THE FALL OF A COLONIAL LEGACY: A MODERN HISTORY OF SYRIAN BORDERS (1920-2015)

 

 

 

 

 

A historian and political scientist and the author of "Syria: Borders, boundaries, and the state", Mat­thieu Cimino has devoted his research to the contemporary his­tory of the Near and Middle East. Following his time as a postdoc­toral researcher at Tel Aviv Univer­sity, he took up the post of Marie Skłodowska-Curie researcher at Oxford University in 2016‒2018. It was there he led the SYRIAN­BORDERS project: The Fall of a Colonial Legacy: A Modern History of Syrian Borders (1920‒2015).

 

THE SYRIANBORDERS JOURNEY

Introducing the project, Cimino not­ed: “While working on borders, in particular the borders of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Israel, I real­ised there was one topic I needed to investigate regarding Syria.” He further explained: “Wars and rev­olutions in Syria have triggered multiple reconfigurations, restruc­turing the nature of the state, the territory and its borders. While in other countries like Lebanon re­search has been carried out to study and document changes in its borders, this has not been the case with Syria.”

Cimino aimed to change this through the SYRIANBORDERS project. The researcher worked towards two goals. The first was to contribute to the history of contemporary Syria by analysing the country through the prism of its borders. The second goal was to produce a monograph that would include post ‒2011 dynamics.

As a result of the project, research­ers, political actors, civil servants and the public have a greater un­derstanding of post-2011 reconfig­urations of the Middle East. “We have learnt how different non-state actors perceive the boundaries of Syria, how relevant they are now, and how have they been config­ured over time,” confirmed Cimino. He further emphasises that this research is very important as “bor­ders and boundaries are the en­velope of the state ‒ charged with important symbolic values.”

Following this project, the research­er will continue to focus on under­standing nationalistic ideology and non-state actors by examining Syr­ian textbooks. This will help ascer­tain how history and geography are taught to students.

 

MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE SUPPORT

“Being a Marie Skłodowska-Curie researcher gave me the opportunity to work on this project,” confirmed Cimino. The researcher noted that through the programme he received both personal and professional sup­port. “When you are a researcher it is quite difficult to find a position that is financially rewarding, which I found with the Marie Skłodowska- Curie programme.” He added: “You are also able to, through the pro­gramme, do field work and organise conferences. For example, I helped organise an international conference where we brought many research­ers from different backgrounds and places to Oxford.” Cimino conclud­ed: “In terms of grants and fellow­ships, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme is one of the best, if not the best.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The delivery of health-related ser­vices through the use of mobile technologies is called mHealth. The use of mHealth apps has grown exponentially in recent years, with over 100 000 apps available online for download.

These numbers tell of a significant market size and of the ongoing de­mand for new tools to help people manage their health. Unfortunately, only a fraction of these apps and services take into consideration the perspectives of relevant stake­holders like healthcare profession­als, and sometimes even patients themselves.

In order to be effective, technology needs to be designed in a way that is meaningful to those who would use it. My doctoral thesis focused on this problem.

Worldwide, there has been a great change as countries developed and the overall population aged. Gone are the days where predators and nasty infections were the main source of concern; a new kind of ailment now plagues our world and it is known as a chronic condition.

Over 60 % of all deaths are caused by chronic conditions like cancer or heart disease, taking precedence over “traditional” acute illnesses. In fact, thanks to improved living con­ditions and advances in healthcare, severe and disabling diseases that were considered lethal or used to require hospitalization are now controllable if not curable, letting people live on with them for many years. However, this presents a challenge for continued and pro­longed self-management.

The way that technologies have entrenched themselves so deeply into our day-to-day lives has also created rapid changes in our socie­ty. We are now seeing patients who actively seek, gather, and make decisions based on online informa­tion. In this sense, mobile technol­ogies hold promise for chronic con­ditions because of their ubiquity, low cost, less invasive nature, and their ability to provide immediate feedback.

There are many behavioural change theories that attempt to explain why we do things, and propose frameworks to be followed in or­der to create new behaviours. The use of behavioural change models has proven important in develop­ing successful health interventions for chronic disease management. However, understanding human be­haviour is a complex task as many elements influence and shape the way we act without us realising it. Some elements are internal while others are external, and the inter­play between each of them can de­termine our perceptions, our beliefs and our willingness to do certain things.

Further, finding ways to engage pa­tients and encourage them to con­tinue with an intervention is a difficult task, leaving designers of mHealth solutions for chronic conditions with no clear way of deciding what fac­tors are relevant to consider.

The doctoral thesis I presented at the University of Oulu, Finland, is the result of an industrial PhD ex­perience that took place in Salu­media Tecnologias, a digital health company in Spain, over the span of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship in the CHESS ITN pro­gramme (MSCA ITN No. 676201). During this time, I was involved in several digital health projects that I used to ground my research.

As part of the company’s ongoing product development, I followed a user-centred design approach to create different mHealth solutions for conditions like breast cancer and multiple sclerosis. In doing so, I explored the negotiations be­tween existing medical knowledge, behavioural change theories and gamification.

As a result of an embedded case study methodology and themat­ic analysis, certain design factors emerged from the data. They were grouped in the form of three main components to create the “Model for Motivational Mobile-health Design for Chronic conditions” or 3MD model.

The 3MD model is aimed at de­signers of mHealth solutions and it proposes a series of illustrative questions to assist in the process of creating a digital health solution. The doctoral thesis has recently been awarded the "Best Doctoral Dis­sertation" distinction by the national Finnish Association of Information and Communication Professionals in consideration to its interdiscipli­nary value, importance of the topic and excellence of the research.

As technologies continue to emerge and adapt, healthcare will transform into something very different from what we have now. It is up to us, whether we are researchers, design­ers, healthcare professionals or pa­tients, to decide the shape of things to come. There is so much left to be done, so we should get working.

 

 

 

 

GUIDO GIUNTI

 

 

 

 

POLICYMAKING USES OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

From this perspective, the main policymaking uses of critical histor­ical analysis on the EU’s FMP are dedicated to the following:

• The fact that changing attitudes towards human mobility rights illustrate more profound societal changes to be taken into account from an evidence-based policy­making perspective

• The provision of timely and es­sential tools to interpret new con­ceptions of inclusiveness in a globally interconnected society

• Bridging research outputs and global governance objectives by clarifying the links between par­ticular turning points and resulting contexts

• The improvement of our under­standing of the intertwined factors conditioning EU borders, mem­bership and belonging

• The building of well-researched countermeasures to the increasing poverty and discrimination of mo­bile populations, as well as ways of globally fostering a sustainable social solidarity

• The improvement of the modalities of the progressive Europeanisa­tion of immigrants’ integration.

Given the primacy of economic in­tegration over its more socio-politi­cal dimensions, the EU’s FMP has been denominated the ‘fourth free­dom’ due to its relegation to the oth­er three Schengen Area freedoms of movement: of capital, goods and services. Plus, as the integration of migrant and refugee populations is a crucial issue of global concern, more critical attention could be paid to understanding how the EU’s FMP as a ‘fourth freedom’ is crashing un­der the weight of ever-growing so­cial inequalities.

In this respect, a promising shift of focus could be centred on promot­ing sustainable models of upward social mobility. In short, critical his­torical analysis would decisively aid to reconfigure policy-making debates on profoundly unsettled human mo­bility rights.

 

GATEWAY HISTORICAL ARCHIVES

A paradigmatic observatory for such undertakings can be found at the European Parliament (EP)’s archi­val records on the changing modes of implementation of the EU’s FMP. Indeed, EP decision-makers dis­tinctly searched for a balance be­tween Single Market priorities and the pre-eminence of the FMP as an end in itself within the European in­tegration process. For instance, EP representatives denounced how the aims of the internal market intended to overshadow the defence of dem­ocratic rights and freedoms per se. Accordingly, the EP’s influence was reflected in the June 1986 Solemn Declaration by the three Institutions, centred on combating all forms of discrimination, racism or xenopho­bia. Furthermore, EP discussions on the nascent concept of a ‘Citizens’ Europe’ stressed ‘the value of the contribution made by immigrants to the building of a multinational and multicultural European society’(2).

 

A MOVEMENT IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION

The EU’s FMP is considered one of the most meaningful, and also the most popular accomplishments ever of European integration(3). This socially recognised achieve­ment could be mirrored by an EU that acts, primarily, as an ethically committed political player constant­ly bringing up the human rights, sol­idarity and social cohesion dimen­sions of the European integration process. As we witness a reverse of such developments, critical histor­ical analysis could reignite a com­mitment to re-establish a decisive dialogue between citizens and in­stitutions, determined to supersede growingly toxic socio-political cleav­ages. Indeed, this pivotal viewpoint could trace back key EU principles to rekindle the transformative power of policy innovation and lead to pos­itive societal impact: ‘A movement in the opposite direction, free of incon­siderate ambitions’(4).

 

 

 

 

 

 

THD2 testbed at the Observatory of Paris where we develop techniques to improve the current capabilities of imaging exoplanets.

 

Exoplanets are planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun. These alien worlds come in all flavours: Super-Earths, hot Jupi­ters and mini-Neptunes to name a few. We have sufficient evidence to believe that our solar system with its eight famous planets is not unique and perhaps may not be the only place where life is har­boured in the universe. In fact, we have been finding exoplanets that lie just at the right distance from their stars where life-supporting conditions could exist.

Exoplanetically speaking, it is an exciting time for humanity: these wonderful discoveries are opening the doors to the possibility of finding life somewhere else than the Earth. Although such a quest may not help us solve the problems of our world, it can surely give an orbital perspec­tive when one questions the exist­ence of the world we live in. Today, we know more than 4 000 exoplan­ets. Most of these discoveries were made with indirect methods that confirm the existence of a planet but do not visually perceive it. If a planet orbits a star, then the star wobbles. If a planet passes in front of its star, then the brightness of the star varies periodically. This wobbliness and/ or the change in the brightness of stars is what is observed to indirect­ly approve the presence of planets around them. By definition, these methods are more favourable in de­tecting planets with small orbital pe­riods or mature planets like the ones in our solar system. The question is: Can we take images of exoplanets?

Seeing an exoplanet has its own charm but obtaining its image is scientifically essential. Apart from being able to study the chemical and physical composition of the at­mosphere of planets, imaging is a powerful way to find liquid water on the surface of a planet. However, the technical requirements to do so are extremely challenging. Current tech­niques include the high-contrast imaging (HCI) of exoplanets, which consists of taking snapshots of extra­solar systems with ground-based tel­escopes. With current technological capabilities, it is actually possible to detect young Jupiter-size exoplan­ets orbiting at large distances, while it is nearly impossible to take images of exoplanets orbiting closer to their stars. Being able to see planets at all possible orbital periods is essen­tial in understanding the formation and evolution of planets in a stellar environment. With this motivation, we astronomers are aiming to image exo­planets at all ranges of orbital periods7. Our project “Exoplanet Finder” fund­ed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro­gramme under the Marie Skłodowska- Curie grant agreement No 798909 is dedicated to finding solutions to prob­lems that limit our visual evidence to di­rectly image exoplanets closer to their host stars.

 

CURRENT TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS IN IMAGING EXOPLANETS

Ground-based telescopes of 30- metre diameter or more are needed to look deeper and closer to the star to find exoplanets with short orbital periods. We have already entered the era of extremely large telescopes and the construction of an European telescope of 39-metre diameter has already started in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. However, it will take at least a dec­ade to be able to image closer-in ex­oplanets. Given the current limit of 10-metre-class telescopes, at pres­ent we simply do not have access to the immediate surrounding of a star. We can image young giant planets at large distances only in favourable observing conditions.

Another requirement is to isolate the faint light of a planet from the overwhelming brightness of its star. In general, a planet sig­nal is roughly 1 000 to 10 billion times fainter than its star. A device called coronagraph is generally used to block the starlight inside the instruments. However, during HCI observations from ground, the Earth’s atmosphere behaves like an oven. The light from a star-planet system is distorted and blurred by our atmospheric turbulence. As a result, coronagraphs do not func­tion as expected. This challenging problem is addressed by the Adap­tive Optics (AO) technique. When we point the telescope at a star to search for an exoplanet around it, the routine process includes in­specting the corrupted signal of a star-planet and undoing the effects of Earth’s turbulence every milli­second during an observation.

Once the real-time frames of a star possibly containing the signal from an exoplanet are stabilized on the science camera by an AO system, the starlight is then blocked by a coronagraph. Theoretically, after this process, the signal of an exoplanet should emerge out from the noisy background where the starlight is suppressed. However, it is not yet the case. Since the telescope structure shakes continually and contorts gradually, part of the star­light which should have been sup­pressed spreads out and creates little 'devils' called speckles which are a lookalike of planetary signals. These speckles evolve in images at different rates and it is challenging to speculate their evolution lifetime. Some of these instrumental patterns can be discarded in post-process­ing of data while some linger and create false positives. In images, the area closer to the star is pollut­ed by speckles which create confu­sions during the data interpretation by astronomers, making it difficult to differentiate between speckles and real planetary signals.

 

PREVENTION BEFORE CURE

We astronomers are very well aware that our images containing signals of exoplanets are contami­nated by speckles. It is thus highly desirable in the HCI community to find sturdy solutions that can with­stand these speckles and undo their presence whenever they pop-up in the images. In other words, when the telescope is taking exoplanet data then a real-time algorithm should detect the location of these emerg­ing speckles and make them disap­pear. Our team at the Observatory of Paris8 has pushed the current technological limit and worked on such an algorithm9.

In our laboratory setup, we simu­late a star under the environmental condition that imitates the observing scenarios at the Very Large Tele­scope (VLT) in Chile. First of all, our technique teaches the algorithm to differentiate between the speckles and the planetary signals. An impor­tant property of a speckle is that it is generated by the light of the star itself whereas the signal of a planet comes either from its own thermal energy or from the starlight reflected by the planet. Once this knowledge is established, fake speckles with all the possible known brightness are injected into the images at different locations. The algorithm then scans the area of interest in the images and trains itself by building a matrix containing the information of fake speckles. This matrix then acts as a foreknowledge of speckles and is able to identify random speckles that appear during the real observations. Once the location and the brightness of a speckle is identified, the light from this speckle can be diminished (Figure 2, right) with the help of a mir­ror that has a property of reshaping the light in any desirable form.

One of my projects as an MSCA fellow was to characterize the per­formance of this technique in sim­ulations and in the laboratory ex­periments. We demonstrated in an article10 that our real-time algorithm can identify such persisting planet-resembling features and suppress them before post-processing of the data. The published article has a direct impact on improving the ca­pability of the current and future HCI instruments by further clearing up our vision while looking for exoplan­ets at all possible distances.

 

 

Laboratory images of a star as seen by a Very Large Telescope in Chile. The left image simulates a realistic scenario where a star image is filled with speckles as labelled. These speckles mimic signals of exoplanets. The image on the right shows how these speckles are suppressed (the region within the white box) in real-time by the algorithm. It takes roughly 90 seconds to clean the speckles and remove this ambiguity.

 

GARIMA SINGH