Where to build the walls that protect us

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.Working at a tangent to Wrights & Sites' disrupted walking practices and the notion of the architect-walker, commissioned by Kaleider and funded by Arts Council England, Where to build the walls that protect us was an opportunity to imagine a future city. Originally focused on Exeter in 2013-14, the work was later reiterated for Leeds as part of Compass Festival 2016. Framed as an architectural charrette, participants experienced two distinct phases of activity: initially framed by a series of themed reconnaissance excursions; later followed by an iterative period of generating future-facing models of the city. Literal and poetic drift underpinned the work, for example, through the use of: • post-Situationist walking-art practices drawn from Wrights & Sites and others, e.g. Simon Pope's 'constrained drift', where geographical (or temporal) limits bound the scope of the journey; • strategic, location-specific encounters with 'experts' (whether professional, municipal or resident), as spurs to the imagination; • creative intervention into the process of city planning (Exeter was undertaking a consultation process about its new flood defence scheme at the time); • physical interruption of everyday city life, as unsuspecting members of the public suspended their A to B journeys and join in the reimagining of their city

The Loft: Where Gen Z Goes to Build Relationships and Discover Spiritual Truths

It is an alarming but indisputable fact that the vast majority of Generation Z, specifically those between ages 18 and 25, are not attending and/or not interested in the faith or beliefs of the American Protestant Church today. Studies show that the Western Christian church is losing touch with an entire generation and that reality is the driving force behind this research project. We know from research conducted for this Doctoral Project, as well as from multiple academic and sociological studies that members of Generation Z are often interested in spirituality but are either ignorant or highly skeptical of organized religion. Along with the culturally preconceived idea that the Christian Church is narrow-minded, outdated, and intolerant, this poses a significant problem for faith leaders attempting to reach Generation Z. While formulating this Doctoral Project, I asked: “How can faith leaders connect with this generation in a relevant, viable, and appealing way, which could result in healthy relationships and, ultimately, point young adults to Jesus? Could the Church model Jesus in such a way that young adults become curious about faith and relationship in Jesus?” “If so, how and where?” I will present the idea, proven by data and testing, that the creation of a third space model (named “The Loft”) in which entertaining, interactive, and enlightening activities that appeal to Generation Z are regularly hosted in a neutral, non-threatening environment with a focus on building relationships could be a place where the Holy Spirit could use these authentic relationships to change lives and lead participants to Jesus ultimately

Group reputations: an experimental foray

Often information structures are such that while individual reputation building is impossible groups of agents would have the opportunity of building up a reputation. We experimentally examine whether groups of sellers in markets that suffer from moral hazard are able to build up reputations and, thus, avoid market breakdown. We contrast our findings with situations where sellers alternatively can build up an individual reputation or where there are no possibilities for reputation building at all. Our results offer a rather optimistic outlook on group reputations. Even though sellers only receive some of the reputation benefits of withstanding short-run incentives to exploit trust, they are able to overcome the dilemma and successfully exploit the information structure

Energy and Smart Growth: It's about How and Where We Build

By efficiently locating development, smarter growth land use policies and practices offer a viable way to reduce U.S. energy consumption. Moreover, by increasing attention on how we build, in addition to where we build, smart growth could become even more energy smart. The smart growth and energy efficiency movements thus are intrinsically linked, yet these two fields have mostly operated in separate worlds. Through greater use of energy efficient design, and renewable energy resources, the smart growth movement could better achieve its goals of environmental protection, economic security and prosperity, and community livability. In short, green building and smart growth should go hand in hand. Heightened concern about foreign oil dependence, climate change, and other ill effects of fossil fuel usage makes the energy-smart growth collaboration especially important. Strengthening this collaboration will involve overcoming some hurdles, however, and funders can play an important role in assisting these movements to gain strength from each other. This paper contends there is much to be gained by expanding the smart growth movement to include greater attention on energy. It provides a brief background on current energy trends and programs, relevant to smart growth. It then presents a framework for understanding the connections between energy and land use which focuses on two primary issues: how to build, which involves neighborhood and building design, and where to build, meaning that location matters. The final section offers suggestions to funders interesting in helping accelerate the merger of these fields

Predicting how many animals will be where: how to build, calibrate and evaluate individual-based models

Individual-based models (IBMs) can simulate the actions of individual animals as they interact with one another and the landscape in which they live. When used in spatially-explicit landscapes IBMs can show how populations change over time in response to management actions. For instance, IBMs are being used to design strategies of conservation and of the exploitation of fisheries, and for assessing the effects on populations of major construction projects and of novel agricultural chemicals. In such real world contexts, it becomes especially important to build IBMs in a principled fashion, and to approach calibration and evaluation systematically. We argue that insights from physiological and behavioural ecology offer a recipe for building realistic models, and that Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a promising technique for the calibration and evaluation of IBMs. IBMs are constructed primarily from knowledge about individuals. In ecological applications the relevant knowledge is found in physiological and behavioural ecology, and we approach these from an evolutionary perspective by taking into account how physiological and behavioural processes contribute to life histories, and how those life histories evolve. Evolutionary life history theory shows that, other things being equal, organisms should grow to sexual maturity as fast as possible, and then reproduce as fast as possible, while minimising per capita death rate. Physiological and behavioural ecology are largely built on these principles together with the laws of conservation of matter and energy. To complete construction of an IBM information is also needed on the effects of competitors, conspecifics and food scarcity; the maximum rates of ingestion, growth and reproduction, and life-history parameters. Using this knowledge about physiological and behavioural processes provides a principled way to build IBMs, but model parameters vary between species and are often difficult to measure. A common solution is to manually compare model outputs with observations from real landscapes and so to obtain parameters which produce acceptable fits of model to data. However, this procedure can be convoluted and lead to over-calibrated and thus inflexible models. Many formal statistical techniques are unsuitable for use with IBMs, but we argue that ABC offers a potential way forward. It can be used to calibrate and compare complex stochastic models and to assess the uncertainty in their predictions. We describe methods used to implement ABC in an accessible way and illustrate them with examples and discussion of recent studies. Although much progress has been made, theoretical issues remain, and some of these are outlined and discussed