Urban Spots Research Articles

GEOLOGICAL AND ARCHITECTURAL CONTEXT OF HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKES IN EASTERN VENEZUELA

The importance of local site amplification during historical earthquakes in Eastern Venezuela is documented by setting the information in its geological and historical context. Reports are often only available for a few urban spots settling on soft soils. Prior to the second half of the 20th century, historical information is only available for the Northern Caribbean coast. During the following years, the increase in the number of villages inside the Orinoco basin results in a better description of historical earthquakes. An assessment of intensity values using the descriptions of the damages suffered by religious and military buildings is often unavoidable, because information on the damages suffered by individual houses is often lacking. This constraint requires us to understand the architectural characteristics of the buildings and the history of their repairs. Due to their peculiar geometry, material heterogeneity, and long lasting repairs, the vulnerability of the buildings could indeed be higher than the vulnerability of individual houses. The settlement of forts on top of the steep hills surrounded by soft water-rich soils still enhanced their vulnerability, due to the low-frequency amplification of the ground motion.

Lossless compression of multispectral satellite images

This paper describes a neural network-based technique to compress multispectral SPOT satellite images losslessly. The technique harnesses the pattern recognition property of one-hidden-layer back propagation neural networks to exploit both the spatial and the spectral redundancy of the three-band SPOT images. The networks are initially trained on samples of the SPOT images with a unique network for each of the bands. The resultant trained nonlinear predictors are then used to predict the target SPOT images. Predicted errors are entropy-coded using multi-symbol arithmetic coding. This technique achieves compression ratios of 2.1 times and 3.2 times for urban and rural SPOT images respectively which are above 10% better than using lossless JPEG compression techniques. In comparison with JPEG2000 lossless compression, the proposed technique is 5% better.

Reconquering Urban Spots and Spaces?

Children's publicness ( Kinderöffentlichkeit) develops and occurs in local urban areas. It is obviously threatened today by the lower density of the child population, the institutionalization of childhood and changes in the urban landscape. That does not mean that it is disappearing. Rather, it is undergoing a substantial change. `Scripts' created by the media and involving intensive consumption influence when, where and how children's publicness actually occurs. In dealing with these `scripts', children develop new forms of temporary publicness. Of considerable importance are attempts to develop a new way of integrating medial, sensual-active, body-, space-and group-related actions. The article reconstructs these interrelationships from a cultural analysis perspective. The analysis itself is based on many years of empirical research.

The land clearances at Pilgrim's rest

Despite the volume of material dealing with forced removals in South Africa, there remain some obvious lacunae in the literature. I Among the removals which have been lost from sight in the publicity over dramatic, ideologically-based demolitions of urban group areas and rural black spots are the innumerable relocations of people from company-owned land in the Transvaal. So little is known about social conditions in these vast areas of the province over the past century that a daunting research task lies ahead. The relationship between the history of rural communities and the events of their removal remains largely unexplored, as do the subsequent forms which relocated communities have taken. 2 With masterful understatement, the Surplus People Project noted that 'little primary work has been done' on the abolition of labour tenancy and squatting on farms in the Transvaal. Still less documented is the role of private landowners in the origins and demise of 'squatting' and labour tenancy, despite the extent to which corporate land ownership has played a role in shaping the history of the country, particularly the Transvaal, for over a century. It is partly due to the lack of such studies that the state has been portrayed as the key actor in South African population relocation. Of course there are areas in which that assessment seems largely correct; black spot removals are a case in point. But even there, accumulation and impoverishment, as Beinart and Delius put it in a