INTRODUCTION Interventions on behalf of the marginalized in society can assume many formats. In an urban slum the Government of Delhi built one-room houses for some of the residents in what is termed a 'plot area'. Not all residents could be accommodated in the project and the remainder continued to live next door in shanty houses of the slum. Nineteen years later, young children who had migrat...

A critical component of preventing the spread of vector borne diseases such as Chagas disease are door-to-door campaigns by public health officials that implement insecticide application in order to eradicate the vector infestation of households. The success of such campaigns depends on adequate household participation during the active phase as well as on sufficient follow-up during the survei...

This paper presents a pioneering effort to define the efficiency of the most common simulation-based design methods, namely the parametric simulation method (PSM) and the simulation-based optimization method (SOM), in improving two building performance indicators: thermal comfort and energy consumption. Three case-study houses were selected and their indoor conditions were continuously monitore...

An ecological control method, using environmental management operations, based on biological and behavioral characteristics of Triatoma dimidiata (Latreille, 1811), was implemented as a pilot project in an area of Costa Rica where the bug is prevalent. The sample was represented by 20 houses with peridomestic colonies (two also had indoor infestation), divided in two equivalent groups of 10 eac...

There is broad consensus among researchers both that faces are processed more holistically than other objects and that this type of processing is beneficial. We predicted that holistic processing of faces also involves a cost, namely, a diminished ability to localize change. This study (N = 150) utilized a modified change-blindness paradigm in which some trials involved a change in one feature ...