Nobel Peace Prize

Summary

The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish and Nobels fredspris) is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments (military weapons and equipment) manufacturer Alfred Nobel, along with the prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine and Literature. Since March 1901, it has been awarded annually (with some exceptions) to those who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". The Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary History describes it as "the most prestigious prize in the world". In accordance with Alfred Nobel's will, the recipient is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a five-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway. Since 2020 the prize is awarded in the Atrium of the University of Oslo, where it was also awarded 1947–1989; the Abel Prize is also awarded in the building. The prize w

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The Birth of the Workshop: Techno-Morals, Peace Experts and the Care of the Self in the Middle East

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos

In the article I examine through ethnography and contextual analysis one of the flagship techniques of peace expertise in the Middle East and elsewhere, the so-called conflict resolution workshop. For the transnational and hyper-mobile clan of peacemakers and peace experts, the workshop constitutes maybe the absolute travel device: it can be transported and deployed everywhere without the need for translation into local vernaculars; it can exemplify the moral ambition for peace in the world backed with technical arrangements of space, time and learning mostly imported from other disciplinary settings; it can address sustained needs for knowledge and hopes for personal betterment by introducing a unique style of pedagogy based on both academic credentials and moral superiority. I present ethnographic evidence that shows how assemblages of peacemaking, most of them centred around the technique of the conflict resolution workshop, had at least three, often unintended, effects in Lebanon and beyond: First, a massive trend towards what one might call the workshopping of peace, namely the idea that major issues of broad concern regarding past and future violence can be effectively addressed within secluded spaces of conflict resolution workshops. Second, the widespread acceptance and consequent proliferation of a particular version of what Michel Foucault has called ‘the care of the self’ (Foucault 1986) primarily premised on a new configuration of peacemaking that understood the individual as the primary target of expert intervention in a distinct moral and technical sense. Third, the (re-)production of a professionalized field of peace experts, whose degree of legitimacy and conditions of institutional existence crucially depended on the constant need to reiterate and reify the binary between an intrinsically ignorant and potentially uncivil society (that needs to be trained) and themselves (who need to train it).

2014

In 2003, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their seminal discoveries concerning the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a non-invasive diagnosis technique notably used in medicine to visualize the human internal organs and to distinguish between healthy and pathological cells. For this purpose, contrast agents are valuable tools that enhance this distinction which is resulting from the difference in the water content of the different tissues. These drugs are used nowadays in more than 30% of the 60 millions MRI examinations performed each year. And both numbers are still growing fast. Most of the contrast agents contain a paramagnetic ion (GdIII) that accelerates the relaxation of the water protons by providing them a new relaxation pathway. Relaxivity is a way of quantifying the contrast agent efficiency and is governed by four key parameters: hydration number of the lanthanide ion, water exchange rate, electronic relaxation rate and rotational correlation time of the system. A judicious simultaneous optimization of these parameters is predicted to result in a 20-fold increase in relaxivity compared to the currently used contrast agents. In this work, with the aim of increasing the relaxivity and better understanding the involved mechanisms, the synthesis and physico-chemical characterization of new dinuclear GdIII complexes, based on thoroughly studied monomeric equivalents, were performed. We particularly stressed the outmost importance of introducing rigidity together with the increased size of the system, for a flexible assembly will hinder the relaxivity gain brought by the higher molecular weight. This rigidity is induced by using an aromatic linker between the chelating subunits or by means of the self-assembling properties of terpyridine units around FeII or RuII. We investigated the thermodynamic stability, which in crucial for toxicological reason, the spectrophotometric properties, and the rotational and water exchange dynamics of these complexes. As a result, a remarkable increase in relaxivity is obtained for all the studied compounds with respect to the clinically used actual contrast agents. Finally, insights into a promising novel class of MRI contrast agents acting simultaneously as luminescence probes are provided.

EPFL2005

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Primary marine aerosol (PMA)-cloud interactions off the coast of California were investigated using observations of marine aerosol, cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), and stratocumulus clouds during the Eastern Pacific Emitted Aerosol Cloud Experiment (E-PEACE) and the Stratocumulus Observations of Los-Angeles Emissions Derived Aerosol-Droplets (SOLEDAD) studies. Based on recently reportedmeasurements of PMA size distributions, a constrained lognormal-mode-fitting procedure was devised to isolate PMA number size distributions fromtotal aerosol size distributions and applied to E-PEACEmeasurements. During the 12 day E-PEACE cruise on the R/V Point Sur, PMA typically contributed less than 15% of total particle concentrations. PMA number concentrations averaged 12 cm-3 during a relatively calmer period (average wind speed 12m/s1) lasting 8 days, and 71 cm-3 during a period of higher wind speeds (average 16m/s1) lasting 5 days. On average, PMA contributed less than 10% of total CCN at supersaturations up to 0.9% during the calmer period; however, during the higher wind speed period, PMA comprised 5-63% of CCN (average 16-28%) at supersaturations less than 0.3%. Sea salt was measured directly in the dried residuals of cloud droplets during the SOLEDAD study. The mass fractions of sea salt in the residuals averaged 12 to 24% during three cloud events. Comparing the marine stratocumulus clouds sampled in the two campaigns, measured peak supersaturations were 0.2 ± 0.04% during E-PEACE and 0.05-0.1% during SOLEDAD. The availablemeasurements show that cloud droplet number concentrations increased with > 100 nmparticles in E-PEACE but decreased in the three SOLEDAD cloud events. © 2015. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.

Wiley-Blackwell2015