Policy interventions and grassroots initiatives: Mismatches in a relocation project in Chennai, India

This article is based on research that took place between 1998 and 2002 in a relocation project in Southern Chennai, India. About 2,640 poor urban households were relocated from the city centre to the project location on the outskirts of the city in the early 1990s. The objectives of the relocation programme, its organisation and the way it was implemented by the local government is described, as well as the role of NGOs in the area. The main focus however is on the initiatives taken by the relocatees in trying to rebuild their lives in the absence of services and employment. It will describe the nature and the direction of these initiatives, their capacity and significance, and how these initiatives are related to the other actors in the area. The extent of coordination between the different actors and an assessment of the manner in which activities could be better coordinated and matched to improve outcomes for the urban poor is discussed

Longitudinal insights on a sites and services resettlement project:The case of Ambedkar Nagar in Chennai, India

Sites and Services (S&amp;S) schemes were popular in resettlement in the Global South, especially between the 1970s and 1990s. Towards the end of the twentieth century they were considered unsuccessful and discontinued. The abandonment of S&amp;S was based on premature evaluations and narrow indicators, with little understanding of the real timeframes of incremental development processes. Yet, literature on the long-term development of S&amp;S is scarce. This article draws on a longitudinal study in a S&amp;S resettlement project in Chennai which was implemented at the beginning of the 1990s. It examines both the physical and social development of the project. Although initially, due to the remote location of the site and related lack of employment opportunities, a substantial number of beneficiaries had left the area during the early years, the long-term insights show that the neighbourhood achieved a desirable physical development. The results also underscore how different types of homeowners and residents enabled the development of various tenure types, including rental space. The paper argues that these developments facilitated social mixing across economic, ethnic, and linguistic groups.</p

FPGA based modular control platform for switched mode power converters

In educational as well as research environments there is a demand for an easy way to prototype switching converters. Several recurring standard tasks like pulse pattern generation, driving controllable switches and analog to digital conversion of physical quantities e.g. current, voltage and temperature, need to be performed. Because these standard tasks interfere with the research focus, a modular control platform for rapid prototyping is highly desirable. In this paper, a system is presented that provides an effective and flexible solution for these requirements

The Structural Complexity of (Bi0.5Na0.5)TiO3-BaTiO3 as Revealed by Raman Spectroscopy

The structural phase diagram of the Pb-free ferroelectric (Na1/2Bi1/2)1-xBaxTiO3 (NBT-BT), x<0.1, has been explored by Raman spectroscopy at temperatures from 10 to 470 K. The data provide clear evidence for a proposed temperature-independent morphotropic phase boundary at x \approx 0.055. However, there is no evidence for a structural phase transition across T \approx 370 K for x > 0.055, where bulk-property anomalies appear to signal a transition to a nonpolar or antiferroelectric phase. The results identify that the phase above 370 K shows short-range ionic displacements that are identical to those in the long-range-ordered phase below 370 K. These conclusions provide a natural interpretation of the weak piezoelectric response in this system and have important implications for the search for Pb-free piezoelectrics.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure

Сербська книжка ХІХ століття у Львівській науковій бібліотеці ім. В. Стефаника (за матеріалами фонду відділу рідкісної книги)

UBUlink(opens in a new window)|Entitled full text(opens in a new window)|View at Publisher(opens in a new window)| In recent years the number and frequency of high-impact floods have increased and climate change effects are expected to increase flood risks even more. The European Union (EU) has recently established the Floods Directive as a framework for the assessment and management of these risks. The aim of this article is to explore factors that have hampered or stimulated the implementation process of the Floods Directive in the Netherlands, from its establishment in 2007 until January 2013. During this period, the first requirements of the Floods Directive had to be implemented, while the second and third obligations were to be in an advanced stage. Following a literature review of policy implementation theories and a content analysis of the Floods Directive, we have studied the implementation processes in the Dutch part of the Meuse and Rhine-West catchments. Perceptions of interviewees and survey respondents were used to identify influential factors. Our research shows that although the implementation process in the Netherlands is on schedule, it is iterative and complex. Various constraining and stimulating factors, affecting the implementation process, are distinguished. The article concludes with some suggestions for improving the further implementation of the Floods Directive

The tail of the contact force distribution in static granular materials

We numerically study the distribution P(f) of contact forces in frictionless bead packs, by averaging over the ensemble of all possible force network configurations. We resort to umbrella sampling to resolve the asymptotic decay of P(f) for large f, and determine P(f) down to values of order 10^{-45} for ordered and disordered systems in two and three dimensions. Our findings unambiguously show that, in the ensemble approach, the force distributions decay much faster than exponentially: P(f) ~ exp(-f^{\alpha}), with alpha \approx 2.0 for 2D systems, and alpha \approx 1.7 for 3D systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.