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The need for shelter is a growing worldwide problem. In developing countries this need far exceeds the capacity of government agencies to respond. Cooperative self-help techniques often provide alternative means for lower income people to imporve their own shelter and community services with a minimun of outside assistance. These techniques may often require the introduction of less advanced, but appropriate building technology is important. It is, however, only one part of a comprehensive system needed to produce better housing. In many countries, technology is the least important constraint; more serious concerns are building technology is important. It is, however, only one part of a comprehensive system needed to produce better housing. In many countries, technology is the least important constraint; more serious concerns are managerial and financial obstacles. The Building Materials Production Centers concept is part of a larger shelter development strategy; a "Cooperative Development System 1) aimed at promoting low-cost housing in developing countries. The self-help construction that takes place in squatter settlements and rural areas is often poorly served by the formal construction industry material suppliers and must rely on informal material production systems for building materials. Building Materials Production Centers can be established to meet the needs of these settlement areas in a more efficient way at a reasonable cost and at locations where people are improving their own housing and communities. ; Las necesidades de alojamiento constituyen un problema creciente a nivel mundial. En los países en vías de desarrollo, esta necesidad excede con mucho la capacidad de respuesta de las agencias gubernamentales. Las técnicas cooperativas de auto-construcción proporcionan, a menudo, medios alternativos para la población de ingresos bajos que puede mejorar sus propios alojamientos y servicios comunitarios con un mínimo de asistencia exterior. Estas técnicas pueden requerir muchas veces la utilización de ...

Inspired by Georges Perec's musings on reading, which he likens to "a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs", Simon Morris' latest book sets exactly those feral avians to work on the very surface of Perec's celebrated text "Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline". In the process he puts pressure on all of the terms in Perec's title: what does it mean to engage a text physically — looking at print, flipping pages, processing language, vocalizing, responding — without any of the social practices or semantics we usually associate with "reading." Or, to put this as Wittgenstein might: what activities still embody a grammar of reading even in the absence of what would seem to be its defining features. Moreover, Pigeon Reader intervenes as a precise facsimile edition of Perec's book, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin books, 1997), with only the single chapter on reading modified. Pigeon Reader is thus also a kind of inversion, as well as an intervention: where British copyright laws permit copying 5% of a book, Morris has copied 95%. In reprinting the book to this extent, Morris' conviction has gone beyond the recent tradition of the artists' insert. Within the paratext he has corrupted the corporate branding, with penguins morphing into pigeons and advertisements re-imagined. One could be forgiven for asking why someone would remake an entire book just to make a conceptual play in a single chapter. Morris would likely respond by further appropriating and recontextualizing Perec's closing words from "Reading": "These are questions that I ask, and I think there is some point in a writer asking them."

Abstract. Natural hazard models need accurate digital elevation models (DEMs) to simulate mass movements on real-world terrain. A variety of platforms (terrestrial, drones, aerial, satellite) and sensor technologies (photogrammetry, lidar, interferometric synthetic aperture radar) are used to generate DEMs at a range of spatial resolutions with varying accuracy. As the availability of high-resolution DEMs continues to increase and the cost to produce DEMs continues to fall, hazard modelers must often choose which DEM to use for their modeling. We use satellite photogrammetry and topographic lidar to generate high-resolution DEMs and test the sensitivity of the Rapid Mass Movement Simulation (RAMMS) software to the DEM source and spatial resolution when simulating a large and complex snow avalanche along Milford Road in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Holding the RAMMS parameters constant while adjusting the source and spatial resolution of the DEM reveals how differences in terrain representation between the satellite photogrammetry and topographic lidar DEMs (2 m spatial resolution) affect the reliability of the simulation estimates (e.g., maximum core velocity, powder pressure, runout length, final debris pattern). At the same time, coarser representations of the terrain (5 and 15 m spatial resolution) simulate avalanches that run too far and produce a powder cloud that is too large, though with lower maximum impact pressures, compared to the actual event. The complex nature of the alpine terrain in the avalanche path (steep, rough, rock faces, treeless) makes it a suitable location to specifically test the model sensitivity to digital surface models (DSMs) where both ground and above-ground features on the topography are included in the elevation model. Considering the nature of the snowpack in the path (warm, deep with a steep elevation gradient) lying on a bedrock surface and plunging over a cliff, RAMMS performed well in the challenging conditions when using the high-resolution 2 m lidar DSM, with 99 % of the simulated debris volume located in the documented debris area.