort McMurray wildfire of 2016, particularly as Fort McMurray is the epi-centre of demonized oil sands activity. Most recently, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a report claiming that 2016 was the hottest year on record, linking to a map of “evidence” of extreme events wherein the Fort McMurray fire is noted as one such example. Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada made similar claims on March 2, 2017. In fact, the archived status report of the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Association (CIFFA) for that period shows that all Alberta fires were categorized by as being ‘human-caused’ and thus preventable (“human-caused” can mean any form of human-related interaction, from a power line sparking a tree branch, to negligent campers, to intentional acts, etc.). This paper reviews relevant fire risk information related to the events of May 2016 in the Fort McMurray fire, demonstrating that a combination of human-caused interaction or negligence, human-caused lack of governmental attention to recommendations from previous reports on similarly catastrophic wildfires in the same region, in conjunction with the natural warming climate anomalies of El Nino Southern Oscillation and cyclical effects of Pacific Decadal Oscillation and natural biological aging of conifers were drivers of the Fort McMurray wildfires, not human-caused global warming. The author gratefully acknowledges Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada and the Minister of Natural Resources for permission to reproduce relevant archival fire weather maps.

Ornamentalism in a European Context? Napoleon’s Italian Coronation, 26 May 1805

Abstract Napoleon’s Italian Coronation has been neglected, or at best consigned to a footnote, in historical scholarship. The ceremony involved immense expenditure and thousands of participants, but its true importance lay in the elusive—and somewhat confused—semiotic claims put forward by its organisers. The manner in which the events of May 1805 were choreographed reveals much about how French imperialists viewed their nascent Empire and their relationship with their northern Italian citizen-subjects. The argument put forward here is inspired by the concept of ‘ornamentalism’. While the realities of imperial brutality, cultural chauvinism and economic exploitation of conquered territories cannot be brushed under the carpet, the reverse side of this coin is also worthy of further investigation. Nowhere more than in the satellite kingdom of Italy did Napoleon seek to promote collaboration and local investment in his supranational empire. He rewarded, honoured and rallied his Lombard and Emilian officials in order to endow them with a sense that they belonged to, and benefited from membership of, the wider imperial community. The coronation in Milan, on 26 May 1805, was an important experiment in the creation of new hierarchies and elite affinities. Its mixed, though significant, legacy was continued, to a certain extent, by Napoleon’s Habsburg successors well into the first half of the nineteenth century.

A new New Babylon. Bottom-up Urban Planning & The Situationist utopia

The recent “Participatory Turn” in Urbanism has flourished most significantly in situations of economic turmoil, material scarcity and technical insufficiency: those circumstances have boosted creative and audacious urban processes that take advantage of such limitations as an opportunity to enhance social engagement, formal exploration and developmental experimentation. All across Europe or Latin America, multidisciplinary collectives aim to reinvent the socioeconomical conditions for urban design and construction, favoring the architectural Process rather than the Object.Experiences in Urban Acupuncture, bottom-up urbanism, activism for the public space and the claim for neighborly ties are often struggling against Top-Down urban planning and the modern articulation of the zoned city: according to some of these collectives, the Welfare State and its urban culture has been overtaken by capitalism, and the classical Ville Radieuse model has somehow become synonymous with Corporatocracy and social engineering.In this sociopolitical milieu , some of the mid twentieth century arguments against the Modern Movement have emerged again. Many scholars have linked the Occupy and Indignados movements with the events of May 68, and the urban guerrillas within both periods have been strongly biased towards a radical reformulation of the Structuralist urban parameters: in order to re-humanize the city, urban planning must give way to spontaneity, autopoiesis, dynamism and horizontal decision-making. The city is not considered a ready made object designed from scratch, but an always-evolving living entity, where perennial mutation and reconfiguration is the at the key feature. The City is a rhizome rather than a tree.The Situationist utopia of the New Babylon (as conceived by Constant Nieuwenhuys) revives as the core intellectual reference of many Participatory Urbanism experiences. Psycho-geography, détournement, the urban dweller as a homo ludens, and the harmonization of life and work are presented as the shield against the alienation, social segregation and gentrification inherent to the capitalist city and its planning instruments. The Situationist model is now enhanced with ideas of sustainability, social responsibility, gender claims, global migrations and ecology, depicting a contemporary Utopia that collapses the boundary between planners and dwellers.In this paper we´ll trace the influence of the Situationist ethos upon recent experiences in participatory urbanism: the impact of mid-twentieth century radical activism upon contemporary counter-cultural urban praxis, a trend that is pushing the Academia to reconsider its ethical foundations and methodological tools, and ultimately to reformulate the consensual ontology of the city inherited from the early Modern Movement.

Afiches del Mayo Francés. Gráfica, autoría y alteridad sudamericana en 1968

Dada su relación con el Mayo francés, el Atelier Populaire constituye uno de los episodios más citado en relación a los cruces entre arte y política de los años sesenta. Sin embargo, tratándose de un episodio europeo, resulta significativa la centralidad que ciertos artistas sudamericanos tuvieron en la producción de esos afiches. Este artículo analiza la tensión entre los carteles firmados y aquellos producidos de manera anónima. En el contexto de la crisis que mayo del ’68 significó para el campo artístico y su autonomía, se interpreta esa participación en términos de una alteridad que el tercermundismo identificaba con la producción cultural colectiva y politizada.

ON THE PRAGMATICS OF SOCIAL THEORY: THE CASE OF ELIAS'S "ON THE PROCESS OF CIVILIZATION".

This paper proposes a new approach to the study of sociological classics. This approach is pragmatic in character. It draws upon the social pragmatism of G. H. Mead and the sociology of texts of D. F. McKenzie. Our object of study is Norbert Elias's On the Process of Civilization. The pragmatic genealogy of this book reveals the importance of taking materiality seriously. By documenting the successive entanglements between human agency and nonhuman factors, we discuss the origins of the book in the 1930s, how it was forgotten for 30 years, and how in the mid-1970s it became a sociological classic. We explain canonization as a matter of fusion between book's material form and its content, in the context of the paperback revolution of the 1960s, the events of May 1968, and the demise of Parsons' structural functionalism, and how this provided Elias with an opportunity to advance his model of sociology.

To what question is the Badiouan notion of the subject an answer? On the dialectical elaboration of the concept in his early work

Alain Badiou’s elaboration of a subject faithful to an event is commonly known today in the academic world and beyond. However, his first systematic account of the subject ( Théorie du Sujet) was already published in 1982 and did not mention the ‘event’ at all. Therefore, this article aims at tracing back both the structural and the historical conditions that directed Badiou’s elaboration of the subject in the early work up until the publication of L’Être et l’Événément in 1988. On the one hand, it investigates to what extent the (early) Badiouan subject can be considered an exceptional product of the formalist project of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse as instigated by psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan) and a certain Marxist discourse (Althusser) insofar as both were centered upon a theory of the subject. On the other hand, this article examines the radical political implications of this subject insofar as Badiou has directed his philosophical aims towards the political field as a direct consequence of the events of May ’68.

Are flood-driven turbidity currents hot spots for priming effect in lakes?

Abstract. In deep stratified lakes, such as Lake Geneva, flood-driven turbidity currents are thought to contribute to the replenishment of deep oxygen by significant transport of river waters saturated with oxygen into the hypolimnion. The overarching aim of this study was to test this long-standing hypothesis directly. It combines direct observational data collected during an extreme flooding event that occurred in May 2015 with dark bioassays designed to evaluate the consequences of river-borne inputs for the hypolimnetic respiration. The exceptional precipitation events of May 2015 caused floods with an annual return time for the Rhône River, the dominant tributary of Lake Geneva, and with 50-year return time for the Dranse River, the second-most important tributary. Sediment-loaded river flows generated turbidity currents plunging into the lake hypolimnion. The observed river intrusions contributed to the redistribution of dissolved oxygen, with no net gain, when occurring in the lowermost hypolimnetic layer. In the uppermost hypolimnion above the last deep-mixing event, the intrusions coincided with a net oxygen deficit. Consistent with field observations, dark bioassays showed that 1 to 50 % substitution of riverine organic matter to deep (< 200 m) hypolimnetic water did not affect microbial respiration, while the addition of 1 to 10 % of riverine water to the uppermost hypolimnetic waters resulted in a respiration over-yielding, i.e. excess respiration of both river-borne and lacustrine organic matter. The results of our study conflict with the hypothesis that flood-driven turbidity currents necessarily increase hypolimnetic oxygen stocks in Lake Geneva. In contrast, results show that flood-driven turbidity currents can be potential hot spots for priming effect in lakes.

Young people’s disillusionment with French education before 1968: sport, the school curriculum and social change

The quasi-revolutionary events of May 1968 have come to symbolize the generation gap between young people and their elders in France, and of contestation over social values, freedom and control. This article demonstrates that this discontent was apparent earlier in the decade, although politicians in charge of youth affairs either did not see it or chose not to publicize its existence. It focuses on debates relating to sport – and its incorporation into the teaching of physical education in lycées – because of its importance both within formal schooling and as an extra-curricular leisure activity. In 1966 François Missoffe, Minister of Youth Affairs and Sport, launched a huge inquiry into the problems facing young people, leading to the publication of an official report in 1967 which, perhaps surprisingly, had nothing to say about unrest among young people. This article aims to access the voices of young people in French lycées by mining the contents of over 2600 files of evidence that were collected during the course of the Missoffe inquiry. We argue that it is important to measure the gap between what the political and educational decision-makers presupposed about the sporting needs of young people and the views these same young people actually expressed. The article highlights examples of young people’s disillusionment with the teaching of sport and physical education, demonstrating that this not only conveyed signs of discontent with educational institutions as a whole but also a wider desire for social change that anticipated the views of angry lycéens (school pupils) in May 1968.

Laruelle: Against the Digital by Alexander R. Galloway

Reviewed by: Laruelle: Against the Digital by Alexander R. Galloway Don Ihde (bio) Laruelle: Against the Digital. By Alexander R. Galloway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. 288. $27.50. Alexander R. Galloway is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University who specializes in continental philosophy, and in this case deals with what the back cover describes as “the idiosyncratic French thinker, François Laruelle.” I was shocked to realize I had never heard of Laruelle. Anxious to fill in any gaps in what has been the dominance of French philosophical thought in humanities, I plunged into what began as an almost impenetrable exposition of a philosopher who extolls the One, derides its distinction into Two and what is called “the standard model” of philosophy—identified by the author as the digital—and who (Laruelle) advocates non-philosophy. After a few pages, three prior philosophical experiences began to show relevance: First, early in my own graduate education I was fascinated with the Presocratics. Parmenides, after all, was the philosopher of the One, revived here in a more post-Heideggerian tone by Laruelle. Second, I was fortunate enough to twice live in Paris, first during the monumental years 1967–68, and later again in 1984, precisely times when French philosophy was in its heyday both in the universities and the streets. But was I missing something? Reading Laruelle I realized that there was another French philosophical strand not that of the dominant philosophies of the “Events of May.” And third, a very different philosophical strand related first to a fascination with Zen Buddhism while in theological school and later while working on my first forays into auditory phenomenology. Could we “think” non-linguistically? Or is thinking in a language—inner speech—a persistent feature of human experience? Is the One necessarily without language? Today one can recognize that unlike the dominant university/street talk of 1968, phenomenology—(Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur), hermeneutics (Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger), critical theory (Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse—Louis Althusser in France), structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure) post-structuralism (Jacques Derrida), postmodernism (Jean-François Lyotard)—there had begun what later is called “speculative [End Page 708] realism,” which one can associate with Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Laruelle. This strand, already present in 1968 with Deleuze, blooms later, closer to and after 1984. It is this strand which holds Galloway’s attention. Of the principals, Deleuze is probably the best known and Galloway claims, “We are all Deleuzians today” (p. 96). Laruelle places close to Deleuze, but even closer to Badiou. Yet all three are nostalgically Presocratics, I would say via a strand from Heidegger. Heidegger tried to return philosophy to the singular question of Being, in Presocratic language a variant on the One. Speculative realists, still following the strange blend of quasi-mythical but also highly abstract language, return to precisely these meditations. And they reinsert various “Platonic” strands of mathematical idealism. But Galloway’s target, captured in the subtitle, is the digital, which in the above renewed Presocratic conversation is the Two, the many, the multiple, the Digital. The standard model, academic philosophy, follows the Two, the Digital, and thus in the most concrete chapters of part II, withdrawing from the Standard Model, there is discussion of computers, capitalism, the black universe, etc. It is clear that digital technologies, in a capitalist network, are the enemies of “reality” of this Laruellean sort. This is an understandable reading and it reconnects with much of what also was the spirit of 1968—a revival of Marxism in its French mode (including Althusser, Deleuze, Badiou, and Laruelle), and a study of the theme of “autonomous technology,” a technology run away and on its own, now re-emergent as globalization. Laruelle, most radical of the group, wants to “unify philosophy and capitalism together as a single term” (p. 120). And finally, as Galloway reaches toward his conclusion, he claims, “All thought is essentially pre-Socratic” (p. 190). Included here should be the ultimate rejection of the digital and its technological incarnations (although he admits Laruelle says little about technologies as such...

Brochure of the 18th century on the Journey of Peter the Great to Paris and its Author

The article is devoted to an obscure Russian brochure of the 18th century, containing a chronicle of the journey of Peter the Great to Paris in 1717. Instead of the title page that anonymous edition had a description of a medal minted at the Royal Mint in the presence of the Tsar. The peculiar feature of chronicle narration of the visit is that the events of May, 1717 were described briefly with errors; however, June events were covered in more details. The author ascertained that the text of the brochure was almost completely borrowed from a book by J. Rousset de Missy “Notes on the Reign of Peter the Great” which was published in Holland in French language after Peter the Great death. The author of the book, in turn, borrowed the information from the Paris newspaper “Le Nouveau Mercure”. In several cases the Russian publisher supplemented the story on the journey with the material, quite similar to literary fiction. The author of the brochure was Andrey Andreevich Nartov (1737-1813), a well-known writer, statesman and public person in Catherine’s time. He was also the author of a collection of historical anecdotes under the title “Memorable Narrations and Speeches of Peter the Great”. Both works by Nartov were made as compilations from European sources, added by the author’s fiction.

Le lieu et le moment

hero he reconstructs the artistic world and images that fixed Paz in the popular imagination, proving that the Nobel laureate was thoroughly “in his century.” This monumental biography has fueled controversy among those who shared or rejected Paz’s convictions. But it is impartial , as befits one of the largest lives ever lived. Paz has not found his Edel, Ellmann, or Stach but rather a combination of them, with some Holroyd-like insights included for good measure. This is not unanticipated , since Domínguez Michael is also an authoritative interpreter of world literature and criticism. Will H. Corral San Francisco Laurent Jenny. Le lieu et le moment. Lagrasse, France. Verdier. 2015. 125 pages. A professor of literary studies at the University of Geneva, Laurent Jenny is best known as a critic and theorist, with an impressive body of scholarly works to his credit, the most recent among them focusing upon the aesthetics of literature. As a much-younger man, he tried his hand at the novel, publishing two of them with Éditions du Seuil in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, he turns to yet another form, autobiography. He is not the only critic to do so: one thinks of Roland Barthes, for example, whose late work was often colored by reflection on the self; Gérard Genette ’s latest books, from Bardadrac (2006) through Épilogue (2014) come to mind as well. By comparison, Jenny’s project is briefer and less programmatic. Asked to characterize Le lieu et le moment, he describes it as an exercise in “antisubjective autobiography,” a book that focuses more on the monde than on the moi. Certainly, the world is always present here, whether put on display in miniature (a tool kit in a mail-order catalog, a landscape in an analyst’s office, a comic book in a child’s hand) or in broader shapes (a production of Ubu roi in post-Ceaușescu Romania, a predawn fish market in Tokyo, a Greyhound bus rolling toward Boston). Yet the “I” is always in evidence here, too—as indeed one might expect it to be. Refreshingly enough, Jenny expresses very little nostalgia and almost no regret as he casts a glance over his past. He carefully encloses the word “revolution” in ironic quotation marks when alluding to the events of May 1968, and he meditates on André Malraux’s notion of “lyrical illusion” as if he might have been guilty of that sin. Mostly, however, Jenny gazes at his past in a poised, lucid manner, one fueled by an apparently inexhaustible intellectual curiosity that he brings to bear on a fundamental question: how can an individual traverse such large expanses of space, time, and event, and still be imagined as the same person? Warren Motte University of Colorado Alberto Manguel. Curiosity. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2015. 377 pages. In the opening pages of this ambitious memoir—in which its author tracks the career of his own curiosity through a lifetime of dedicated reading within a capacious framework of the literary history of human inquisitiveness through the ages— he mentions that he was almost sixty when he first encountered Dante’s Commedia, the work of literature that did more than any other to guide him through the production of his unusually challenging task. Such a gargantuan project seeks proper scaffolding, and Dante’s poem is expected to supply it, along with a conspicuous amount of its content. Curiously including the introduction and even the notes, every chapter in a series of seventeen——appositely titled as questions such as “What Is Curiosity?”, “How Do We Reason?”, “What Are We Doing Here?”, and “What Is True?”—is preceded, with varying degrees of aptness, by an emblematic woodcut reproduced from the 1487 printing of Cristoforo Landino’s commentary on the Commedia. Each of these is followed by a brief prefatory page or two of autobiographical rumination and epigraphs by an array of writers ranging from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Karl Marx to Margaret Atwood to Francis Bacon. Next we plunge into an erudite, often engaging, at times rambling, exposition of Manguel’s ample output of thinking and reading relevant to the chapter’s thematic question...

Social policy and conflict: the Gezi Park–Taksim demonstrations and uses of social policy for reimagining Turkey

This article argues that conflicts are productive forces within which new ideas are developed and new social relations are articulated. The critical issue here is the way in which such conflicts are managed and mediated. The paper analyses the Gezi Events of May–June 2013 in Istanbul and considers the way in which people’s reactions in these events are linked with the intersection of everyday lives and the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – AKP) government’s social policy initiatives, which are increasingly framing these everyday lives. Social policy is considered to be the domain of this intersection, as the government uses policies to inform a particular way of orienting individuals’ everyday context.

A Writing Haunted by Cinema: The Film Theories of Three Latin American Fictions

A Writing Haunted by Cinema: The Film Theories of Three Latin American Fictions Felipe Pruneda Sentíes (bio) Ontology’s Outsiders The film-theoretical work of Latin American writers is far from absent in anglo- and francophone film studies. Perhaps the most anthologized text that appears alongside canonical names like Bazin, Bordwell, and Mulvey is Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema.”1 Joining these Argentinian filmmakers behind the classic documentary La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino, Fernando E. Solanas, AR, 1968) is Brazil’s Glauber Rocha, who contributed to the search for a film praxis that both stood outside and opposed Hollywood’s imperialism with pieces like “Aesthetic of Hunger” and films like Antonio Das Mortes/Black God, White Devil (FR/BR/DE, 1969). Two similarities between these writings, besides their contemporaneity and resonance with the events of May 1968, stand out: they were written by filmmakers with an eminent body of work and they are about Latin American cinema. These common features are indicative of certain tendencies within the context of European and North American academic film studies. Hispano- and lusophone writings on the nature of cinema from Latin America are usually relevant to the hegemonic centers of the field when filmmakers whose work is already under study wrote them, or when they supply inroads to understanding Latin American cinema itself.2 Film theory from the region is thus quickly folded into area-specific cinematic research, and while it would be counterproductive to object to those approaches, it is impossible to shake a growing sense of territorialization. Solanas, Getino, and Rocha are what Francesco Casetti would call “field theorists” of film, [End Page 414] or public intellectuals whose theoretical work is inseparable from their political and cultural criticism.3 Insistently tasking these writers with representing the cultural particularities of their regional cinema obstructs the realization that their writings might also strive for sharable, cross-cultural generality. Like Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that “all third-world texts are necessarily allegorical” because they always seek to complete, through storytelling, an unformed national identity (a remark that Jameson himself acknowledges as “sweeping”),4 there is a tacit exclusion of Latin American voices from certain domains of theoretical thinking. In the case of film studies (to continue with Casetti’s categories), the voices are excluded from the realm of ontological theory, where they could construct conceptual “models of the unobservable underlying reality.”5 Their absence involves more than one kind of language barrier. Looking for texts that establish frameworks to define cinema’s existence and reconstructing them through a close reading and a careful translation is a necessary step in repairing the gap. Here, however, I want to locate theories of cinema within genres of writing that do not replicate the structures and methods of the canonical texts, and to suggest that the relative dearth of paradigms of film ontology from Latin America has been not only a matter of linguistics, differing modernities, and unbalanced power dynamics between geopolitical entities, but also one of approach to the very task of theory-creation. To identify these diverging methodologies, Christian Keathley lays out a useful distinction when he proposes a form of film writing (the “cinephiliac anecdote”) that attempts to overcome the conundrum most eloquently delineated by Roland Barthes: Either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or . . . to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize. . . . We constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state that is still mystified.6 Hence Keathley diagnoses the state of cinema studies at the turn of the 21st century and sees the balance unmistakably tilted within Barthes’s tension between ideologizing and poeticizing. “At present,” says Keathley, “scholarship in the discipline of film studies is dominated by the former critical method, one in which the scholar produces knowledge about the object of study; more importantly, film scholars are suspicious about the latter...

Collectivization, participation and dissidence on the transatlantic axis during the Cold War: Cultural Guerrilla for destabilizing the balance of power in the 1960s

This article analyses the role of collectivization and participation and their configuration under the concept of Cultural Guerrilla that implied a socio-political commitment of artists in the 1960s. It discusses how the Cultural Guerrilla was understood by the artists and how it participated in the destabilization of the social (and political) system and in confronting the imperialist policies of the US. It, firstly, focuses on the development processes of a collective and participative action during that decade and its role for confronting the aesthetic model that was fostered by the US within their Cold War cultural politics. Secondly, the text approaches the exchanges of French-based artists and intellectuals with the revolutionary government of Cuba in 1967 during the organization of the Salon de Mayo in Havana, discussing, thirdly, their impact on the artists’ participation during the events of May’68 in Paris.

Representations of their own sexuality and aging body by old people: phenomenological and psychodynamic approach.

The sexuality of the elderly is rarely mentioned in general medicine although it holds an important place in many old people's life, and sexual well-being is a part of the global well-being according to the World Health Organization. To explore the representations of their own sexuality and aging body by the elderly. Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews in 15 healthy elderly people over 65 years of age, living at home. In-depth interviews were transcribed and submitted to qualitative content using a phenomenological and a psychodynamic analysis. The phenomenological approach allows to explore the meaning and significance of the sexuality of older people (their representations and individual experience). The psychodynamic approach allows an analysis of defense mechanisms in verbal and nonverbal behavior. Some elderly maintain a view of their sexuality in accordance with the societal standards existing before the sexual liberalization following the events of May 68 in France. For these people, sexuality is tabooed and only linked to procreation, no longer part of the aging body, and perceived as degraded, then difficult to be approached by general practitioners in relation with defense mechanisms. Other elderly people have managed to free themselves from those previous societal standards. The notion of pleasure is still present in these people and their aging body is perceived as an altered body, difficult to be accepted on account of the pressure for conformity due to actual societal standards. These standards reserve sexuality to young people and convey a picture of a sexuality that would be improper for the elderly. Understanding the representations of their sexuality by the elderly allows GPs a better approach for helping older patients to improve their sexual well-being.

Seismic induced variation of hydraulic conductivity distribution in a large tank

A large tank (4x8x1.4 m) equipped with 26 standard piezometers and filled with sandy sediments (35 m3), was characterized via slug tests and grain size distribution analysis in 2006. The characterization via slug tests was repeated in 2013 after the seismic events of May 2012 near Ferrara (IT) characterized by a maximum Mw of 5.9 to infer the hydrological response of the tank's hydraulic conductivity field to the stresses induced by the earthquake. Results show a general decrease in hydraulic conductivity values, due to compaction phenomena, and a variation in the spatial distribution of hydraulic conductivity values, directly correlated to the presence of the finer fraction of the sediments within the large tank. In particular, the lenses, prevalently made of sandy sediments showed a negligible reduction, while the lenses constituted prevalently by silt displayed a larger decrease. The differential hydraulic conductivity reduction inhibited the flow linkages between the sandy lenses, provoking a four times decrease in the bulk hydraulic conductivity of the tank. This laboratory experiment highlights that pronounced hydraulic conductivity shrinkages should be expected after important seismic events in heterogeneous fine alluvial units.

Proton intensity spectra during the solar energetic particle events of May 17, 2012 and January 6, 2014

Context. Ground-level enhancements (GLEs) are solar energetic particle events that show a significant intensity increase at energies that can be measured by neutron monitors. The most recent GLE-like events were recorded on May 17, 2012 and January 6, 2014. They were also measured by sophisticated instrumentation in space such as PAMELA and the Electron Proton Helium INstrument (EPHIN) onboard SOHO. Since neutron monitors are only sensitive to protons above 400 MeV with maximum sensitivity at 1 to 2 GeV, the spectra of such weak GLE-like events (January 6, 2014) can only be measured by space instrumentation.Aims. We show that the SOHO/EPHIN is capable of measuring the solar energetic particle proton event spectra between 100 MeV and above 800 MeV.Methods. We performed a GEANT Monte Carlo simulation to determine the energy response function of EPHIN. Based on this calculation, we derived the corresponding proton energy spectra. The method was successfully validated against previous PAMELA measurements.Results. We present event spectra from EPHIN for May 17, 2012 and January 6, 2014. During the event in May 2012, protons were accelerated to energies above 700 MeV, while we found no significant increase for protons above 600 MeV during the event on January 6, 2014.

Erratum to: Application of landslide hazard scenarios at annual scale in the Niraj River basin (Transylvania Depression, Romania)

The main objective of the study was to determine the landslide hazard in the drainage basin of the Niraj River taking into account as far as possible the dichotomous relationship between space and time. A broad inventory of the Romanian approaches concerned with natural hazard prediction reveals a clear preference for spatial analysis, while the temporal scale was almost totally neglected. To fill this gap, the proposed methodological approach combines GIS techniques for quantitative analysis with statistical analysis and detailed observation in the field, both directly and indirectly through remote sensing. Niraj River drainage basin is extended over an area of 658 km2 in the east-central part of Transylvania Depression, one of Romania’s major geographic units. Due to the substrate composition, consisting essentially of marls, clays and sands, this area is often affected by rotational and shallow landslides causing important material damages. The first step of this approach was to develop a spatial model for determining the susceptibility to landslide occurrence related to several causative factors: lithology, geomorphology, structural, hydroclimatic, seismic, land use and anthropogenic factors. In order to develop the temporal side of the prediction, two subsidiary objectives were assumed. The first one, to obtain a more detailed database which contains also the temporal moments of the landslides activation or reactivation. Secondly, to realise a statistical analysis of cumulative rainfall, over a period of 90 days prior to the time of each sliding event, which allows us to identify the correlation between cumulative rainfall which had triggered recorded landslides (beginning with the year 2005) and the landslide occurrence moments. On this basis, the main results obtained were: (1) the identification the recurring interval of each value of precipitation amount; (2) the assessment of the temporal probability of landslide occurrence, accepting the assumption that the precipitation amount which led to landslide activation in the past will have the same effects in the future; and (3) the development of four scenarios of landslide occurrence, starting from the events of May 2005, April 2006, July 2010 and February 2013, which were used to determine the annual probability of landslide occurrence under similar precipitation conditions. Finally, by identifying the correlation curves between the probability of landslides and time, taking into account the susceptibility classes, additional scenarios were determined for representative years in the future (2021, 2050, 2071 and 2100). The probability values were used to create correlation curves for each susceptibility class, the corresponding mathematical expressions facilitating the computation of annual probability. The results from the study area highlight the fact that there is an acceleration trend of landslide processes in the high susceptibility area.