1,343 research outputs found
THE IMPACT OF MEXICOâS LAND REFORM ON PERIURBAN HOUSING PRODUCTION: Neoliberal or Neocorporatist?
Changes to Mexico's Constitution in the 1990s marked the end of agrarian reform and the Revolutionary land regime which had allowed beneficiaries to work but not to sell their land. New legislation allowed individual parcels of ejido land to be converted into private property. Many observers link this âprivatizationâ with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developersâ construction of mass âsocial housingâ developments: a classic example of neoliberal urbanism. We examine evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, finding that, although some developments do occupy former ejido land, developers mostly prefer private property, including former haciendas. Private sector interests are wary of the ejido for reasons that stem from its place in the corporatist political system that characterized twentiethâcentury Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developersâ land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informalityâon a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housingâand the intertwining of formal and informal. We interpret these interrelated processes of housing production as legacies of corporatism, underlining the significance of political influences on Latin American neoliberalism
Agrammatic but numerate
A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to
which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the
case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both
lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact
calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown
that calculation is associated with activation of a network of
left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and
the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity
of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere
perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment
and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic
number words, all basic computational procedures were intact
across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems
involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for
example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our
knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable
independence of mathematical calculations from language
grammar in the mature cognitive system
Dynamics of a map with power-law tail
We analyze a one-dimensional piecewise continuous discrete model proposed
originally in studies on population ecology. The map is composed of a linear
part and a power-law decreasing piece, and has three parameters. The system
presents both regular and chaotic behavior. We study numerically and, in part,
analytically different bifurcation structures. Particularly interesting is the
description of the abrupt transition order-to-chaos mediated by an attractor
made of an infinite number of limit cycles with only a finite number of
different periods. It is shown that the power-law piece in the map is at the
origin of this type of bifurcation. The system exhibits interior crises and
crisis-induced intermittency.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figure
Automatic creation of boundary-representation models from single line drawings
This thesis presents methods for the automatic creation of boundary-representation models of polyhedral objects from single line drawings depicting the objects. This topic is important in that automated interpretation of freehand sketches would remove a bottleneck in current engineering design methods. The thesis does not consider conversion of freehand sketches to line drawings or methods which require manual intervention or multiple drawings.
The thesis contains a number of novel contributions to the art of machine interpretation of line drawings. Line labelling has been extended by cataloguing the possible tetrahedral junctions and by development of heuristics aimed at selecting a preferred labelling from many possible. The âbundlingâ method of grouping probably-parallel lines, and the use of feature detection to detect and classify hole loops, are both believed to be original. The junction-line-pair formalisation which translates the problem of depth estimation into a system of linear equations is new. Treating topological reconstruction as a tree-search is not only a new approach but tackles a problem which has not been fully investigated in previous work
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Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea Initiative, Export Control Issues for the Proposed PNNL Energy Efficiency Center in North Korea
This is a letter report provided to program participants involved in developing the Energy Efficiency Center in the DPRK
"It has no meaning to me". How do researchers understand the effectiveness of literature searches? A qualitative analysis and preliminary typology of understandings
This study aimed to address the question: what does âeffectivenessâ mean to researchers in the context of literature searching for systematic reviews?
We conducted a thematic analysis of responses to an eâmail survey. Eightyânine study authors, whose studies met inclusion in a recent review (2018), were contacted via eâmail and asked three questions; one directly asking the question: in literature searching, what does effective (or effectiveness in) literature searching mean to you?
Thirtyâeight (46%) responses were received from diverse professional groups, including: literature searchers, systematic reviewers, clinicians and researchers. A shared understanding of what effectiveness means was not identified. Instead, five themes were developed from data: 1) effectiveness is described as a metric; 2) effectiveness is a balance between metrics; 3) effectiveness can be categorised by search purpose; 4) effectiveness is an outcome; and, 5) effectiveness is an experimental concept. We propose that these themes constitute a preliminary typology of understandings.
No single definition of effectiveness was identified. The proposed typology suggests that different researchers have differing understandings of effectiveness. This could lead to uncertainty as to the aim and the purpose of literature searches and confusion about the outcomes. The typology offers a potential route for further exploration
Identification of genetic changes associated with drug resistance by reverse in situ hybridization.
The molecular cytogenetic techniques of comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and reverse in situ hybridization (REVISH) allow the entire genomes of tumours to be screened for genetic changes without the requirement for specific probes or markers. In order to define the ability of REVISH to detect and map regions of amplification associated with drug resistance, we investigated a panel of cell lines selected for resistance to doxorubicin and intrinsic sensitivity to topoisomerase II-inhibitory drugs. We have defined a modified REVISH protocol, which involves double hybridizations with genomic DNA from the test cell lines and chromosome-specific whole chromosome paints to identify the chromosomes to which the amplicons localize. Sites of amplification are then mapped by fractional length measurements (Flpter), using published genome databases. Our findings show that amplification of the topoisomerase II alpha gene is readily detected and mapped, as is amplification of the MDR and MRP loci. Interestingly, REVISH detected a new amplicon in the doxorubicin-resistant lung cancer cell line, GLC4-ADR, which mapped to chromosome 1q. REVISH is therefore ideally suited to characterize genetic changes specific for drug resistance within a background of genetic anomalies associated with tumour progression
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