Policing mobilities through bio-spatial profiling in New York City

In 2003, the Bloomberg administration launched Operation Impact, a hot-spots policing program which identified high-crime areas in New York City and flooded them with high concentrations of new police officers. These hot-spots, labeled Impact Zones, are sites of mobility constrained and structured by biometric and spatial technologies borrowed from the military. This article analyzes the city's advanced police profiling technologies as they play out within Impact Zones. The profiling is racial, social, biometric, bio-political, and spatial, and works to demarcate dangerous people and places. Because this profiling technology is enacted spatially and governs residents' mobility, I argue for a new conceptual apparatus, which I call bio-spatial profiling. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in police hot-spots, policy analysis, and textual analysis of media articles, I argue that the lived experience of biospatial profiling is one of pervasive fear which governs mobilities in Impact Zones. Next, I trace the experiences of Northeast Brooklyn residents back to their sources, and find three bio-spatial practices: both biometric and spatial data collection, and police street-stops. These symbiotic practices inform and strengthen each other, congealing to produce fear and immobility for those they target. The article concludes with a discussion of the conflicting understandings of (in)security in Impact Zones that connects the practices with the experiences of bio-spatial profiling, to illuminate the human costs of militarized securitization of domestic urban life.     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

Empirical Green's Functions Modified by Attenuation for Sources Located at Intermediate and Far Distances from the Original Source

We present a scheme to modify empirical Green's functions by attenuation considering: (1) geometrical spreading; (2) decay in high frequency; (3) regional attenuation; and (4) phase of the signal. The accelerograms computed with the proposed simulation method are compared, in time and frequency domains, with strong ground motions from subduction and intermediate-depth earthquakes recorded in Mexico. It is shown that this simple empirical Green's functions technique can synthesize both the shape and amplitude of the response spectra in the site, considering a postulated seismic source located at different distances from the original one.     

Technology and ocean‐scape: Defining the deep sea in mid‐nineteenth century

The ocean's profound inaccessibility makes it impossible to comprehend except through the mediation of technology. The first investigators to explore the great depths were hydrographers whose work was animated by mid‐nineteenth century growth of political, economic, and cultural interest in the oceans. While submarine telegraphy certainly boosted ocean science, interest in this field derived first from commercial concerns related to whaling and shipping as well as the intellectual pursuits of physical geography and questions about the existence of life at great depths. Hydrographers’ developing conception of the oceanic environment never represented a clear translation from technology. Dramatic changes in the understanding of the shape of the deep‐sea floor testified to the complexity of interaction between sounding machines, methods, and interpretations of depth. The shifting image of the sea floor not only reflected increasingly accurate measurements, but also mirrored shifting human motivations for studying this unexplored territory.     

Searching for Ancient Shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea: the Discovery of Chios and Kythnos Hellenistic Wrecks with the Use of Marine Geological-Geophysical Methods

This paper presents the results of two deep-water archaeological surveys recently conducted in the Aegean Sea, and the advantages of using conventional marine geological techniques in deep-water archaeology. Two Hellenistic wrecks were discovered: one in the Chios-Oinousses strait at 70 m, was a concentration of over 400 amphoras in a 1.5-m-high, high-backscattering, morphological high; the second, west of Kythnos island, at 495 m, consisted of a few amphoras scattered in a 20 × 20-m-wide area. Side-scan sonar was integrated with high-resolution sub-bottom profiling, and the integration of the two data-sets proved to contribute significantly to realistic interpretation of the sonar targets.
© 2007 The Authors     

Development and Verification of a New Site Classification System and Site Coefficients for Regions of Shallow Bedrock in Korea

In this article, site response analyses for 124 sites collected in Korea were performed to evaluate earthquake ground motions in regions of shallow bedrock in Korea. Based on the results, a new two-parameter site classification system was developed for use in regions of shallow bedrock. The system incorporates depth to bedrock and mean V_S of soil above bedrock as parameters for site classification instead of V_S30. Soil sites were divided into seven site classes and the corresponding site coefficients were proposed for each site category. Some verification work demonstrates the superiority of the proposed system over the current seismic codes.     

Field Measurements and Numerical Simulation of Debris Flows from Dolomite Slopes Destabilized during the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake,Pakistan

A devastating earthquake occurred in Kashmir, Pakistan on October 8, 2005. This earthquake resulted from reactivation of a known active fault later defined as the Balakot–Bagh fault, which caused widespread slope failure throughout its stretch, particularly around Muzaffarabad, the provincial capital of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. This slope failure resulted in a huge amount of debris material which flows in deeply incised creeks during monsoon and hits the inhabitants along the valley in Muzaffarabad. Two GPS measurements are carried out along with channel morphometric parameters and observed changes to investigate the effect of debris flows along these creeks during monsoon. Other than the physical measurements, actual debris flow is simulated using the Depth Average Material Point Method (DAMPM) after carrying out parametric study and calibrating the model for subject topographical and geological settings. The generalized effect of different input parameters of the model on debris flow runout features is studied and discussed in detail. After ensuring validation of the numerical tool, the contribution of a single closed-type check dam to decrease runout intensity to its downstream reach is also investigated for different locations to obtain optimized selection.     

Analysis of rock samples collected from rock hewn churches of Lalibela,Ethiopia using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

With the aim to study alteration processes of the rock hewn churches from Lalibela (Ethiopia), we applied Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) technique to measure the elemental composition both of the bulk rock materials and their external layers, exposed to the environmental factors. The analytical plasma was generated by nanosecond pulses of an Nd: YAG laser emitting at 1064 nm. Different major and minor sample constituents were detected, including Ca, Mg, Na, Fe, Ti, Al and K. The detected O emission originates both from air surrounding and the sample, while the intensity of N lines, coming exclusively from air, was used for the LIBS signal normalization. By depth profiling of the weathered basalt rock, we observed a lower presence of K in the external layers, corresponding to the first 5 laser shots. The emission from this element is anti-correlated with the line intensities from O, and this was attributed to the variations in relative abundances of clay minerals and K-feldspar. The analogue measurements were performed on the tuff rock, and compared to the spectra from powder samples containing only the external soft material, scratched from the rocks. These analyses show an abundance of H in the weathered, wetted layers and suggest that cations are lost from the constituent primary minerals and replaced by H⁺; this process disrupts the lattice structure and causes a marked loss of strength. The studies presented here demonstrate that LIBS is a useful technique for studying the alteration processes in the rocks, caused by environmental factors.     

Seismic Response of the Central Part of Indo-Gangetic Plain

In spite of high seismic risk, there is no numerical model of Indo-Gangetic Plain. In this paper, seismic response of the central part of Indo-Gangetic Plain, i.e., Ganga Plain is studied using a two-dimensional plane strain finite element model. Seismic source is assumed to be located beneath the Himalayas near Himalayan Frontal Thrust. Basin response is simulated for a hypothetical M_w 8.0 Himalayan earthquake. Ground motion amplification and sensitive frequency band of the basin, obtained from the numerical simulation, show that the sediment depth and epicentral distance at a site play significant role in the seismic response of the site.     

Depth records and ocean volumes: Ocean profiling by sounding technology, 1850-1930

Oceanographic research commencing in the mid-19th century could not rely on the direct observation of its object, but had to create its images of ocean depth through remote investigation. Depth became a matter of scientific definitions, systematic measurements, and graphic representations. In the course of a century, the opaque ocean of the 1850s was densely depicted in physical terms and transformed into a technically and scientifically sound oceanic volume. Tracing the history of deep-sea sounding technology from wire sounding around 1850 to acoustic sounding in the early 1920s, the paper investigates the relation and interplay between conceptual, pictorial, and technological depth performance. Addressing the conditions and limitations oceanographers encountered in producing single measurements and arranging them into profiles and contour line charts, the paper takes on a narrative approach to spatial representation: resembling a narrated or written story, the texture of depth depended on the richness and coherence of its plots.