Hanoi’s Built Materiality and the Scales of Anthropology

Hanoi’s ‘collective housing quarters’ (KTTs) are a living legacy of its socialist past. Since the 2000s the state has set out radical redevelopment plans to transform KTTs into new buildings, but these have largely failed. What are the possible explanations for this failure? KTTs have gradually transformed in their material forms through self-built modifications initiated by residents. Such material property of KTTs bears on the pathway of redevelopment, but official discourses are silent about this. In this article I show how KTTs as things have the capacity to transform anthropological thinking. The material property of KTTs as a citywide phenomenon affords a particular scale of analysis, with which we can imagine humans as participants in the material world instead of viewing materialities as participants in society.

A Novel Variable Extensometer Method for Measuring Ductility Scaling Parameters from Single Specimens

Macro-scale ductility is not an intrinsic material property but is dependent on the overall geometry of the specimen. To account for variety in specimen geometries, multiple ductility scaling laws have been developed which scale ductility between different specimen sizes. Traditionally, these ductility laws rely on testing multiple different specimens of varying sizes to obtain material parameters, often done by varying gauge lengths. With the use of Digital Image Correlation (DIC), this work presents a technique where multiple different gauge lengths are extracted from a single specimen to obtain ductility scaling parameters from a single experiment. This technique provides orders of magnitude more data from each specimen than previous techniques. This variable extensometer method is then validated by testing multiple different geometries and select scaling laws are then compared.

A New "Intersection" Method for Multi-Objective Optimization in Material Selection

Till now the previous methods for multi-objective optimization adopt the "additive" algorithm for the normalized evaluation indexes, which has the inherent shortcoming of taking the form of "union" in the viewpoint of set theory. In fact, "simultaneous optimization of multiple indexes" should be more appropriate to take the form of "intersection" for the normalized evaluation indexes in the respects of set theory and "joint probability" in probability theory. In this paper, a new concept of favorable probability is proposed to reflect the favorable degree of the candidate material in the selection; All material property indicators are divided into beneficial or unbeneficial types to the material selection; Each material property indicator correlates to a partial favorable probability quantitatively, and the total favorable probability of a candidate material is the product of all partial favorable probabilities in the viewpoints of "intersection" of set theory and "joint probability" in probability theory, which is the sole decisive index in the competitive selection process. Results of the application examples indicate the validity of the new method.