Many houses are at risk of being destroyed by wildfires. While previous studies have improved our understanding of how, when and why houses are destroyed by wildfires, little attention has been given to how these fires started. We compiled a dataset of wildfires that destroyed houses in New South Wales and Victoria and, by comparing against wildfires where no houses were destroyed, investigated...

The social conventions and expectations around the appropriate use of imaging and video has been transformed by the availability of video cameras in our pockets. The impact on law enforcement can easily be seen by watching the nightly news; more and more arrests, interventions, or even routine stops are being caught on cell phones or surveillance video, with both positive and negative consequen...

Recent high-profile incidents of police misconduct have led to calls for increased police accountability. One proposed reform is to equip police officers with body worn cameras, which provide more reliable evidence than eyewitness accounts. However, such cameras may pose privacy concerns for individuals who are recorded, as the footage may fall under open records statutes that would require the...

The housing sector accounts for a large share of the overall energy use and CO2 emissions in the European Union. In the light of the many environmental and economic problems that can arise from high use of fossil fuels, it is necessary to increase efficiency in this sector. In the Italian province of South Tyrol an environmental agency has designed a certification program for the heating demand...

Six methods for detecting domestic infestations by triatomine bugs were compared in the rural community of Amamá, north-west Argentina. An average of three pairs (range, 2-5 pairs) of sensor boxes and sheets of pink typing-paper were tacked to the walls of human sleeping areas in 45 houses for 30 days and then inspected by a two-man team. Triatoma infestans bugs were collected in bedrooms by a ...

Why do people sign petitions? Do they genuinely care about the subject matter, or just feel pressured by the solicitor? I tested this question in a field experiment involving a door-to-door petition drive where the ability of the homeowner to avoid the solicitor was varied. Households in the Flyer treatment group received a flyer on their doorknob announcing that a solicitor would arrive the ne...

A study was undertaken to correlate the impact of housing and patterns of house construction on the vector density and transmission of filaria among the inhabitants of these houses. Three different types of houses in ecologically similar hamlets of Hariharpur village in Varanasi were selected for determining the density of Culex quinquefasciatus, the vector of Wuchereria bancrofti and its infec...