Disaster associated with natural hazards can lead to important changes-positive or negative-in socio-ecological systems. When disasters occur, much attention is given to the direct disaster impacts as well as relief and recovery operations. Although this focus is important, it is noteworthy that there has been little research on the characteristics and progress of change induced by disasters. Change, as distinct from impacts, encompasses formal and informal responses to disaster events and their direct and indirect impacts. While smaller disasters do not often lead to significant changes in societies and organizational structures, major disasters have the potential to change dominant ways of thinking and acting. Against this background, the article presents an analytical framework for distinguishing change from disaster impacts. Drawing from research in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, formal and informal changes after the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 are examined and discussed against the background of the conceptual framework. The changes examined range from the commencement of the peace process in Aceh, Indonesia, to organizational and legal reforms in Sri Lanka. The article concludes that change-making processes after disasters need to be understood more in depth in order to derive important strategic policy and methodological lessons learned for the future, particularly in view of the increasing complexity and uncertainty in decision making due to climate change.

The effects of excess electron occupation on the optical properties of excitons ͑X͒ and biexcitons (2X) in a single self-assembled InGaAs quantum dot are investigated. The behavior of X and 2X differ strongly as the number of excess electrons is varied with the biexciton being much more weakly perturbed as a result of its filled s-shell ground state, a direct manifestation of shell-filling effects. Good correlation is found between charging thresholds observed from s-shell recombination perturbed by p-shell occupation, and direct observation of p-shell recombination.

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The mobility and carrier concentration of a number of InSb-based modulation-doped quantum well heterostructures are examined over a range of temperatures between 4.5 and 300 K. Wide well ͑30 nm͒ and narrow well ͑15 nm͒ structures are measured. The temperature dependent mobilities are considered within a scattering model that incorporates polar optical and acoustic phonon scatterings, interface roughness scattering, and scattering from charged impurities both in the three-dimensional background and within a distributed "quasitwo-dimensional" doping layer. Room temperature mobilities as high as 51 000 cm 2 / V s are reported for heterostructures with a carrier concentration of 5.8ϫ 10 11 cm −2 , while low-temperature mobility ͑below 40 K͒ reaches 248 000 cm 2 / V s for a carrier concentration of 3.9ϫ 10 11 cm −2. A Schrödinger-Poisson model is used to calculate band structures in the material and is shown to accurately predict carrier concentrations over the whole temperature range. Low-temperature mobility is shown to be dominated by remote ionized impurity scattering in wide well samples and by a combination of ionized impurity and interface roughness scattering in narrow well samples.