Notion Of Disorder Research Articles

Rethinking urban public space

This paper aims to connect to recent debates in City (2011) regarding what assemblage thinking can offer to critical urban praxis. It proposes assemblage as a tool to take Sennett's (1970. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. Yale edition with a new preface by the author, 2008. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) ‘uses of disorder’ in city life from theory to practice. The main reason for this is the consideration that Sennett's early thoughts about providing non-regulated spaces for interaction have not been implemented in urban practice to their full potential. Planners and architects have not been able to counter the overdetermination of functions and the social segregation resulting from modern urban developments. Assemblage can offer tools for urban practitioners to combine definition and indeterminacy when intervening in the public realm. In order to do so, the paper looks at similarities between recent contributions on assemblage thinking and Sennett's notion of disorder: the influence of sociomaterial associations on how people perceive strangers, the interest in indeterminacy and public space as an open process. Based on these findings, the paper proposes two sets of concepts as approaches for intervening in public space: ‘assemblage’ and ‘disassembly’. The first group of concepts proposes three tools to design associations introducing certain planned urban elements that give rise to an unplanned use of public space: ‘reassembling’, ‘convergence of diversity’ and ‘complex connections’. The second set of concepts offers two tools that propose to leave unbound points in public space: ‘open systems’ and ‘failure and disconnections’. These concepts address different uses of disorder proposed by Sennett and serve as guidelines to propose interventions in public space.

A psiquiatria e a medicalização dos anormais: o papel da noção de transtorno de personalidade antissocial

This article analyses the recent trajectory of the concept antisocial personality disorder in the field of psychiatry. This is a relatively new concept, a nosological category which discloses some of the principal contemporary tendencies of the process of medicalization of social life. We scrutinize in particular the development of the mentioned concept as the result of the protagonist character achieved by the notion of disorder in the processes of expansion of the field of psychiatry. We also present four hypothesis related to the antisocial personality disorder, defined as a diagnostic category, which are related to the following aspects: the transference of functions of social control of different types of behaviors to the field of medicine; the profile of the etiological models about the constitution of the antisocial personality; the definition of the family as a pathogen agent in contexts of poverty; and the moral character of the enshrined handbooks and instruments used for the diagnosis of the antisocial personality disorder.

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited1

Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited¹

Order–disorder separation: Geometric revision

After Boltzmann and Gibbs, the notion of disorder in statistical physics relates to ensembles, not to individual states. This disorder is measured by the logarithm of ensemble volume, the entropy. But recent results about measure concentration effects in analysis and geometry allow us to return from the ensemble-based point of view to a state-based one, at least, partially. In this paper, the order–disorder problem is represented as a problem of relation between distance and measure. The effect of strong order–disorder separation for multiparticle systems is described: the phase space could be divided into two subsets, one of them (set of disordered states) has almost zero diameter, the second one has almost zero measure. The symmetry with respect to permutations of particles is responsible for this type of concentration. Dynamics of systems with strong order–disorder separation has high average acceleration squared, which can be interpreted as evolution through a series of collisions (acceleration-dominated dynamics). The time arrow direction from order to disorder follows from the strong order–disorder separation. But, inverse, for systems in space of symmetric configurations with “sticky boundaries” the way back from disorder to order is typical (Natural selection). Recommendations for mining of molecular dynamics results are also presented.

A new light on the iron coordination in Sr 4Fe 6O 13± δ: Super space formalism and structural mechanism

The incommensurate modulated structure of Sr 4Fe 6O 13± δ refined in super space formalism, from single crystal X-ray diffraction data. The analysis of this structure shows that the geometry of the iron polyhedra, their respective positions and arrangement are fundamentally different from those previously described for this oxide. Three types of iron environment, namely trigonal bipyramids, tetragonal pyramids and monocaped tetrahedra are observed in the double iron oxygen layers. The peculiar role of a structural unit built up from double trigonal bipyramids is outlined and the notion of disorder is detailed. The structural mechanism of this modulation character of the double iron layer is analyzed, compared to other related phases built of one single perovskite layer inter-grown with a complex slice made of one modulated double layer sandwiched between two [AO] ∞ layers.

EXTENDED ENTROPIES AND DISORDER

Landsberg's notion of disorder, entropy normalized to maximum entropy, was originally proposed for the Shannon information-theoretic entropy to overcome extensivity-based deficiencies of entropy as a measure of disorder. We generalize Landsberg's concept to three classes of extended entropies: Rényi, Tsallis and Landsberg–Vedral. We show an intimate connection between the Rényi disorders and the spectrum of dimensions known as multifractals. Three examples are treated, including one for power law distributions and one based on the logistic map. On the basis of the three examples, it is demonstrated that all three classes of extended disorder are required to fully characterize the corresponding properties of a system. We conjecture, and sketch a proof to support, that all three extended disorders are also sufficient to completely determine a dimension spectrum.