Property titles and the urban poor: from informality to displacement?

An extensive literature opposes the provision of property titles for the residents of informal settlements. One concern is that titling leads to commodification and the market-driven displacement of the original inhabitants. Another is that it propagates the ideology of private ownership, undermines collective solidarity and demobilises social movements. This article, based on observations from Mexico City and Guadalajara, finds little evidence of displacement but highlights the importance of location. It supports the view that formalisation undermines resistance, but argues that titling does so by meeting rather than creating the desire of the urban poor for private property and homeownership

A study of William Van Mildert, Bishop of Durham, and the high church movement of the early nineteenth century

This thesis examines the life and ministry of William Van Milder-t (I765-I836) and his membership of the early nineteenth century High Church group known as the Hackney Phalanx. It considers Van Mildert's experiences before ordination and as deacon, priest and bishop, and their influence on his conception of the nature and mission of the Church of England. It relates the measures initiated by the Phalanx for reforming and extending the work of the Church to its members' understanding of their social and political context, and indicates some features of their shared theological position, particularly their ecclesiology. Among the undertakings of the Phalanx, the restructuring of the S.P.C.K, and the founding of new Church Societies to promote education and church-building receive particular attention. Van Mildert's labours as a member of the House of Lords are considered in detail, especially during his Durham episcopate (1826-36), when he was prominent in the unsuccessful opposition to Roman Catholic emancipation and to the Church Temporalities (Ireland) Act of 1833.The founding of Durham University owed much to Van Mildert, Besides contributing an estimated £10,000, he was closely involved both in developing the plans and in piloting the necessary legislation through Parliament. Van Mildert's theological writings are more notable for their extensive acquaintance with the work of earlier theologians than for originality: he disliked Innovation in matters of religion. Besides sermons and episcopal charges, he published Boyle Lectures taking a systematic view of the rise and progress of Infidelity and (while Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity) Bampton Lectures on the principles of Scripture-interpretation. He also produced a complete edition of the works of Waterland. Cited as a theological authority by the Oxford Movement, he nevertheless held aloof from the Movement’s beginnings

Bridging the capability gap in environmental gamma-ray spectrometry

Environmental gamma-ray spectroscopy provides a powerful tool that can be used in environmental monitoring given that it offers a compromise between measurement time and accuracy allowing for large areas to be surveyed quickly and relatively inexpensively. Depending on monitoring objectives, spectral information can then be analysed in real-time or post survey to characterise contamination and identify potential anomalies. Smaller volume detectors are of particular worth to environmental surveys as they can be operated in the most demanding environments. However, difficulties are encountered in the selection of an appropriate detector that is robust enough for environmental surveying yet still provides a high quality signal. Furthermore, shortcomings remain with methods employed for robust spectral processing since a number of complexities need to be overcome including: the non-linearity in detector response with source burial depth, large counting uncertainties, accounting for the heterogeneity in the natural background and unreliable methods for detector calibration. This thesis aimed to investigate the application of machine learning algorithms to environmental gamma-ray spectroscopy data to identify changes in spectral shape within large Monte Carlo calibration libraries to estimate source characteristics for unseen field results. Additionally, a 71 × 71 mm lanthanum bromide detector was tested alongside a conventional 71 × 71 mm sodium iodide to assess whether its higher energy efficiency and resolution could make it more reliable in handheld surveys. The research presented in this thesis demonstrates that machine learning algorithms could be successfully applied to noisy spectra to produce valuable source estimates. Of note, were the novel characterisation estimates made on borehole and handheld detector measurements taken from land historically contaminated with 226Ra. Through a novel combination of noise suppression and neural networks the burial depth, activity and source extent of contamination was estimated and mapped. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that Machine Learning techniques could be operated in real-time to identify hazardous 226Ra containing hot particles with much greater confidence than current deterministic approaches such as the gross counting algorithm. It was concluded that remediation of 226Ra contaminated legacy sites could be greatly improved using the methods described in this thesis. Finally, Neural Networks were also applied to estimate the activity distribution of 137Cs, derived from the nuclear industry, in an estuarine environment. Findings demonstrated the method to be theoretically sound, but practically inconclusive, given that much of the contamination at the site was buried beyond the detection limits of the method. It was generally concluded that the noise posed by intrinsic counts in the 71 × 71 mm lanthanum bromide was too substantial to make any significant improvements over a comparable sodium iodide in contamination characterisation using 1 second counts

THE IMPACT OF MEXICO’S 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 ‘privatization’ with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developers’ construction of mass ‘social housing’ 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 twentieth‐century Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developers’ land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informality—on a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housing—and 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

Seismic data clustering management system

This is the abstract of the paper given at the conference. Copyright @ 2011 The Authors.Over the last years, seismic images have increasingly played a vital role to the study of earthquakes. The large volume of seismic data that has been accumulated has created the need to develop sophisticated systems to manage this kind of data. Seismic interpretation can play a much more active role in the evaluation of large volumes of data by providing at an early stage vital information relating to the framework of potential producing levels. [1] This work presents a novel method to manage and analyse seismic data. The data is initially turned into clustering maps using clustering techniques [2] [3] [4] [5] [6], in order to be analysed on the platform. These clustering maps can then be analysed with the friendly-user interface of Seismic 1 which is based on .Net framework architecture [7]. This feature permits the porting of the application in any Windows – based computer as also to many other Linux based environments, using the Mono project functionality [8], so it can run an application using the No-Touch Deployment [7]. The platform supports two ways of processing seismic data. Firstly, a fast multifunctional version of the classical region-growing segmentation algorithm [9], [10] is applied to various areas of interest permitting their precise definition and labelling. Moreover, this algorithm is assigned to automatically allocate new earthquakes to a particular cluster based upon the magnitude of the centre of gravity of the existing clusters; or create a new cluster if all centers of gravity are above a predefined by the user upper threshold point. Secondly, a visual technique is used to record the behaviour of a cluster of earthquakes in a designated area. In this way, the system functions as a dynamic temporal simulator which depicts sequences of earthquakes on a map [11]

Word frequency predicts translation asymmetry

Bilingualism studies report asymmetries in word processing across languages. Access to L2 words is slower and sensitive to semantic blocking. These observations inform influential models of bilingual processing, which propose autonomous lexicons with different processing routes. In a series of experiments, we explored an alternative hypothesis that the asymmetries are due to frequency of use. Using a within-language ‘translation’ task, involving high/low frequency (HF/LF) synonyms, we obtained parallel results to bilingual studies. Experiment 1 revealed that HF synonyms were accessed faster than LF ones. Experiment 2 showed that semantic blocking slowed retrieval only of LF synonyms, while form blocking produced powerful interference of both HF and LF words. Experiment 3 examined translation speed and sensitivity to blocking in two groups of Russian-English bilinguals who differed in frequency of use of their languages. Translation asymmetries were modulated by frequency of use. The results support an integrated lexicon model of bilingual processing

A new approach to analysing HST spatial scans: the transmission spectrum of HD 209458 b

The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is currently one of the most widely used instruments for observing exoplanetary atmospheres, especially with the use of the spatial scanning technique. An increasing number of exoplanets have been studied using this technique as it enables the observation of bright targets without saturating the sensitive detectors. In this work we present a new pipeline for analyzing the data obtained with the spatial scanning technique, starting from the raw data provided by the instrument. In addition to commonly used correction techniques, we take into account the geometric distortions of the instrument, whose impact may become important when combined to the scanning process. Our approach can improve the photometric precision for existing data and also push further the limits of the spatial scanning technique, as it allows the analysis of even longer spatial scans. As an application of our method and pipeline, we present the results from a reanalysis of the spatially scanned transit spectrum of HD 209458 b. We calculate the transit depth per wavelength channel with an average relative uncertainty of 40 ppm. We interpret the final spectrum with T-Rex, our fully Bayesian spectral retrieval code, which confirms the presence of water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere of HD 209458 b. The narrow wavelength range limits our ability to disentangle the degeneracies between the fitted atmospheric parameters. Additional data over a broader spectral range are needed to address this issue.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figures, 7 tables, Accepted for publication in Ap

Assessing emergence from a prolonged disorder of consciousness: Current opinion and practice in the UK

BACKGROUND: A patient in PDOC must demonstrate functional object use or functional communication to confirm they have emerged from this state. A range of tasks and stimuli are used and patients must achieve 100% accuracy. As consciousness occurs along a continuum, determining emergence is not straightforward. OBJECTIVE: To establish the opinions of expert clinicians on how emergence is determined in practice. METHODS: An online survey was completed by clinicians working in specialist rehabilitation settings across the UK. Questions were asked about diagnosis and confidence, informal assessment, formal assessment, and family involvement. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse responses to closed questions. Responses to open questions were analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: Seventy-five surveys were analysed. Approximately a third (30.4 %) used tasks other than those recommended to determine emergence. A lack of confidence in tasks to detect the return of functional communication was reported by 46.4%. The majority (78.6%) reported they worked with patients who they felt had emerged, but could not demonstrate it based on the current criteria. A range of stimuli were employed, but 30.6% of respondents were not confident they could choose stimuli appropriately. Respondents reported a range of benefits and challenges when involving family in assessment