The social consequences of minor innovations in construction

Innovation studies in construction focus on a desire to increase economics and efficiency at a large scale. This has resulted in a skewed perspective that sees only major corporations with substantial R&D resources, complex projects, or national interests at the heart of innovation. By adopting anthropological methods, it becomes possible to examine the two aims of this paper: to demonstrate that an accumulation of minor innovations can have significant consequences; and to show that these are inherently social rather than purely economic. Results come from fieldwork studying the improvisatory house-building practices of the Kelabit people of rural Borneo, tracing changes to the technologies used for roofing and foundations, and describes how these are mutually entangled with new social structures. The conclusion is that we should think more broadly about the forms and effects of innovation in construction, and recognise the significance of improvisation at the level of the individual or small group

When is the Multiaffine Image of a Cube a Polygon?

We give two simple sufficient conditions under which the multiaffine image on the complex plane of an m-dimensional cube is a convex polygon. A third condition which, in some generic sense, is necessary and sufficient is then obtained. The conditions involve checking the locations of the image of the vertices of the cube. These results help determine whether a family of parametrized polynomials is stable, and provide a tool for robust control analysis