Posts Tagged ‘CentreDoc’

Lights and Shadows of Drones

September 22nd, 2014 1 Comment

Until recently, the word “drone” evoked a buzzing sound or a stingless male bee. Today, however, its everyday use no longer derives from noises or the animal kingdom. The word “drone” is now better known as a synonym for “unmanned aircraft”. Yet, this is not a twenty-first-century invention. Some years ago they were called “remote control aircraft”, but progress has brought with it three new elements that have made it necessary to coin a new word: autonomous flight, distance from the remote pilot, and military use.

Although the drone’s lethal capacity has made it famous in the past decade, it also has civilian and commercial uses. The two giant companies Amazon and Google are presently competing over which will be able to use it as an urban delivery device, moving packages from warehouse to home in a couple of minutes. Many other companies have dreamt up further drone uses: cultivating fields, rescue work, checking rooftop plumbing, and getting better images for real-estate sales. Its commercial uses will dramatically expand after 2018 when new legislation comes into force in the United States. Drones are not only remotely piloted aircraft. Their new functions will include – if all goes well – a self-piloting version which can respond to software commands.

However, the lamentable fame of drones and the theme of the debate Drones. Siege at a distance is their impressive ability to kill. For the moment, only three countries have killed with drones: the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. The military use of drones is not limited to firing missiles. Surveillance and reconnoitring are more common among their strategic uses. Most of the countries with drones – more than fifty – have this less offensive type. The future violence of drones will not only take the form of missile strikes. China (and no doubt other countries as well) is working on planes that can engage in electronic warfare: blocking GPS systems, or scrambling object-locating programmes.

Nevertheless, the lethal drones have been the most evident type and, moreover, they have been used as freely moving aerial spies, unthreatened by anti-aircraft defences and combat aircraft, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Gaza. Drones have been one of the two outstanding tools of President Obama’s antiterrorist campaign since 2008, the other being the special forces. Their effectiveness in a real war in which the enemy has anti-aircraft weapons is yet to be seen. Perhaps smaller, undetectable drones will be deployed. Some of them measure only 15 centimetres. Soon there will be autonomous solar-powered drones that can remain in the air for up to three years. A whole world to be discovered.

The constant activity of US drones in the remote zones of the world means that alleged members of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates will cannot live or train in peace. Obama has cut back their use in the past two years but the toll of civilian victims is still enormous. The rage of affected populations which are living under constant threat casts doubt on the success of this method.

Drones can be guided by human intelligence. Somebody informs that a target is, or will be at a certain place which is then attacked. But the target might be at a family gathering or party. What then? It will depend on the importance of the target for the attacking force. Drones have also carried out “signature strikes”. The US intelligence services identify a pattern that signals terrorist activities, for example a convoy of cars or a training camp. If a reconnaissance drone records signs meeting these parameters, it can attack. Sometimes the consequences have been dreadful.

Michael Hayden, retired United States Air Force general and Director of the National Security Agency in the dramatic weeks after 9/11, has said, referring to attacks against the Islamic State in Iraq, that, “The reliance on air power has all the attraction of casual sex. It seems to offer gratification but with very little commitment.” Hayden believes that such a strategy is dubious and insufficient. Now, let’s imagine a strategy where air power is in the hands of unmanned aircraft. What sort of sex would that be? President Obama has been engaging in it for years.

Jordi Pérez Colomé is a journalist specialising in international politics and author of the blog Obamaworld. He takes part in the debate Drones. Siege at a distance, that will take place on the 2nd October, in the framework of the project Under Siege.

The Siege Today

September 16th, 2014 No Comments

With “Under Siege”, we begin this last quarter of the year with a cycle of debates on contemporary sieges, a project that also aims to denounce military conflicts that are unresolved, forgotten and even hidden from public opinion.

A Brief History of Collapses (2011-12) © Mariam Ghani

“Under Siege” consists of an installation comprised by two audiovisual works by the artists Mariam Ghani and Omer Fast, together with a series of conversations about the concept of the siege. The installation was opened to the public on the 16th September with a session titled “Working under Siege”, which took the form of a dialogue between the curator Chus Martínez and the Afghanistan-born artist Mariam Ghani about the possibility of artistic creation in a state of siege.

The cycle also discusses  one of today’s most paradigmatic cases of the siege in “Gaza. The Permanent Siege“. Ahron Bregman, a former soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces and presently a lecturer at King’s College, London, will be presenting his most recent book La ocupación (Crítica, 2014 – published in English as Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories, 2014, Allan Lane). On the basis of his own experience and study of high-level Israeli classified documents, among other privileged sources, he condemns his country’s policy in Gaza Strip.

From the siege as understood in the classical acceptance of the word, the debate moves on to describe a key element in contemporary warfare with the session titled “Drones. Siege at a Distance”. With its use of drones, technology definitively breaks with the physical and moral proximity between attacker and victim, in such a way that killing becomes a less costly, aseptic, effortless task-at-a-distance. What does this use of drones mean on the political, military and ethical scales? A documentary, Drone (2014), directed by the Norwegian film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei and bringing together the testimonies of both victims of drone attacks and their pilots, is to be premiered in this session. Chris Woods, a British journalist and expert on drones will speak with Hessen in a discussion moderated by the journalist Jordi Pérez Colomé.

Finally, in the session titled “Syria. Information under Siege”, moderated by the journalist Lali Sandiumenge, another essential aspect of the contemporary siege will be analysed, namely the power of information and the importance of the digital media in making it available to the general public. The Syrian researcher and activist Leila Nachawati has studied a range of citizens’ initiatives in her birthplace. These have found a potent weapon against the Syrian regime in the form of the social media, and she documents this in the database Syria Untold. Then Marc Marginedas, a war correspondent for the newspaper El Periódico, inquires into the change of direction in the Syrian conflict after the irruption therein by the group of Iraqi origins called Islamic State (IS) and their strategy of targeting international journalists.

“Under Siege” is the counterpoint of the “Open City” cycle of debates with which the CCCB opened 2014, and also its contribution to the commemoration of the Tricentenari – the three-hundredth anniversary of the siege of Barcelona. These are two cycles of debate which, from opposite starting points, uphold freedom as an essential value of human existence, and draw attention to the responsibility of all of us in the task of safeguarding it.

Colm Tóibín pays tribute to George Orwell

June 25th, 2014 No Comments

Colm Tóibín © Peter Bevan

George Orwell arrived in Barcelona on Boxing Day 1936. He was 33 years old. He came here to fight as a volunteer on the side of the Republic as an anti-fascist militant. He found a revolutionised and revolutionary city where, in his words, “the working class was in the saddle”. He served on the Aragon front with the POUM militias and was shot through the neck by a fascist bullet. In Barcelona, he was a direct witness of the fateful days when a civil war took place within a civil war. Stalinist pressure on the Republic led to the May Days and the city became the setting for a bloody battle between forces that, up to that point, had fought side by side against the common enemy. Orwell witnessed that new Tragic Week where the authoritarian urges of some and the libertarian urges of others opened up an incurable rift in the strategy to win the war and uphold the revolutionary spirit. With the POUM outrageously declared illegal and its leader Andreu Nin tortured and murdered by Soviet agents, Orwell had to escape the persecution against his comrades-in-arms and depart in hiding from a city where he had discovered – and maintained, in spite of everything – a revolutionary and fraternal spirit that forever marked his political stance and the direction of a literary journey that culminated with Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Colm Tóibín arrived in Barcelona in 1975. He was 20 years old. He came to a city that still had the literary echoes of Homage to Catalonia in its head. He found a city that was awaiting the imminent death of the dictator, a society that was effervescent, creative and mobilised, but still under constant surveillance and repressed by a regime that was especially cruel, and aware that it was in its dying moments. In the midst of a dictatorship, the young Tóibín, paradoxically, found an atmosphere of change and an explosion of the much longed-for liberties. The Barcelona of the end of the Franco era and the start of the transition – so radically different to the Catholic and rural society of Ireland – became an initiatic space for Tóibín: a mixture of collective hope for the future and individual liberties that the young Irishman embraced as his own. In Barcelona, Tóibín learned to be who he is and adopted Catalonia as his second homeland. His successful literary career is full of traces of that decisive formative experience.

Now, on the occasion of Orwell Day, Tóibín offers us a re-reading of Homage to Catalonia in an attempt to put into perspective the Barcelona of 1936, – that of a frustrated revolution and a lost war – and that of 1975 – which was beginning the change from a dictatorship to a capitalist democracy. In this transition, the city will play an essential role and will be one of the keys of the configuration of the literary universe of Orwell and of Tóibín himself.

(Català) La gelosia i la seva història

June 17th, 2014 No Comments

Ruth de Diego: “Previously we were trying to discover which part of the brain carried out such and such a function, but now we think about networks”

March 26th, 2014 No Comments

The ICREA-CCCB debates on “The Brain” end on Tuesday 1 April with the lecture titled “Lessons from Brain Lesions”, which is to be given by the University of Barcelona researcher Ruth de Diego. We have asked her to explain in advance why study of behaviour patterns and deficits caused by these lesions is useful in neuroscientific research.

The ICREA researcher Ruth de Diego

You are a specialist in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. Could you tell us what is studied in these two disciplines?

First of all, I am interested in psycholinguistics, by which I mean knowing how we come to understand language. While I was writing my thesis I was attracted to the neurobiological aspects of language and, in particular, how brain lesions can affect our understanding and speaking skills. When we come into contact with a new language, our brain gets to work to extract the regularities of that language, even if we don’t understand a word of it. If we land in Japan, for example, and start hearing this strange language, our brain will start to derive all kinds of statistical information, for example which sounds are most frequent, which ones tend to make sequences, and so on. Studying language is interesting because this is what most identifies us as human beings and because language governs our social relations. Hence, a brain lesion that affects one’s ability to speak greatly limits one’s quality of life.

What is the present situation of brain research?

In the past ten years there has been a second big spike in research and the amount of information we have acquired, in this case with a lot of studies on the brain’s structure and connectedness. Previously, in the more traditional approach, the brain was studied in a way that strongly emphasised localisation so efforts were made to discover which part of the brain carried out such and such a function. However, we realised that we couldn’t talk about isolated zones of the brain performing specific functions but, rather, we had to think about networks of different parts of the brain functioning synchronically, or working together and in a coordinated fashion to perform a certain function. Moreover, we now know that the brain is much more adaptable than we previously thought and that when there is a lesion it has an incredible capacity to reorganise itself and restore connections.

Why is studying patients with brain lesions useful?

It is useful because, by comparing different situations, we can discover a lot about the brain and its functions. Imagine a person who has a brain tumour that has taken a year to develop. In that brain the functioning is not exactly the same as that in a person who has not suffered a lesion because of this adaptability I just mentioned: the patient’s brain has been undergoing a process of restructuration in order to adapt to the pathology.

We use transcranial magnetic stimulation with a device that is brought up close to the outside of the head and, by means of a very powerful magnetic field, it changes the functioning of the neurones in the region it is nearest to by inhibiting or stimulating them. This stimulation induces a lesion virtually. This only lasts a certain time, from a few seconds to a quarter of an hour and, during that time, the healthy person acts as if he or she is suffering from a lesion in that part of the brain. Comparing a simulated lesion in a healthy person, whose brain structure is maintained without alterations, with someone else who has a long-term brain lesion, and who therefore does have alterations, makes it possible for us to discover many things about brain structure and function as well as about specific disorders.

Magnetic resonance of a Huntington patient

What kinds of brain lesions have you studied?

One of the illnesses we have studied is Huntington’s disease, which is quite a rare genetic disorder with a low incidence among the population. In its early stages, Huntington’s disease quite specifically affects a particular subcortical structure, a key area of the brain that has many connections with different parts of the cortex and, accordingly, many associated functions. We also study aphasia, a disorder that affects language comprehension because of a brain lesion. People with aphasia can see the image of a pear and say “banana” for example.

What is the use of studying these diseases?

Studying the whys and wherefores of such behaviour has many uses such as the rehabilitation of patients. Imagine that there are two zones of the brain connected in two ways. As a result of the adaptability I mentioned, if you have a lesion that affects one of them the other one, the intact one, will work to recover its function as much as possible. If we know that one way is obstructed but that the other neuronal network is operating, we can use and reinforce this latter way and design a particular kind of rehabilitation. I’ll give you an example. We have a study showing that there are two main zones of language processing, one of which is more concerned with motor functions like production and speech while the other is more concerned with perception and understanding of language, which is to say it’s more auditory. These two areas are joined by a bundle of connections and it seems that this connection, this ability to transform what we are listening to into a motor sequence, is very important with regard to learning new words. By this I mean that this process of repeating new words, listening to them, hearing them and pronouncing them ourselves – or this loop – enables us to learn. If a patient’s bundle of connections is broken and he or she can’t repeat the words in order to assimilate them, we can help him or her to learn words by turning to another connection that exists, this time a more semantic one. If this other path is taken it’s not possible to repeat words in order to assimilate them but we can accede to the word by giving it sense, connecting the motor and auditory parts of the brain through the structures of meaning. If I train the patient using this method there is a better chance that he or she will understand the word this way than through the obstructed path of repetition.

Would this be similar to mnemonics or the acronyms that are used for studying purposes to assimilate concepts on the basis of unrelated ideas of phrases?

Yes, it would be similar to that. Moreover, all of this has specific uses in the treatment of these disorders because knowing about the alterations in brain structure and functions in patients with Huntington’s disease, for example, enables us to detect and understand individual differences in patients suffering from this disorder. In the case of a clinical trial, we can divide the patients up according to the connections that are affected in each one of them and, by thus grouping them, a much more specific and effective treatment can be offered than if we didn’t distinguish between the different degrees of brain lesions affecting patients.

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