Resistance to metropolitan institutionality and planning in Chile

In this article, the authors review and analyse two key processes conducted by the Chilean state over the past 50 years. The first process consists of the development of specific planning instruments for the particular realities of metropolitan areas. The second process consists of the successive legislative attempts to work towards a definition of a new form of institutionality for cities with metropolitan profiles. These attempts have either failed or solely become bills of law. Both processes suggest a political and technical resistance throughout history, to substantially modify institutionality, as well as planning instruments, in order to make them more appropriate and consistent with the needs of growing metropolitan areas in Chile.     

Emergency Planning for Hazardous Industrial Areas: A Brazilian Case Study

One of the characteristics of modern industrial development is the emergence of a new typology of accidents whose effects can be spread, in space as well as in time, well beyond the borders of the installations where they occur, sometimes impacting the local population and the environment in a catastrophic fashion. This is the result of a number of factors that have changed the risk profile of modern industrial activities. For a number of reasons, the developing countries have proved to be more vulnerable to industrial disasters. Three of the most catastrophic industrial accidents—Bhopal, San Juan de Ixhuatepec, and Cubatão—occurred in developing countries, claiming thousands of lives. During the 1970s and 1980s the higher degree of public visibility of industrial hazards as a result of serious accidents, led to the creation, especially in the more industrialized countries, of regulations for greater control over industrial activities, either by means of new laws or by updating existing legislation. Some of these regulations were designed to improve the response to accidents with potential impacts outside the industrial sites. This article attempts to describe the current status and identify the shortcomings of off‐site emergency planning for hazardous industrial areas in Brazil. The most important problems are the lack of specific legislation and the absence of awareness and active participation of public authorities. The experience of an off‐site emergency planning process for a Brazilian industrial area is presented. This experience illustrates how difficult it is to prepare and implement emergency planning processes in an industrializing country.     

Some Notes On Fertility Problems In A Colombian Semi-Urban Community

Significant efforts in the field of study and control of reproductive habits of the Colombian population have been made in the last few years by local medical groups. This article attempts to illustrate how the data obtained in this program can be meaningfully exploited from the demographic point of view. Although data available at the time of writing did not comply with the principles of scientific sampling procedures, it is thought that such studies can throw some light on particular issues, such as the patterns of mating, the effect of contraception on birth spacing among married couples, and the relation of fecundity to frequency of coitus. This article deals with some methodological issues which center around these problems.     

Do Markets Favor Agents able to Make Accurate Predictions?

Blume and Easley (1992) show that if agents' have the same savings rule, those who maximize the expected logarithm of next period's outcomes will eventually hold all wealth (i.e. are ‘most prosperous’). However, if no agent adopts this rule then the most prosperous are not necessarily those who make the most accurate predictions. Thus, agents who make inaccurate predictions need not be driven out of the market. In this paper, it is shown that, among agents who have the same intertemporal discount factor (and who choose savings endogenously), the most prosperous are those who make accurate predictions. Hence, convergence to rational expectations obtains because agents who make inaccurate predictions are driven out of the market.     

Asymptotic properties of a human age distribution under a continuous net maternity function

A useful and intuitively appealing proposition in theoretical demography asserts that the age distribution of a closed human populationis asymptotically independent of this shapein thedistant past, and is therefore exclusively determined by the historyof fertility and mortalitythat has prevailed during a reasonably long period of time. The mathematical foundations of this ergodic principle arelaid out in this article and thedetailsof its proofareworked out afteremphasizing an intuitive understanding of the process through which an age distribution tends to "forget" its past. The tendency for an unchanging schedule of vital ratesto produce a fixed agestructure in a closed population, is presented as a corollary of the main proposition dealt with in this article.     

BRINGING PERSONALIZED TIES BACK IN: Their Added Value for Biotech Entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists Interorganizational Networks

Using a unique data set collected in France among biotech entrepreneurs and their venture capital investors (VCs), we measure the added value of personal relationships at the interorganizational level. Our analyses show that when two entrepreneurs share a personal collaboration tie or a personal friendship tie with a VC investor, the probability of having an advice tie and thus exchange tacit knowledge increases significantly. We confirm the importance of this kind of social embeddedness in the biotech industry where personalized ties––as opposed to institutional and contractual relationships––at the interorganizational level had not yet been examined systematically. Our results suggest that strategies of personalization of exchanges are vital for interorganizational learning. These strategies help entrepreneurs to access resources, participate in knowledge building, and co‐orientate activities in this sector.     

Migration and livelihood constellations: Assessing common themes in the face of environmental change in Somalia and among Agro-Pastoral peoples

Research on migration has become more challenging due to at least four factors: (1) more complex migration traditions; (2) the development of migration economies that engage many types of migrants from ever more social and cultural backgrounds; (3) increasing likelihood of climate change-driven environmental migration; and (4) increasing likelihood of conflict-based migration in some contexts. These developments have shaken economic theories of migration and have encouraged interdisciplinary, methodologically mixed, qualitative and quantitative research and analysis. From a review of the literature, we have gleaned 11 common themes about environmental, economic and conflict migration that we differentiate by process (migration behaviours that are still evolving) and patterns (migration behaviours that have become customary). We then consider how positive and negative dimensions of migration can be captured and represented with close attention to livelihood constellations (multiple economic activities combined by individuals, households and families). Finally, focusing on Somalia and agro-pastoral peoples generally, where recent environmental and conflict migration have been added to decades of economic migration and centuries of seasonal, environmental migration associated with pastoralism, we combine historical and qualitative work to demonstrate the value of a livelihood constellation perspective.     

The senses and virtual environments

Designers and developers of immersive 3D virtual environments typically aim to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios yet, traditional emphasis is placed on recreating the visual, and to a much lesser extent, auditory scenes, while ignoring the other senses despite their importance in the real world. However, simulation all of the senses in real-time with a high level of fidelity is still not feasible and recent work has shown that high fidelity reproduction of the real world doesn’t necessarily lead to the greatest user experience and outcomes. In the real world, senses interact with one another and alter each other’s processing and ultimately perception. An understanding of this multi-modal interactivity can, therefore, inform our development of virtual environments. Through perceptual-based rendering, we can exploit multimodal effects to reduce computational requirements while creating more compelling scenarios that take advantage of current technology. In this article, we provide a brief review of fidelity, multimodal interactions and perceptual-based rendering in the virtual domain. We emphasize the perception of reality in the virtual world is subjective and not necessarily a reproduction of reality, but rather a combination of personal experiences including those pertaining to media consumption, which can ultimately lead to better user experiences.