Community-led resettlement: From a flood affected slum to a new society in Pune, India

This paper describes the resettlement process of a community devastated by annual floods, to newly constructed housing in Pune, India. The relocation from Kamgar Putala slum to a housing society at Hadapsar was organized by a community-led NGO partnership in 2004. The housing development was coordinated by the local NGO Shelter Associates with significant community participation. The housing has been revisited in 2010 to evaluate the sustainability of the resettlement project’s delivery model via stakeholder perception. The process of organizing for resettlement after natural disaster is described along with the implementation and evaluation of the new housing nearly six years after initial occupation. The strong partnership approach overcame a series of political and financial hurdles at various stages of the relocation project. The story of resettling Kamgar Putala is detailed alongside an outline of the current political climate for an alternative slum-upgrading policy in India and Pune. The advantages of an empowered community supported by an influential local NGO demonstrate a commendable team effort which has tackled the threat of floods. The paper highlights the merits of a community-led partnership approach to housing development for achieving sustainable urban development as well as the alleviation of poverty in a developing context.

Automated Detection of Exposed Reinforcement in Post-Earthquake Safety and Structural Evaluations

Post-earthquake structural safety evaluations are currently performed manually by a team of certified inspectors and/or structural engineers. This process is time-consuming and costly, keeping owners and occupants from returning to their businesses and homes. Automating these evaluations would enable faster, and potentially more consistent, relief and response processes. In order to do this, the detection of exposed reinforcing steel is of utmost significance. This paper presents a novel method of detecting exposed reinforcement in concrete columns for the purpose of advancing practices of structural and safety evaluation of buildings after earthquakes. Under this method, the binary image of the reinforcing area is first isolated using a state-of-the-art adaptive thresholding technique. Next, the ribbed regions of the reinforcement are detected by way of binary template matching. Finally, vertical and horizontal profiling are applied to the processed image in order to filter out any superfluous pixels and take into consideration the size of reinforcement bars in relation to that of the structural element within which they reside. The final result is the combined binary image disclosing only the regions containing rebar overlaid on top of the original image. The method is tested on a set of images from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Preliminary test results convey that most exposed reinforcement could be properly detected in images of moderately-to-severely damaged concrete columns.

EEFIT mission to Haiti following the 12th January 2010 earthquake

The Mw= 7.2 Haiti earthquake of 12th January 2010 caused extensive damage to buildings and other infrastructure in the epicentral region in and around Port-au-Prince. The Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT), which is based in the United Kingdom, organised a field mission to Haiti with the authors as the team members. The paper presents the geotechnical findings of the team including those relating to soil liquefaction and lateral spreading and discusses the performance of buildings, including historic buildings, and bridges. Unprecedented use was made of damage assessments made from remote images (i. e. images taken from satellites and aircraft) when planning the post-earthquake relief effort in Haiti and a principal objective of the team was to evaluate the accuracy of such assessments. Accordingly, 142 buildings in Port-au-Prince were inspected in the field by the EEFIT team; damage assessments had previously been made using remote images for all these buildings. On the basis of this survey, the tendency of remote assessments to underestimate damage was confirmed; it was found that the underestimate applied to assessments based on oblique images using the relatively new technique of Pictometry, as well as those based on vertical images, although to a lesser degree. The paper also discusses the distribution of damage in Port-au-Prince, which was found to be strongly clustered in ways that appear not to have been completely explained. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Community-led resettlement: From a flood-affected slum to a new society in Pune, India

This paper describes the resettlement process of a community devastated by annual floods, to newly constructed housing in Pune, India. The relocation from Kamgar Putala slum to a housing society at Hadapsar was organized by a community-led NGO partnership in 2004. The housing development was coordinated by the local NGO Shelter Associates with significant community participation. The housing has been revisited in 2010 to evaluate the sustainability of the resettlement project's delivery model via stakeholder perception. The process of organizing for resettlement after natural disaster is described along with the implementation and evaluation of the new housing nearly six years after initial occupation. The strong partnership approach overcame a series of political and financial hurdles at various stages of the relocation project. The story of resettling Kamgar Putala is detailed alongside an outline of the current political climate for an alternative slum-upgrading policy in India and Pune. The advantages of an empowered community supported by an influential local NGO demonstrate a commendable team effort which has tackled the threat of floods. The paper highlights the merits of a community-led partnership approach to housing development for achieving sustainable urban development as well as the alleviation of poverty in a developing context. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

The price of pain and the value of suffering.

Estimating the financial value of pain informs issues as diverse as the market price of analgesics, the cost-effectiveness of clinical treatments, compensation for injury, and the response to public hazards. Such valuations are assumed to reflect a stable trade-off between relief of discomfort and money. Here, using an auction-based health-market experiment, we show that the price people pay for relief of pain is strongly determined by the local context of the market, that is, by recent intensities of pain or immediately disposable income (but not overall wealth). The absence of a stable valuation metric suggests that the dynamic behavior of health markets is not predictable from the static behavior of individuals. We conclude that the results follow the dynamics of habit-formation models of economic theory, and thus, this study provides the first scientific basis for this type of preference modeling.

Dread and the disvalue of future pain.

Standard theories of decision-making involving delayed outcomes predict that people should defer a punishment, whilst advancing a reward. In some cases, such as pain, people seem to prefer to expedite punishment, implying that its anticipation carries a cost, often conceptualized as 'dread'. Despite empirical support for the existence of dread, whether and how it depends on prospective delay is unknown. Furthermore, it is unclear whether dread represents a stable component of value, or is modulated by biases such as framing effects. Here, we examine choices made between different numbers of painful shocks to be delivered faithfully at different time points up to 15 minutes in the future, as well as choices between hypothetical painful dental appointments at time points of up to approximately eight months in the future, to test alternative models for how future pain is disvalued. We show that future pain initially becomes increasingly aversive with increasing delay, but does so at a decreasing rate. This is consistent with a value model in which moment-by-moment dread increases up to the time of expected pain, such that dread becomes equivalent to the discounted expectation of pain. For a minority of individuals pain has maximum negative value at intermediate delay, suggesting that the dread function may itself be prospectively discounted in time. Framing an outcome as relief reduces the overall preference to expedite pain, which can be parameterized by reducing the rate of the dread-discounting function. Our data support an account of disvaluation for primary punishments such as pain, which differs fundamentally from existing models applied to financial punishments, in which dread exerts a powerful but time-dependent influence over choice.

A Single-Fundamental-Mode Photonic Crystal Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser

Single-fundamental-mode photonic crystal (PhC) vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) are produced and their single-fundamental-mode performances are investigated and demonstrated. A two-dimensional PhC with single-point-defect structure is fabricated using UV photolithography and inductive coupled plasma reactive ion etching on the surface of the VCSEL's top distributed Bragg-reflector. The PhC VCSEL maintains single-fundamental-mode operating with output power 1.7 mW and threshold current 2.5 mA. The full width half maximum of the lasing spectrum is less than 0.1 nm, the far field divergence angle is less than 10 degrees and the side mode suppression ratio is over 35 dB. The device characteristics are analyzed based on the effective index model of the photonic crystal fiber. The experimental results agree well with the theoretical expectation.

Anomalous strains in the cubic-phase GaN films grown on GaAs (001) by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition

Strains in cubic GaN films grown on GaAs (001) were measured by a triple-axis x-ray diffraction method. Residual strains in the as-grown epitaxial films were in compression, contrary to the predicted tensile strains caused by large lattice mismatch between epilayers and GaAs substrates (20%). It was also found that the relief of strains in the GaN films has a complicated dependence on the growth conditions. We interpreted this as the interaction between the lattice mismatch and thermal mismatch stresses. The fully relaxed lattice constants of cubic GaN are determined to be 4.5038 +/- 0.0009 Angstrom, which is in excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction of 4.503 Angstrom. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(00)07918-4].

A novel photonic crystal vertical cavity surface emitting laser based on coherent coupling

We demonstrate a novel oxide confined GaAs-based photonic crystal vertical cavity surface emitting laser (PC-VCSEL) operating at a wavelength of 850 nm based on coherent coupling. A ring-shaped light-emitting aperture is added to the conventional PC-VCSEL, and coherent coupling is achieved between the central defect aperture and the ring-shaped light-emitting aperture. Measurements show that under the continuous-wave (CW) injected current of 20 mA, a high power of 2 mW is obtained, and the side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) is larger than 20 dB. The average divergence angle is 4.2 degrees at the current level of 20 mA. Compared with the results ever reported, the divergence angle is reduced.

不同灌溉制度对玉米根系生长及水分利用效率的影响

为了探讨不同灌溉制度对玉米根系生长和水分利用效率的影响及基因型间差异,在大型活动防雨棚和棚外田间条件下,利用一组玉米遗传材料杂交种户单四号、父本803和母本天四进行了研究。结果发现玉米杂交种在根系生长、分布和水分利用效率上表现出显著的杂种优势。在充分灌溉条件下,玉米杂交种在浅层的根长密度大于亲本,但在水分亏缺条件下,玉米杂交种根长密度在整个剖面上都显著大于亲本;同一玉米基因型在不同的灌溉制度下根长密度在土壤剖面的分布也不同,拔节期不灌溉条件下玉米根系在深层土壤中的分布较充分灌溉条件下大,保证了玉米对深层土壤水分的充分吸收,而后期灌水延缓了表层根系生长的衰退,产生明显的补偿效应;拔节期干旱而抽雄期和灌浆期灌水显著提高了3种基因型玉米的水分利用效率。通过合理灌溉优化玉米根系分布特性以提高玉米吸水能力和水分利用效率,是节水栽培上的可行途径。

黄土高原六盘山生态经济圈功能区规划研究

六盘山区位于黄河中上游,是黄土高原西部天然生态屏障和水源涵养区,在中国生态环境建设中具有重要战略地位。本区土地资源丰富,生态环境洁净,旱作农业潜力大,草畜业兴旺。六盘山生态经济圈规划了4个功能区和7大特色农业基地产业,以六盘山国家自然保护区为中心,加大退耕造林种草与管护力度,到2015年基本修复六盘山区受损的森林生态系统和灌丛草原植被;以旱作农业技术体系为支撑,建立高效可持续发展的生态农业系统和绿色农牧产品基地,为经济社会发展和新农村建设提供良好的生态环境和农业基础。

干旱对不同冬小麦旗叶光合产物供应能力的影响

研究干旱对小麦旗叶光合产物供应能力的影响,揭示小麦抗旱高产的生理机制,为提高小麦的抗旱能力及高产稳产提供理论依据。【方法】在防雨池栽培条件下,以旱地冬小麦品种长武134(抗旱性强)和水地冬小麦品种陕253(抗旱性弱)为试材,以适宜水分处理为对照(CK,土壤含水量为田间持水量的70%～75%),研究干旱处理(土壤含水量为田间持水量的50%～55%)对不同冬小麦旗叶光合产物供应速率(净光合速率和蔗糖合成能力)和供应持续期的影响。【结果】与对照相比,干旱处理降低了冬小麦灌浆中后期旗叶净光合速率,缩短了净光合速率高值持续期(PAD),其中长武134降幅较小,净光合速率较高;干旱处理提高了冬小麦灌浆初期旗叶的蔗糖磷酸合成酶(SPS)活性,其中长武134增幅较大,且在灌浆中后期依然能保持相对较高的蔗糖供应能力;干旱处理缩短了冬小麦叶绿素含量缓降期(RSP),提高了丙二醛(MDA)含量,加速了旗叶的衰老,缩短了光合产物的供应持续期,其中长武134受干旱影响较小;干旱处理降低了冬小麦灌浆中后期主茎穗粒质量积累量及其速率,其中长武134降幅较小。【结论】干旱条件下,抗旱品种长武134旗叶在灌浆中后期可维持较高的光合产物...

秸秆覆盖量对夏玉米产量影响的试验研究

通过对夏玉米在露天和干旱棚控水2种土壤水分状况下生长状况的观测,发现秸秆覆盖夏玉米有明显增产效应,作物水分利用效率均得到了不同程度提高。通过对0、3000、6000、9000、12000 kg/hm2五种处理下玉米状况的对比,得出6000 kg/hm2为渭河平原地区最适宜夏玉米田秸秆覆盖量。在6000 kg/hm2覆盖量下,露天小区夏玉米可增产5.61%。试验证明,渭河平原地区秸秆覆盖夏玉米,增产潜力大,是一种值得推广的玉米增产措施。

玉米根系活力杂种优势及其与光合特性的关系

对大田不同水分处理条件下玉米杂交种及其亲本在经济产量形成期的根系活力及其衰退的杂种优势进行了研究,并分析了根系活力与叶片光合特性之间的关系。结果表明,水分亏缺显著降低了玉米的根系活力;充分供水和水分亏缺条件下,玉米杂交种根系活力都具有显著的杂种优势;杂交玉米种根系活力衰退速率具有显著的负优势,抽雄后灌水能够显著降低玉米根系活力衰退速率。杂交玉米种在抽雄期各水分处理下的光合速率显著大于亲本;玉米根系活力与光合速率之间具有显著的正相关关系,随着根系活力的增高,玉米光合速率、气孔导度和蒸腾速率均增高。因此,杂交种较高的抗旱性是根冠共同作用的结果。在玉米育种和栽培中,要充分地考虑到根系对地上部生理活性的影响。

Study on tapered crossed subwavelength gratings by Fourier modal method

Fourier modal method incorporating staircase approximation is used to study tapered crossed subwavelength gratings in this paper. Three intuitive formulations of eigenvalue functions originating from the prototype are presented, and their convergences are compared through numerical calculation. One of them is found to be suitable in modeling the diffraction efficiency of the circular tapered crossed subwavelength gratings without high absorption, and staircase approximation is further proven valid for non-highly-absorption tapered gratings. This approach is used to simulate the "moth-eye" antireflection surface on silicon, and the numerical result agrees well with the experimental one.