A witty and engrossing look at Los Angeles' urban ecology and the city's place in America's cultural fantasies Earthquakes. Wildfires. Floods. Drought. Tornadoes. Snakes in the sea, mountain lions, and a plague of bees. In this controversial tour de force of scholarship, unsparing vision, and inspired writing, Mike Davis, the author of City of Quartz, revisits Los Angeles as a Book of the Apocalypse theme park. By brilliantly juxtaposing L.A.'s fragile natural ecology with its disastrous environmental and social history, he compellingly shows a city deliberately put in harm's way by land developers, builders, and politicians, even as the incalculable toll of inevitable future catastrophe continues to accumulate. Counterpointing L.A.'s central role in America's fantasy life--the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909--with its wanton denial of its own real history, Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease at the millennial end of "the American century." With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.
This collection of readings is designed for use in tutor-group or year-group assemblies and is based around 39 weekly themes, which comply with the 1988 Education Act. The themes include spiritual awareness, living as a family, healing, friendship, human rights and inter-cultural harmony.
Advanced space exploration is performed by unmanned missions with integrated autonomy in both flight and ground systems. Risk and feasibility are major factors supporting the use of unmanned craft and the use of automation and robotic technologies where possible. Autonomy in space helps to increase the amount of science data returned from missions, perform new science, and reduce mission costs. Elicitation and expression of autonomy requirements is one of the most significant challenges the autonomous spacecraft engineers need to overcome today. This book discusses the Autonomy Requirements Engineering (ARE) approach, intended to help software engineers properly elicit, express, verify, and validate autonomy requirements. Moreover, a comprehensive state-of-the-art of software engineering for aerospace is presented to outline the problems handled by ARE along with a proof-of-concept case study on the ESA's BepiColombo Mission demonstrating the ARE’s ability to handle autonomy requirements.
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