Mobility

The observation, analysis and construction of cities and forms of mobility are not always in step with the complexity of urban systems and changes in contemporary societies. It is possible to use time as a key to reading the functioning and dysfunctions of cities and as a springboard for new mobilitiesand sustainable urban development policies. This "chronotopic" perspective makes it possible to approach the complexity of urban systems and reflect on ways of "indwelling" times and mobilities. The researcher, the urban planner, the builder and the citizen are invited to change their outlooks, to think, design and manage the city by simultaneously taking into account urban physicality, flows and timetables in order to imagine, together a "malleable city", a more human, accessible and hospitable one.

Travel was a crucial element of ancient Egyptian culture. An extensive traffic system by land and by water already existed as early as the Old Kingdom, including various means of transport that did not fundamentally change right through to the New Kingdom. Traveling activity attested for various professions demonstrates that Egyptian society exercised a high degree of mobility. In the majority of cases, a journey was undertaken within the scope of the traveler’s work and on behalf of the pharaoh. Travel had a significant impact on the Egyptian world-view as well as on the development of the
identity of Egyptian society as an entity.

We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history , people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. All that was solid melted into air long ago and is now in full circulation around the world like dandelion seeds adrift on turbulent winds. We find ourselves, in the early twenty-first century, in a world where every major domain of human activity has become increasingly defined by motion. 1 We have entered a new historical era defined in large part by movement and mobility and are now in need of a new historical on-tology appropriate to our time. The observation that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was marked by an increasingly " liquid " and " mobile modernity " is now something widely recognized in the scholarly literature at the turn of the century. 2 Today, however, our orientation to this event is quite different. Almost twenty years into the twenty-first century we now find ourselves situated on the other side of this heralded transition. The question that confronts us today is thus a new one: how to fold all that has melted back up into new solids. 3

This paper comparatively analyses the impact and functionality of the Federal Recognition Act as well as the external examination. Both approaches can foster labour mobility into and within the German labour market. Focusing on horizontal mobility as a spatial movement of migrants and vertical mobility as an upskilling movement, we link these approaches with individual perspectives and experiences. The results show that both approaches highly depend on the formal education system. For the individuals this linkage can have an effect of exclusion and devaluation but also can have a motivating effect. With regard to their labour market integration, both approaches can enable a sustainable mobility into and within the German labour market. Nevertheless, those processes are very demanding and rely on strict regulations that can impede a smooth procedure.

Mobile objects have gained a lot of attention in research and industry in the recent past, but they also have a long history. Security is one of the key requirements of mobile objects, and one of the most researched characteristics related to mobility. Resource management has been somewhat neglected in the past, but it is being increasingly addressed, in both the context of security and QoS. In this paper we place a few systems supporting mobile objects in perspective based upon how they address security and resource management. We start with the theoretical model of Actors that supports concurrent mobile objects in a programming environment. Then we describe task migration for the Mach microkernel, a case of mobile objects supported by an operating system. Using the OMG MASIF standard as an example, we then analyze middleware support for mobile objects. Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA) system, is an example of middleware level support based on Java. The active networks project, Conv...

A joint design project for the 2006 MIT-Tsinghua University Beijing Urban Design Studio by Non Arkaraprasertkul, Alex H.C. Lee, Liang Sisi, Jue Wang, and Ai Yamamoto. The Beijing Studio is a Joint Program of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, with participants from both architecture and planning, and the Tsinghua University School of Architecture. Funding is provided by the Paul Sun Fund with additional contributions from the Asian Cultural Council of New York/Geoffrey Yeh Foundation, the MIT China Program, the MIT departments of architecture and planning and Tsinghua University.

On 10th October 2014 (at Beursschouwburg in Brussels), a political scientist and sociologist Patrick Le Gales gave a talk 'Global Minds, Roots in the City' on his recently finished research project in which Alberta Andreotti, Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes and himself explored the mobility practices of European urban upper-middle classes. In his talk, Le Gales presented new empirical qualitative data collected through a comparative research of 480 professionals and managers in 16 neighbourhoods in 4 cities (Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Milan + background data on London and Manchester). This data reveals the upper middle class is transnational only to a limited degree (and substantially less than speculated by some social theorists), mostly adopting partial exit strategies – thus refuting simplistic arguments about the rise of mobility, new barbarians (Agnell) and rootedness of European Bourgeoisie. However, despite expressing strong criticism of simplistic understanding of mobility patterns, gentrification and disembeddedness in Europe, Le Gales himself made some bold statements and generalising interpretations that lead to misleading conclusions.

[Paper in Italian]
The discovery of an ancient borrowing from Arabic in the domain of religion (FAKRU, the "name" of the she-camel of prophet Saleh, derived from "FA-‘AQARU..." i.e. the starting words of the quranic verses containing this story) suggests that the oldest relations with Arabs were not limited to secular, commercial ties, but included religious instruction.

Since the 1970s, quotas have continually been used to control immigration to Switzerland. But the categories of foreigners subject to this quota system have changed over time, and the system itself has also undergone numerous modifications. Given that immigration quotas may gain more prominence in Switzerland in the coming years, it is worth taking a closer look at how this specific aspect of immigration policy is currently implemented.

The key issue of the localization study is that how we can minimize the energy consumption of devices with guaranteeing high degree of accuracy. In this paper, we show that the collaboration among proxy devices with short range communication is helpful to energy-efficiently localize their locations in time-average sense by analyzing the device proximity including real GPS trace of students in KAIST and NCSU campuses. Next, we deliberate what is the best method for selfish mobile users to collaborate for the energy-efficient localization, and formulate an optimization problem which considers the energy efficiency and/or user fairness. However, optimizing this problem is tricky since it requires a global knowledge of sets of proxy devices and also solving a NP-hard problem to select devices which directly measure locations. This paper makes a contribution towards presenting a practical and fully distributed location sharing protocol based on competition for turning off GPS, and an opt...

The messaging application WhatsApp is often adopted in urban neighbourhoods to distribute and discuss information as part of neighbourhood watch programmes. In this context, certain notions of information sharing and the cherishing this implies, are often entangled with ideals of protection in the neighbourhood. Using the case study of an enclosed neighbourhood in Johannesburg, this essay draws on theories of affect and mobility to introduce the concept of affective mooring. That is, that a neighbourhood WhatsApp group constitutes an affective mooring—an established practice and point of fixity—that generates a sense of being held in a community through feelings of collective presence and safety. Notably, these feelings of presence and safety are hinged on acts of resistance and alienation towards strangers. In this way, WhatsApp as an affective mooring in the neighbourhood is also a site for negotiating ideals of belonging.

We tested the hypothesis that vibratory thresholds in the elderly are related to mobility. In all, 629 older persons without dementia underwent testing including 11 lower extremity performance measures and modified United Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS), summarized as composite mobility and global parkinsonian signs. Vibratory thresholds were measured at the ankle and toes bilaterally using the graduated Rydel–Seiffer tuning fork. In linear regression models adjusted for age, sex, and education, vibratory threshold was associated with composite mobility (estimate, 0.047, SE = 0.011, P < 0.001) and global parkinsonian signs score (estimate, −0.252, SE = 0.126, P = 0.047). These findings were primarily due to the association of vibratory threshold with gait and balance components of composite mobility and parkinsonian gait. These results were unchanged when we controlled for body mass index, physical activity, cognition, depression, vascular risk factors, vascular disease burden, joint pain, and falls. Vibratory thresholds are associated with mobility, supporting the link between peripheral sensory nerve function and mobility in the elderly. Muscle Nerve, 2009

Jusqu’au debut du xxie siecle, tres peu d’etudiants chinois venaient faire des etudes superieures en France. Ils constituent aujourd’hui la plus importante communaute etudiante etrangere issue d’un pays non francophone (ils sont 27 315 en 2019-2020, Rosenwald, 2020). Cette arrivee resulte d’un choix strategique lie a un contexte national particulier, ou le resultat du baccalaureat determine la reussite d’un etudiant. Les etablissements d’enseignement superieur francais sont accessibles aux etudiants issus de classes moyennes, voire populaires, a la difference des etablissements des pays anglophones par exemple. Aujourd’hui, la mobilite des etudiants chinois n’est plus seulement une mobilite d’elite comme il y a trente ans. L’obtention d’un diplome etranger renomme offre une nouvelle chance de promotion. Le flux migratoire se caracterise de plus en plus par des differenciations selon le milieu d’origine, le parcours anterieur, les motivations et les projets professionnels. La mobilite vers la France s’organise autour d’un modele triptyque entre « seconde chance », capacite financiere et attrait et place de la langue francaise dans le monde. Ainsi, ceux qui ne sont pas satisfaits de leur parcours en Chine se replient temporairement vers l’enseignement superieur francais pour etre ensuite mieux armes pour affronter la concurrence sur le marche chinois des jeunes diplomes. Car, si les Chinois savent particulierement bien hierarchiser la valeur de leurs propres diplomes ou s’illustrent de fortes inegalites entre les regions, la question est plus ouverte quant aux diplomes des pays etrangers. Par ailleurs, l’investissement que constitue le sejour en France est davantage rentabilise lorsque les debouches professionnels sont lies a l’usage de la langue francaise. La recherche d’un emploi est devenue plus difficile du fait de la concurrence provoquee par le retour au pays de nombreux etudiants chinois. Le « retour sur investissement » parait de moins en moins valable pour les jeunes generations.

According to Sahih Muslim, a Sunni Muslim hadith collection, women are obliged to perform their pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in today’s Saudi Arabia solely together with a legal male chaperone (mahram), i.e. one of their immediate family members, such as a father, brother, husband or son she is not eligible to marry. Shia Muslim women, however, are allowed to go for hajj or umrah (“small pilgrimage”) alone if they feel safe. The Saudi government tightened the corresponding law for all Muslim women at the end of the 1990s. Women are obliged to enter Saudi Arabia together with a mahram only until they reach the age of forty-five – but this legal rule is only applicable for women who need a visa to enter the nation state.
This chapter examines fundamental differences in the experiences had by female pilgrims regarding their male supervision according to their citizenship and their Islamic belief (Sunni or Shia Islam). By comparing three stories of women from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, the goal is to investigate the intersecting social categories and practices of gender, Islamic belief, nationality and age as enabling or as limiting factors for women on pilgrimage. Whereas for those women whose male companionship only depends on the interpretation of the belief system their GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) nationality can be a loophole for their mobility, the Saudi legislation can be an obstacle or an empty legal shell for those female citizens who require a visa to perform pilgrimage in the holy places Mecca and Medina.

The concept of family is a social construct, and the one used in Western countries fails to accommodate the complex systems of interaction between parenthood practices, relationships between spouses and siblings, vertical and horizontal relationships among relatives, conjugal ties, marriage contracts, domestic arrangements in other countries-the more so as these relations are frequently conducted at a distance. Nonetheless, the term "family"is widely used in studies of migration and mobility, though often uncritically. This introduction intends to expose the pitfalls incidental to this uncritical perspective and aims to clear up some of the misunderstandings that can occur when migration and mobility studies adopt an ethnocentric idea of family. Far from being inflexible and forging the self-same links whatever the migration circumstances, kinship ties adapt and help others adapt to the novel situations encountered in new countries, thereby proving a resource and an essential part of the culture of mobility.

Long-distance commuting (also called fly-in/fly-out or FIFO) is a system of labour-force provision for industrial operations in remote regions; e. g., at oil and gas extraction sites in the Russian Arctic. Employees  commute on a rotational shift basis of 14 days in and 14 days out (14/14) or on a 30/30 roster. This chapter is based on longterm ethnographic research in the northwestern Siberian Arctic. The theoretical considerations relate to coping strategies for the two main constraints inherent to this way of life: the separation of meaningful social spheres (home and on duty) and the ascription of deviance to this lifestyle. People who cope well with this multilocal and mobile way of life pursue two strategies: (1) the conscious integration of space through the simultaneous connecting and separation of the spheres in order to constitute an integrated, enlarged and meaningful social and geographical space and (2) a flexible process of normalisation which turns the ascription of deviance into potential.

http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0156-09764

Partiendo de la exploracion de los vinculos que se establecen entre las variables movilidad cotidiana, pobreza y exclusion social en un contexto de profunda segregacion funcional y socio espacial, este articulo analiza, para la ciudad de Lima (Peru), la eficiencia social del sistema de transporte colectivo como instrumento de integracion y cohesion social para las personas que viven en situacion de pobreza.

Difficulty in transferring, the ability to rise in and out of a bed and chair, is a common problem in older adults, particularly those residing in skilled nursing facilities. Focusing on one aspect of transferring, rising from supine to sitting position, we devised a set of bed mobility tasks to test key arm, leg, and trunk movements that likely contribute to successful rising from bed. Healthy young controls (YC, n=22, mean age 23), and older adults (aged 60 and over) either residing independently in congregate housing (CH, n=29, mean age 84) or undergoing rehabilitation in a skilled nursing facility (SNF, mean age 77) were assessed in the time to rise from supine to sitting and in the ability or inability to perform 16 other bed mobility tasks. Trunk function-related tasks, specifically those requiring trunk elevation and trunk balance, were most difficult for the SNF, followed by CH, and then YC. Tasks focusing on trunk flexion strength (sit up arms crossed, bilateral heel raise)...