This paper attempts to provide a cost-benefit analysis of the economic and social effects of hosting the Olympic Games. I provide an overview of the economic and social impacts of the Games and analyze their effects. I focus the economic effects of the Games on tourism, trade, corporate sponsorship and the sale of television rights. I also look at the social effects of the Games on infrastructure and employment. Finally I assess why the Olympics remain an appealing venture for cities, despite evidence that demonstrates how they produce more actual harm than good for the host city. In addition, I provide predictions for two alternative directions that the Olympics could take in the future: to either continue in the current trend of immense growth and commercialization, or alternatively, implement a new Olympic bidding process that establishes stricter criteria for candidate cities.

A formal framework is developed and implemented in this research for preliminary rotorcraft design using IPPD methodology. All the technical aspects of design are considered including the vehicle engineering, dynamic analysis, stability and control, aerodynamic performance, propulsion, transmission design, weight and balance, noise analysis and economic analysis. The design loop starts with a detailed analysis of requirements. A baseline is selected and upgrade targets are identified depending on the mission requirements. An Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC) is developed that is used to measure the goodness of the design or to compare the design with competitors. The requirements analysis and baseline upgrade targets lead to the initial sizing and performance estimation of the new design. The digital information is then passed to disciplinary experts. This is where the detailed disciplinary analyses are performed. Information is transferred from one discipline to another as the design loop is iterated. To coordinate all the disciplines in the product development cycle, Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) techniques e.g. All At Once (AAO) and Collaborative Optimization (CO) are suggested. The methodology is implemented on a Light Turbine Training Helicopter (LTTH) design. Detailed disciplinary analyses are integrated through a common platform for efficient and centralized transfer of design information from one discipline to another in a collaborative manner. Several disciplinary and system level optimization problems are solved. After all the constraints of a multidisciplinary problem have been satisfied and an optimal design has been obtained, it is compared with the initial baseline, using the earlier developed OEC, to measure the level of improvement achieved. Finally a digital preliminary design is proposed. The proposed design methodology provides an automated design framework, facilitates parallel design by removing disciplinary interdependency, current and updated information is made available to all disciplines at all times of the design through a central collaborative repository, overall design time is reduced and an optimized design is achieved.

The United States is the only developed nation that fails to provide its citizens with paid parental leave. The lack of parental benefit provision operates to the detriment of individuals and society as a whole by contributing to inequity across gender, race, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. As the demographics of the American workforce have changed, public policy has not kept pace. Paid parental leave is associated a number of health, economic, and social benefits. However, the greatest barrier to legislating paid parental leave is the philosophical underpinnings of American politics, specifically the strong current of liberal individualism and absence of maternalism. This thesis examines the policy option space for paid parental leave in the United States and recommends a paid parental leave policy that is gender-neutral and has a combination of three months individual leave and three months of shared leave at 100 percent wage replacement.

The rise of “zero tolerance” discipline practices in US primary and secondary schools has become increasingly well documented by the media and empirical studies. Despite the extensive scholarship that has emerged from these conversations, many of these analyses are limited in their scope and do not connect the phenomena of zero tolerance in schools to the diverse, shifting forces at play within American politics and policy today. As such, the goal of this work is to synthesize ideas about zero tolerance across disciplines by integrating historical thought, philosophical frameworks of punishment, shifting policy goals within the US education system, the sociological constructions of “deviance” and “disorder” in the context of the US criminal justice system, and empirical data directly from a school district to develop particular policy recommendations accordingly. The primary research question of this analysis is: What are the effects of zero tolerance discipline policies on educational outcomes? To answer this question, Chicago Public Schools will be employed as a case study from which lessons for the nation at large will be drawn. Ultimately, this analysis ends up revealing the ways in which zero tolerance policies stem from much deeper forces at play between dominant and marginal groups, and what comes to be defined as “deviance” in relation to a socially constructed system of “order.”

This thesis analyzes how caring relationships and an emancipatory approach to law related education (LRE) within juvenile justice facilities can cultivate political agency. I focused specifically on Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige, an LA County juvenile probation facility, in La Verne, CA, as a case study. During three months of teaching a law related education class and embedding myself at the facility with an asset-based framework, I encountered a wealth of knowledge that incarcerated juveniles possess, not from formal education or research, but based in their own lived experiences. Los Angeles County Probation spends $233,000 per student per year; assuming best intentions of those in charge and the actors, the students, with a wide array of expertise, should be thriving within these institutions and set up for success upon their release. Unfortunately, though, students’ academic, entrepreneurial, and legal expertise are criminalized rather than cultivated by the juvenile justice system. Through a policy class, the students created reforms to address the challenges of a paramilitary camp that neglects students’ emotional, physical, and mental health. The challenges in the environment complicate the political agency of students within the camp and post-release. I am making the claim that the political agency of the students is visible and the assets are tangibly cultivated by an emancipatory pedagogy, ethic of care, and the law related education curriculum.

La finalité de ce travail exploratoire, inscrit dans le cadre d’une didactique professionnelle du design naissante, est de comprendre l’incidence de l’alternance sur les apprentissages d’étudiants en design. Dans ce but, les connaissances ou savoirs impliqués et les représentations que les prescriptions proposent sont extraits puis mis en regard des représentations que les étudiants construisent de l’activité de conception en tant qu’objet social ou en jeu dans les activités d’apprentissage. Pour aborder ces représentations décrites ou construites, puis leur incidence sur l’activité de conception et sur les apprentissages, il est fait appel à un champ théorique multidisciplinaire et à un cadre méthodologique dialectique s’appuyant sur une analyse curriculaire et sur une analyse de l’activité des étudiants-apprentis. Les résultats mettent en lumière des représentations, parfois antagonistes, de l’activité de conception et de la profession de designer. Ils montrent que l’alternance des temps et des lieux d’apprentissage est un révélateur, pour les étudiants, des spécificités de l’activité de conception au sein de chacun des environnements. Ainsi, les environnements « organisants » et « capacitants » du curriculum réel, impensés dans le prescrit, modifient et régulent l’activité et le développement des compétences. Enfin, la production de connaissances, prescrite par le curriculum dans la cadre d’un « mémoire de recherche », permet aux apprentis-designers-chercheurs de développer des formes d’expertises qui interrogent sur les interactions entre savoirs pour agir et métaconnaissances pour concevoir et semblent redéfinir la représentation de la compétence de conception. / The purpose of this exploratory work, grounded on an emerging professional pedagogy of design, is to understand the impact of work-linked training in design on the learning of the design activity by students. To that end, the knowledge involved is extracted, juxtaposed with the representations that the requirement offers, and then set against the representations that students build of design activity as a social object as well as those involved in learning activities. Therefore, the theoretical field which is used is multidisciplinary. It induces a dialectical methodologic framework based both on a curricular analysis, necessary to understand the observed teaching situations, and on an analysis of the students’ activities. The outcomes shed light on these (sometimes conflicting) representations of creative design activity and of the designer’s profession. Outcomes also show the alternating times and places of learning situations reveal to the students the specificity of both designing situation. Thus, the “organizing environments” of the real curriculum and untaught within the required one, modify and regulate the system of interactions and the development of the students’ design skills. Moreover, the exchange device induces a timeline and “enabling” working and learning environments. Finally, the production of knowledge, required by the curriculum through the “research thesis”, allows the “apprentices-designers-researchers” to develop forms of expertise that question the interactions between knowledge to act and meta-knowledge to design and seems to redefine the representation of the design skill.

This study will trace the history and development of a new idea in recreation, that of the Junior Sportsmen’s Club. This program was first worked out by the writer ar Lodi, California, while he was employed by the Lodi Recreation Department, and has in a few short years spread throughout the United States. The writer feels the inasmuch as the project has been an actual field experiment, his study should be of value to other communities or to other leaders in recreation. This provides the reason as well as the justification for this study.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Topology optimization allows designers to obtain lightweight structures considering the binary distribution of a solid material. The introduction of cellular material models in topology optimization allows designers to achieve significant weight reductions in structural applications. However, the traditional topology optimization method is challenged by the use of cellular materials. Furthermore, increased material savings and performance can be achieved if the material and the structure topologies are concurrently designed. Hence, multi-scale topology optimization methodologies are introduced to fulfill this goal. The objective of this investigation is to discuss and compare the design methodologies to obtaining optimal macro-scale structures and the corresponding optimal meso-scale material designs in continuum design domains. These approaches make use of homogenization theory to establish communication bridges between both material and structural scales. The periodicity constraint makes such cellular materials manufacturable while relaxing the periodicity constraint to achieve major improvements of structural performance. Penalization methods are used to obtain binary solutions in both scales. The proposed methodologies are demonstrated in the design of stiff structure and compliant mechanism synthesis. The multiscale results are compared with the traditional structural-level designs in the context of Pareto solutions, demonstrating benefits of ultra-lightweight configurations. Errors involved in the mult-scale topology optimization procedure are also discussed. Errors are mainly classified as mesh refinement errors and homogenization errors. Comparisons between the multi-level designs and uni-level designs of solid structures, structures using periodic cellular materials and non-periodic cellular materials are provided. Error quantifications also indicate the superiority of using non-periodic cellular materials rather than periodic cellular materials.

The theme of this diploma thesis is the architectural study of the complex of the Farm of 3D Printers in Jaroslavice. The technology of 3D printing at its speed of development has far outweighed the response to its needs. It lacks a new systematically planned building typology corresponding to the requirements of farms. Farms adapt to the spaces. The main aim of the work is to introduce the possibility of turning the situation and adapting the premises to the farms. The thesis follows the urban design of the restructuring of the Jaroslavice landscape elaborated in the previous semester. The project respects established principles at microregion level in the form of emphasis on self-sufficiency, population integrity or the use of current technologies. The land is located on the southern part of Jaroslavice. There are 3 agricultural buildings located on the property, which until 2010, when a photovoltaic power plant was built, operated in conjunction with a neighboring agricultural court. After the power plant was built, the bonds were irreversibly broken. Buildings are in a very poor condition and mutual cooperation no longer works. The existing solution replaces and shows the possibility of using solar energy in a different way. Thus, the construction cartridge works with a hybrid typology where the 3D production area is combined with the maximum solar gains of the photovoltaic panels. Generative methods have been used to design dominantly either for finding a form in terms of achieving maximum solar gains or after verifying the efficiency of the structure. The proposal has several scenarios of possible development. There are four different stages of growth and the linkage of production areas. Printers are able to replicate themselves at such a rate that they can expect rapid growth. The proposal uses controlled growth methods to simulate complex development under the conditions of maximum solar radiation. Visual distraction and overheating are also solved by atypical sunsets on the exterior façade. Thin-film photovoltaic panels are used on the sun, so it is able to produce electricity besides the shield. The energy-efficient shape along with the great advantage of the layout solution, instead of the corridor disposition, is a basic cell on the central plan view. This makes it possible to control and operate more of the machines more efficiently. The production site forwards counts full robot automation.

User Interface Design is the center concept of this thesis. It was used throughout this thesis in order to remedy the design issue of a product called Loredge. Loredge was a digital document reader that contained a Library page with a very simple design. The ultimate goal was to create design suggestions that provides users with a lot of convenience in navigating items for Loredge’s Library page. The solution was proposed by introducing the design process and the concept of Human-Centered Design, which were the essentials in compliance with Loredge users’ desires. The end results demonstrated some interesting facts about users that researchers did not think about at the beginning, which was very helpful to recognize what users want the most for themselves. Despite some predictable answers, the outcome indeed gave the problem a potential solution. The solution was to introduce categories/groups to users and design for menus and buttons that helps user filter out the items they want to navigate. This was implemented to digital mock-ups using a wireframing tool called Axure. The mock-ups could be found within this degree project. / Användargränssnitt är centrumkonceptet för denna avhandling. Det användes under hela denna avhandling för att avhjälpa designproblemet av en produkt som heter Loredge. Loredge var en digital dokumentläsare som innehöll en bibliotekssida med en mycket enkel design. Det ultimata målet var att skapa designförslag som ger användarna mycket bekvämlighet i navigeringsdokument för Loredges bibliotekssida. Lösningen föreslogs genom att introducera designprocessen och konceptet Human-Centered Design, vilka var nödvändiga i enlighet med Loredge-användarnas önskemål. Slutresultatet visade några intressanta fakta om användare som forskare inte tänkte på i början, vilket var till stor hjälp för att känna igen vad användarna vill ha mest för sig själva. Trots vissa förutsägbara svar gav utfallet verkligen problemet en potentiell lösning. Lösningen var att introducera kategorier / grupper till användare och design för menyer och knappar som hjälper användaren att filtrera ut de dokument som de vill navigera. Detta implementerades för digital mock-ups med hjälp av ett wireframing verktyg som heter Axure. Mock-ups kunde hittas inom detta examensarbete.