Performance Escapes and Catastrophes

This chapter presents an overview of newer thinking about how suicide risk fluctuates over time using concepts informed by mathematics, which provides a useful model for understanding why and how suicide emerges in different ways for different people at different times. It focuses in particular on the implications of this perspective for understanding suicides that emerge suddenly or “out of the blue” without much advance notice or warning signs. In the world of dynamical systems, sudden and discontinuous change processes are often referred to as “catastrophic” change because they represent a fundamental shift in how a system operates. Catastrophic change can be so dramatic that it defies reason and cannot be easily anticipated. The chapter then considers the cusp catastrophe model, which stands in contrast to the unidimensional suicide-risk continuum model that has dominated thinking about suicide risk for decades.

Ecologies of Consumption: Food, Materials & Climate

Our ways of living are endangered and on the verge of catastrophic change. Though we may experience the effects of climate change at a macro level, changes are rhizomatic, cascading through scales and networks interconnected by materials and energies, biologies and chemistries, economies and cultures; each of these connections affecting the very ingredients of our everyday life in diverse and unpredictable ways. No other system of matter and exchange offers such a thorough lens through which to examine these effects as does our contemporary food systems. This lecture presents a perspective on how degrees of interconnectivity and the precarity of decision-making for food, materials and construction can impact the future of built environments.

Бифуркация Пуанкаре-Андронова-Хопфа в колебаниях прощелкивания составных несущих и управляющих поверхностей летательных аппаратов

Oscillations of a catastrophic change in shape (oscillations of clicking) compound lifting and control surfaces interconnected in a statically indefinable manner are considered. The influence of the angle of attack on the nature of oscillations is investigated. The phase portraits of the twisting angle of the control surface at different angles of attack are given.