Community-led upgrading for self-reliance in informal settlements in South Africa: a review

Around the world, informal and low-income settlements (so-called “slums”) have been a major issue in city management and environmental sustainability in developing countries. Overall, African cities have an agenda for slum management and response. For example, the South African government introduced the Upgrade of Informal Settlements Program (UISP), as a comprehensive plan for upgrading slum settlements. Nevertheless, upgrading informal settlements from the bottom-up is key to inform broad protocols and strategies for sustainable communities and `adaptive cities´. Community-scale schemes can drive sustainability from the bottom-up and offer opportunities to share lessons learnt at the local level. Key success factors in their roll-out are: systems thinking; empowered local authorities that support decentralised solutions and multidisciplinary collaboration between the involved actors, including the affected local population. This research lies under the umbrella of sustainable bottom-up urban regeneration. As part of a larger project of collaboration between UK and SA research institutions, this paper presents an overview of in-situ participatory upgrade as an incremental strategy for upgrading informal settlements in the context of sustainable and resilient city. The motivation for this research is rooted in identifying the underpinning barriers and enabling drivers for up-scaling community-led, participatory upgrading approaches in informal settlements in the metropolitan area. This review paper seeks to provide some preliminary guidelines and recommendations for an integrated collaborative environmental and construction management framework to enhance community self-reliance. A theoretical approach based on the review of previous studies was combined with a pilot study conducted in Durban (South Africa) to investigate the feasibility of community-led upgrading processes.

Resilience and the ‘everyday’: beyond the paradox of ‘liberal peace’

Over the last decade there has been a shift towards critical understandings of ‘liberal peace’ approaches to international intervention, which argue that local culture holds the key to the effectiveness of peace interventions. In this ‘bottom-up’ approach, peace, reconciliation, and a ‘culture of law’ then become secondary effects of sociocultural norms and values. However, these liberal peace critiques have remained trapped in the paradox of liberal peace: the inability to go beyond the binaries of liberal universalism and cultural relativism. This understanding will be contrasted with the rise of ‘resilience’ approaches to intervention – which build on this attention to the particular context of application but move beyond this paradox through philosophical pragmatism and the focus on concrete social practices. This article clarifies the nature of this shift through the focus on the shifting understanding of international intervention to address the failings of the ‘war on drugs’ in the Americas.

Do Institutional Participatory Projects Contribute to the Development of Political Capabilities?

Participation usually sets off from the bottom up, taking the form of more or less enduring forms of collective action with varying degrees of infl uence. However, a number of projects have been launched by political institutions in the last decades with a view to engaging citizens in public affairs and developing their democratic habits, as well as those of the administration. This paper analyses the political qualifying capacity of the said projects, i.e. whether participating in them qualifi es individuals to behave as active citizens; whether these projects foster greater orientation towards public matters, intensify (or create) political will, and provide the necessary skills and expertise to master this will. To answer these questions, data from the comparative analysis of fi ve participatory projects in France and Spain are used, shedding light on which features of these participatory projects contribute to the formation of political subjects and in which way. Finally, in order to better understand this formative dimension, the formative capacity of institutional projects is compared with the formative dimension of other forms of participation spontaneously developed by citizens.

Warmer, deeper and greener mixed layers in the north Atlantic subpolar gyre over the last 50 years.

Shifts in global climate resonate in plankton dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, and marine food webs. We studied these linkages in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (NASG), which hosts extensive phytoplankton blooms. We show that phytoplankton abundance increased since the 1960s in parallel to a deepening of the mixed layer and a strengthening of winds and heat losses from the ocean, as driven by the low frequency of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In parallel to these bottom-up processes, the top-down control of phytoplankton by copepods decreased over the same time period in the western NASG, following sea surface temperature changes typical of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). While previous studies have hypothesized that climate-driven warming would facilitate seasonal stratification of surface waters and long-term phytoplankton increase in subpolar regions, here we show that deeper mixed layers in the NASG can be warmer and host a higher phytoplankton biomass. These results emphasize that different modes of climate variability regulate bottom-up (NAO control) and top-down (AMO control) forcing on phytoplankton at decadal timescales. As a consequence, different relationships between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and their physical environment appear subject to the disparate temporal scale of the observations (seasonal, interannual, or decadal). The prediction of phytoplankton response to climate change should be built upon what is learnt from observations at the longest timescales.

Warmer, deeper and greener mixed layers in the north Atlantic subpolar gyre over the last 50 years.

Shifts in global climate resonate in plankton dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, and marine food webs. We studied these linkages in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (NASG), which hosts extensive phytoplankton blooms. We show that phytoplankton abundance increased since the 1960s in parallel to a deepening of the mixed layer and a strengthening of winds and heat losses from the ocean, as driven by the low frequency of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). In parallel to these bottom-up processes, the top-down control of phytoplankton by copepods decreased over the same time period in the western NASG, following sea surface temperature changes typical of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). While previous studies have hypothesized that climate-driven warming would facilitate seasonal stratification of surface waters and long-term phytoplankton increase in subpolar regions, here we show that deeper mixed layers in the NASG can be warmer and host a higher phytoplankton biomass. These results emphasize that different modes of climate variability regulate bottom-up (NAO control) and top-down (AMO control) forcing on phytoplankton at decadal timescales. As a consequence, different relationships between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and their physical environment appear subject to the disparate temporal scale of the observations (seasonal, interannual, or decadal). The prediction of phytoplankton response to climate change should be built upon what is learnt from observations at the longest timescales.

Performatividad y arte computacional. Hacia una “DIY society”

El artículo analiza la figura del prosumidor desde los estudios visuales a partir de la combinación de la teoría de los actos de habla y los nuevos medios. El objetivo es evaluar si la distinción entre productores y consumidores, estrategias y tácticas de Michel de Certeau continúa siendo operativa en las interfaces gráficas de la cultura global de la información de Scott Lash. Para ello distingue dos tipos de performatividad de los actos de habla: la performatividad top-down del software, y la bottom-up de los juegos del lenguaje y las formas de vida. Estos tipos se aplican al análisis del discurso de los eslóganes que aparecen en los sitios web de las iniciativas “open” y de economía colaborativa, ya que las primeras están dedicadas a la producción de bienes inmateriales y las segundas a la producción de bienes materiales. El desarrollo muestra cómo los dos tipos de performatividad transforman el análisis textual de los estudios literarios y cinematográficos en una metodología capaz de investigar acciones materiales, humanas y no humanas. Las conclusiones describen el surgimiento de nuevas convenciones narrativas de poder y control ajenas a la ficción que apuntan a una “DIY society”.

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice. 

Semantic feature-based visual attention model for pedestrian detection

Objective
Pedestrian detection under video surveillance systems has always been a hot topic in computer vision research. These systems are widely used in train stations, airports, large commercial plazas, and other public places. However, pedestrian detection remains difficult because of complex backgrounds. Given its development in recent years, the visual attention mechanism has attracted increasing attention in object detection and tracking research, and previous studies have achieved substantial progress and breakthroughs. We propose a novel pedestrian detection method based on the semantic features under the visual attention mechanism.
Method
The proposed semantic feature-based visual attention model is a spatial-temporal model that consists of two parts: the static visual attention model and the motion visual attention model. The static visual attention model in the spatial domain is constructed by combining bottom-up with top-down attention guidance. Based on the characteristics of pedestrians, the bottom-up visual attention model of Itti is improved by intensifying the orientation vectors of elementary visual features to make the visual saliency map suitable for pedestrian detection. In terms of pedestrian attributes, skin color is selected as a semantic feature for pedestrian detection. The regional and Gaussian models are adopted to construct the skin color model. Skin feature-based visual attention guidance is then proposed to complete the top-down process. The bottom-up and top-down visual attentions are linearly combined using the proper weights obtained from experiments to construct the static visual attention model in the spatial domain. The spatial-temporal visual attention model is then constructed via the motion features in the temporal domain. Based on the static visual attention model in the spatial domain, the frame difference method is combined with optical flowing to detect motion vectors. Filtering is applied to process the field of motion vectors. The saliency of motion vectors can be evaluated via motion entropy to make the selected motion feature more suitable for the spatial-temporal visual attention model.
Result
Standard datasets and practical videos are selected for the experiments. The experiments are performed on a MATLAB R2012a platform. The experimental results show that our spatial-temporal visual attention model demonstrates favorable robustness under various scenes, including indoor train station surveillance videos and outdoor scenes with swaying leaves. Our proposed model outperforms the visual attention model of Itti, the graph-based visual saliency model, the phase spectrum of quaternion Fourier transform model, and the motion channel model of Liu in terms of pedestrian detection. The proposed model achieves a 93% accuracy rate on the test video.
Conclusion
This paper proposes a novel pedestrian method based on the visual attention mechanism. A spatial-temporal visual attention model that uses low-level and semantic features is proposed to calculate the saliency map. Based on this model, the pedestrian targets can be detected through focus of attention shifts. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed attention model for detecting pedestrians.

Hierarchical Task Network Planning with Common-Sense Reasoning for Multiple-People Behaviour Analysis

Safety on public transport is a major concern for the relevant authorities. We
address this issue by proposing an automated surveillance platform which combines data from video, infrared and pressure sensors. Data homogenisation and integration is achieved by a distributed architecture based on communication middleware that resolves interconnection issues, thereby enabling data modelling. A common-sense knowledge base models and encodes knowledge about public-transport platforms and the actions and activities of passengers. Trajectory data from passengers is modelled as a time-series of human activities. Common-sense knowledge and rules are then applied to detect inconsistencies or errors in the data interpretation. Lastly, the rationality that characterises human behaviour is also captured here through a bottom-up Hierarchical Task Network planner that, along with common-sense, corrects misinterpretations to explain passenger behaviour. The system is validated using a simulated bus saloon scenario as a case-study. Eighteen video sequences were recorded with up to six passengers. Four metrics were used to evaluate performance. The system, with an accuracy greater than 90% for each of the four metrics, was found to outperform a rule-base system and a system containing planning alone.

Bilingual Lexical Access in Reading : Analyzing the Effect of Semantic Context on Non-Selective Access in Bilingual Memory

Recent empirical studies about the neurological executive nature of reading in bilinguals differ in their evaluations of the degree of selective manifestation in lexical access as implicated by data from early and late reading measures in the eye-tracking paradigm. Currently two scenarios are plausible: (1) Lexical access in reading is fundamentally language non-selective and top-down effects from semantic context can influence the degree of selectivity in lexical access; (2) Cross-lingual lexical activation is actuated via bottom-up processes without being affected by top-down effects from sentence context. In an attempt to test these hypotheses empirically, this study analyzed reader-text events arising when cognate facilitation and semantic constraint interact in a 22 factorially designed experiment tracking the eye movements of 26 Swedish-English bilinguals reading in their L2. Stimulus conditions consisted of high- and low-constraint sentences embedded with either a cognate or a non-cognate control word. The results showed clear signs of cognate facilitation in both early and late reading measures and in either sentence conditions. This evidence in favour of the non-selective hypothesis indicates that the manifestation of non-selective lexical access in reading is not constrained by top-down effects from semantic context.

Rudimentos de uma inspeção topográfica aplicados à Passacaglia para orquestra, opus 1, de Anton Webern

SILVA, Alexandre Reche e. Rudimentos de uma inspeção topográfica aplicados à Passacaglia para orquestra, opus 1, de Anton Webern. Ictus - Periódico do PPGMUS/UFBA, Salvador, v. 7, p.189-208, 2010

Continuidade do desempenho do cargo de diretor de turma e o impacto no sucesso educativo dos alunos: um estudo no 2º Ciclo de uma escola pública da Ilha da Madeira

A escola portuguesa do século XXI tem sido alvo de reformas sucessivas procedentes de imposições económicas, políticas e sociais, sem o devido acompanhamento de inovação bottom up. A mudança decorrente tem-se processado sobretudo formalmente (inovação top down), menosprezando, ainda em larga escala, as pessoas e o seu capital (intelectual, emocional, social e psicológico), num momento em que a globalização impulsiona a transição do paradigma funcional para o paradigma das competências. Sendo os indivíduos parte integrante das soluções e êxitos organizacionais, bem como cada vez mais manifesta a preocupação dos líderes com a eficácia, eficiência e qualidade do serviço prestado ao nível das escolas de interesse público, direcionamos a análise para a gestão dos recursos humanos, mais particularmente ao nível da dualidade: instabilidade na carreira docente/estabilidade do diretor de turma. O interesse supremo da temática reside nas potencialidades deste cargo de gestão intermédia na concretização da missão da escola, a partir do papel que o seu detentor assume na teia de relações em que se insere por imposição das suas funções, e que pode fomentar quando dotado de determinadas características. Este estudo de caso, de natureza essencialmente quantitativa, traduz a análise crítica acerca do impacto da continuidade do desempenho do cargo ao longo do 2.º ciclo do ensino básico no sucesso educativo dos alunos, partindo da análise dos resultados de medidas adotadas no ano escolar 2010/2011. Para o efeito recorreu-se à análise do aproveitamento, da atuação do conselho de turma e da comunicação escola-família em seis turmas do sexto ano de escolaridade, três com o mesmo diretor de turma, de uma escola pública do concelho de Câmara de Lobos. Concluímos que a manutenção do diretor de turma nas turmas visadas teve repercussões na vertente relacional, principalmente, não tendo sido confirmada a conexão entre a continuidade do profissional que assume o cargo ao longo do ciclo e os resultados académicos dos discentes, pese embora a opinião contrária de 87,9% dos docentes inquiridos, e de a maioria quer dos estudantes, quer dos seus encarregados de educação, ser favorável à sua prossecução.

End-to-end modelling for an ecosystem approach to fisheries in the Northern Humboldt Current Ecosystem

This work represents an original contribution to the methodology for ecosystem models' development as well as the rst attempt of an end-to-end (E2E) model of the Northern Humboldt Current Ecosystem (NHCE). The main purpose of the developed model is to build a tool for ecosystem-based management and decision making, reason why the credibility of the model is essential, and this can be assessed through confrontation to data. Additionally, the NHCE exhibits a high climatic and oceanographic variability at several scales, the major source of interannual variability being the interruption of the upwelling seasonality by the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which has direct e ects on larval survival and sh recruitment success. Fishing activity can also be highly variable, depending on the abundance and accessibility of the main shery resources. This context brings the two main methodological questions addressed in this thesis, through the development of an end-to-end model coupling the high trophic level model OSMOSE to the hydrodynamics and biogeochemical model ROMS-PISCES: i) how to calibrate ecosystem models using time series data and ii) how to incorporate the impact of the interannual variability of the environment and shing. First, this thesis highlights some issues related to the confrontation of complex ecosystem models to data and proposes a methodology for a sequential multi-phases calibration of ecosystem models. We propose two criteria to classify the parameters of a model: the model dependency and the time variability of the parameters. Then, these criteria along with the availability of approximate initial estimates are used as decision rules to determine which parameters need to be estimated, and their precedence order in the sequential calibration process. Additionally, a new Evolutionary Algorithm designed for the calibration of stochastic models (e.g Individual Based Model) and optimized for maximum likelihood estimation has been developed and applied to the calibration of the OSMOSE model to time series data. The environmental variability is explicit in the model: the ROMS-PISCES model forces the OSMOSE model and drives potential bottom-up e ects up the foodweb through plankton and sh trophic interactions, as well as through changes in the spatial distribution of sh. The latter e ect was taken into account using presence/ absence species distribution models which are traditionally assessed through a confusion matrix and the statistical metrics associated to it. However, when considering the prediction of the habitat against time, the variability in the spatial distribution of the habitat can be summarized and validated using the emerging patterns from the shape of the spatial distributions. We modeled the potential habitat of the main species of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem using several sources of information ( sheries, scienti c surveys and satellite monitoring of vessels) jointly with environmental data from remote sensing and in situ observations, from 1992 to 2008. The potential habitat was predicted over the study period with monthly resolution, and the model was validated using quantitative and qualitative information of the system using a pattern oriented approach. The nal ROMS-PISCES-OSMOSE E2E ecosystem model for the NHCE was calibrated using our evolutionary algorithm and a likelihood approach to t monthly time series data of landings, abundance indices and catch at length distributions from 1992 to 2008. To conclude, some potential applications of the model for shery management are presented and their limitations and perspectives discussed.

From data to applications in the Internet of Things

Con la crescita in complessità delle infrastrutture IT e la pervasività degli scenari di Internet of Things (IoT) emerge il bisogno di nuovi modelli computazionali basati su entità autonome capaci di portare a termine obiettivi di alto livello interagendo tra loro grazie al supporto di infrastrutture come il Fog Computing, per la vicinanza alle sorgenti dei dati, e del Cloud Computing per offrire servizi analitici complessi di back-end in grado di fornire risultati per milioni di utenti. Questi nuovi scenarii portano a ripensare il modo in cui il software viene progettato e sviluppato in una prospettiva agile. Le attività dei team di sviluppatori (Dev) dovrebbero essere strettamente legate alle attività dei team che supportano il Cloud (Ops) secondo nuove metodologie oggi note come DevOps. Tuttavia, data la mancanza di astrazioni adeguata a livello di linguaggio di programmazione, gli sviluppatori IoT sono spesso indotti a seguire approcci di sviluppo bottom-up che spesso risulta non adeguato ad affrontare la compessità delle applicazione del settore e l'eterogeneità dei compomenti software che le formano. Poichè le applicazioni monolitiche del passato appaiono difficilmente scalabili e gestibili in un ambiente Cloud con molteplici utenti, molti ritengono necessaria l'adozione di un nuovo stile architetturale, in cui un'applicazione dovrebbe essere vista come una composizione di micro-servizi, ciascuno dedicato a uno specifica funzionalità applicativa e ciascuno sotto la responsabilità di un piccolo team di sviluppatori, dall'analisi del problema al deployment e al management. Poichè al momento non si è ancora giunti a una definizione univoca e condivisa dei microservices e di altri concetti che emergono da IoT e dal Cloud, nè tantomento alla definzione di linguaggi sepcializzati per questo settore, la definzione di metamodelli custom associati alla produzione automatica del software di raccordo con le infrastrutture potrebbe aiutare un team di sviluppo ad elevare il livello di astrazione, incapsulando in una software factory aziendale i dettagli implementativi. Grazie a sistemi di produzione del sofware basati sul Model Driven Software Development (MDSD), l'approccio top-down attualmente carente può essere recuperato, permettendo di focalizzare l'attenzione sulla business logic delle applicazioni. Nella tesi viene mostrato un esempio di questo possibile approccio, partendo dall'idea che un'applicazione IoT sia in primo luogo un sistema software distribuito in cui l'interazione tra componenti attivi (modellati come attori) gioca un ruolo fondamentale.

Farmers' Resilience to Climate Change in the Welsh Marshes

Climate change will exacerbate challenges facing food security in the UK. Increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will further impact upon farm systems. At the heart of the impending challenges to UK agricultural production, farmers’ resilience will be tested to new limits. Research into farmers’ resilience to climate change in the UK is distinctly underdeveloped when compared to research in developing and other developed nations. This research gap is addressed through exploration of farmers’ resilience in the Welsh Marches, establishing the role of risk perceptions, local knowledge and adaptive capacity in farmers’ decision-making to limit climate shocks. Further contributions to agricultural geography are made through experimentation of a ‘cultural-behavioural approach’, seeking to revisit the behavioural approach in view of the cultural-turn. The Welsh Marches, situated on the English-Welsh border, has been selected as a focal point due to its agricultural diversity, and known experiences of extreme weather events. A phased mixed methodological approach is adopted. Phase one explores recorded and reported experiences of past extreme weather events in local meteorological records and local newspaper articles. Phase two consists of 115 survey-questionnaires, 15 in-depth semi-structured interviews, and a scenario based focus group with selected farmers from the Welsh Marches. This allows farmers’ resilience to climate change in the past, present and future to be explored. Original contributions to knowledge are made through demonstrating the value of focusing upon the culture of a specific farm community, applying a ‘bottom-up’ approach. The priority given to the weather in farmers’ decision-making is identified to be determined by individual relationships that farmers’ develop with the weather. Yet, a consensus of farmers’ observations has established recognition of considerable changes in the weather over the last 30 years, acknowledging more extremes and seasonal variations. In contrast, perceptions of future climate change are largely varied. Farmers are found to be disengaged with the communication of climate change science, as the global impacts portrayed are distant in time and place from probable impacts that may be experienced locally. Current communication of climate change information has been identified to alienate farmers from the local reality of probable future impacts. Adaptation options and responses to extreme weather and climate change are identified from measures found to be already implemented and considered for the future. A greater need to explore local knowledge and risk perception in relation to farmers’ understanding of future climate challenges is clear. There is a need to conduct comparable research in different farm communities across the UK. Progression into establishing the role of farmers’ resilience in responding effectively to future climate challenges has only just begun.