Partial MDS Codes with Local Regeneration

Partial MDS (PMDS) and sector-disk (SD) codes are classes of erasure codes that combine locality with strong erasure correction capabilities. We construct PMDS and SD codes where each local code is a bandwidth-optimal regenerating MDS code. The constructions require significantly smaller field size than the only other construction known in literature

Environment 2.0 : the 9th Biennial Conference on Environmental Psychology, 26-28 September 2011, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

On behalf of the Environmental Psychology Division of the German Association of Psychology, the 9th Biennial International Conference on Environmental Psychology is organized by the Human-Technology Interaction (HTI) group of the School of Innovation Sciences of the Eindhoven University of Technology. The HTI group is internationally acclaimed for perception research, and has become established as a major centre of excellence in human-technology interaction research. Bringing together psychological and engineering expertise, its central mission is investigating and optimizing interactions between people, systems, and environments, in the service of a socially and ecologically sustainable society

Domestic Insurgency - Towards Affordable Housing in Vancouver

Vancouver’s persisting housing crisis has decoupled dwelling prices from local income through persistent capital investment oriented dwelling typologies and restrictions on land availability. Vancouver, as one of the first North American cities to reach a post-sprawl condition, must correct policy and land use to acknowledge changes in dwelling preferences, demographics, and land value to provide a new mass housing strategy. Once contradictory policy is aligned to affordable housing values, the thesis proposes a housing framework for the private sector to profitably build dwellings suitable for a range of local incomes. The framework targets Vancouver’s most prominent, repetitive, and artificially underused land, its low density house neighbourhoods, to resurrect a middle density housing typology to respectfully transition neighbourhoods to affordable dwellings. Using a three pronged approach of neighbourhood improvement, flexible design for occupant control, and a focus on sharing, dwellings are drastically reduced in cost due to efficient space and material planning while simultaneously increasing living benefits to building inhabitants and its existing neighbours. Traditional thresholds at the dwelling and building scales are reimagined to support smaller living spaces and urban development in established neighbourhoods that create new co-dependent beneficial relationships and dynamically mitigate frictions, rather than eliminate them altogether. Ultimately, the framework provokes a wave of disruption in the housing market in response to current crisis conditions by making living more communal, shifting the focus from investment to human capital and by reinstating affordability as a key facet in the living standard formula governing housing design. The framework is an insurgent force that provides affordable housing through the private sector despite distorted high property costs, using existing property and economic mechanisms to create an alternative competitive affordable housing type. It is also an insurgency within the built fabric of the city, inserting itself within established neighbourhoods currently fortified against change and in progressing ideas of co-living and participatory design. Overtime, efforts to improve neighbourhoods for existing residents, putting people first, and creating a sustainable growth strategy capable of housing new residents for the long term, it is the ambition of this proposal to eventually reach a critical mass to reduce housing prices for all dwellings to restore affordability within the entire city

Small is Necessary

Does small mean less? Not necessarily. In an era of housing crises, environmental unsustainability and social fragmentation, the need for more sociable, affordable and sustainable housing is vital. The answer? Shared living - from joint households to land-sharing, cohousing and ecovillages. Using successful examples from a range of countries, Anitra Nelson shows how 'eco-collaborative housing' - resident-driven low impact living with shared facilities and activities - can address the great social, economic and sustainability challenges that householders and capitalist societies face today. Sharing living spaces and facilities results in householders having more amenities and opportunities for neighbourly interaction. Small is Necessary places contemporary models of 'alternative' housing and living at centre stage arguing that they are outward-looking, culturally rich, with low ecological footprints and offer governance techniques for a more equitable and sustainable future