abstract: Sustainable development in an American context implies an ongoing shift from quantitative growth in energy, resource, and land use to the qualitative development of social-ecological systems, human capital, and dense, vibrant built environments. Sustainable urban development theory emphasizes locally and bioregionally emplaced economic development where the relationships between people, localities, products, and capital are tangible to and controllable by local stakeholders. Critical theory provides a mature understanding of the political economy of land development in capitalist economies, representing a crucial bridge between urban sustainability's infill development goals and the contemporary realities of the development industry. Since its inception, Phoenix, Arizona has exemplified the quantitative growth paradigm, and recurring instances of land speculation, non-local capital investment, and growth-based public policy have stymied local, tangible control over development from Phoenix's territorial history to modern attempts at downtown revitalization. Utilizing property ownership and sales data as well as interviews with development industry stakeholders, the political economy of infill land development in downtown Phoenix during the mid-2000s boom-and-bust cycle is analyzed. Data indicate that non-local property ownership has risen significantly over the past 20 years and rent-seeking land speculation has been a significant barrier to infill development. Many speculative strategies monopolize the publicly created value inherent in zoning entitlements, tax incentives and property assessment, indicating that political and policy reforms targeted at a variety of governance levels are crucial for achieving the sustainable development of urban land. Policy solutions include reforming the interconnected system of property sales, value assessment, and taxation to emphasize property use values; replacing existing tax incentives with tax increment financing and community development benefit agreements; regulating vacant land ownership and deed transfers; and encouraging innovative private development and tenure models like generative construction and community land trusts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Sustainability 2013

Doctorat en sciences sociales, politiques et économiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The design of microprocessors is undergoing radical changes that affect the performance and reliability of hardware and will have a high impact on software development. Future systems will depend on a deep collaboration between software and hardware to cope with the current and predicted system design challenges. Instead of higher frequencies, the number of processor cores per chip is growing. Eventually, processors will be composed of cores that run at different speeds or support specialized features to accelerate critical portions of an application. Performance improvements of software will only result from increasing parallelism and introducing asymmetric processing. At the same time, substantial enhancements in the energy efficiency of hardware are required to make use of the increasing transistor density. Unfortunately, the downscaling of transistor size and power will degrade the reliability of the hardware, which must be compensated by software. In this thesis, we present new algorithms and tools that exploit speculative and asymmetric execution to address the performance and reliability challenges of multicore architectures. Our solutions facilitate both the assimilation of software to the changing hardware properties as well as the adjustment of hardware to the software it executes. We use speculation based on transactional memory to improve the synchronization of multi-threaded applications. We show that shared memory synchronization must not only be scalable to large numbers of cores but also robust such that it can guarantee progress in the presence of hardware faults. Therefore, we streamline transactional memory for a better throughput and add fault tolerance mechanisms with a reduced overhead by speculating optimistically on an error-free execution. If hardware faults are present, they can manifest either in a single event upset or crashes and misbehavior of threads. We address the former by applying transactions to checkpoint and replicate the state such that threads can correct and continue their execution. The latter is tackled by extending the synchronization such that it can tolerate crashes and misbehavior of other threads. We improve the efficiency of transactional memory by enabling a lightweight thread that always wins conflicts and significantly reduces the overheads. Further performance gains are possible by exploiting the asymmetric properties of applications. We introduce an asymmetric instrumentation of transactional code paths to enable applications to adapt to the underlying hardware. With explicit frequency control of individual cores, we show how applications can expose their possibly asymmetric computing demand and dynamically adjust the hardware to make a more efficient usage of the available resources.

The property development industry in cities such as Calgary, Edmonton, Denver and Houston experienced a boom characterized by compulsive speculative growth in the 1970's and then a dramatic collapse in 1982. In the wake of the collapse came a crisis in the financial as well as the development sector, which to 1987 is nowhere near resolved. The expansion and decline in the property development industry is seen as a subset of a classical business cycle fueled by the world oil and gas economy, Canadian government regional and economic policies, and changes in money supply and interest rates. These factors are recognized as being contributory, but not a sufficient explanation for the property boom and bust. Additional understanding is offered by an analysis of the decision making process in the development industry. The research, focusing on key decision makers, revealed that repeated decision errors made by developers on strategies related to growth, diversification, and financing contributed significantly to the industry problems. The sources of strategic errors were found to be associated with the key developers' personalities and their perception of the business environment, as well as group and organizational behaviour. In 1976-77 opportunities to gain windfall profits in real estate development encouraged developers to travel from city to city continent wide in search of opportunities. Their fast-paced activity brought key developers stunning successes. Their perceived brilliance attracted followers from the rest of the industry and captured the imagination of the financial community. In 1979-80, as land values began increasing at rates far faster than interest rates, land banking superceded land development as a principal activity. Developers not only borrowed to the maximum under conventional project lending, but they also invented the concept of "appraisal surplus" (the difference between market value and debt) as a measure of their enormous "equity". This in turn permitted them to raise additional capital corporately through debentures and share offering to purchase even more land. By 1981 companies were highly levered financially making them extremely vulnerable to the slightest changes in the marketplace. Rather than recognizing that they were swept up in a property' boom developers, individually and as a group, chose to continue to believe that their "exceptional ability" to turn a profit was the basis for their successes. As the boom accelerated developers abandoned all caution committing to some of their largest and most daring acquisitions at the very peak of the boom. Then, in 1982 the inevitable happened, the bust in the property market. Those public companies with huge financially levered land banks, whose strategies were predicated on continuing inflation and ever increasing market share failed. Those companies, often private, with low debt to equity ratios, conservative financial practices, and income property portfolios survived. Since both sets of companies operated in a similar environment, but one failed and the other survived, the argument that decision making was a crucial factor in understanding the boom-bust property cycle is strengthened. The understanding of change in the activity patterns and in the structure of the built environment is elucidated by the study of decision processes. Insights into decision making and business cycles create a new awareness of the development process. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This thesis concerns with speculative carry trade strategy. Carry trade is based on breach of Uncovered Interest Parity. The theoretical part is focused on traditional fundamental analysis. This thesis deals with the identification of carry trade existence and capture their expressions in the financial markets, verification profitability and attractiveness of carry trade operations, analysis of conditions for carry trade on financial markets before and after global financial crisis 2008. Important part of the work was also description of the consequences of carry trade transactions and their effects on the exchange rate and financial situation

It is necessary put aside the idea that infinite economic development is the solution to terminate inequalities that exist in the world. Should consider a new model of society, which look for specify in the reality the value of justice, the hand of principles of equality and fraternity, where man is in a world of cooperation with others. / Es necesario dejar de lado la idea de que el desarrollo económico infinito es la solución para dar fin a las desigualdades existentes en el mundo. Debe plantearse un nuevo modelo de sociedad, el cual busque concretar en la realidad el valor de la justicia, de la mano de los principios de igualdad y fraternidad, donde el hombre se encuentre en un mundo de cooperación con los demás.

Event stream processing (ESP) applications enable the real-time processing of continuous flows of data. Algorithmic trading, network monitoring, and processing data from sensor networks are good examples of applications that traditionally rely upon ESP systems. In addition, technological advances are resulting in an increasing number of devices that are network enabled, producing information that can be automatically collected and processed. This increasing availability of on-line data motivates the development of new and more sophisticated applications that require low-latency processing of large volumes of data. ESP applications are composed of an acyclic graph of operators that is traversed by the data. Inside each operator, the events can be transformed, aggregated, enriched, or filtered out. Some of these operations depend only on the current input events, such operations are called stateless. Other operations, however, depend not only on the current event, but also on a state built during the processing of previous events. Such operations are, therefore, named stateful. As the number of ESP applications grows, there are increasingly strong requirements, which are often difficult to satisfy. In this dissertation, we address two challenges created by the use of stateful operations in a ESP application: (i) stateful operators can be bottlenecks because they are sensitive to the order of events and cannot be trivially parallelized by replication; and (ii), if failures are to be tolerated, the accumulated state of an stateful operator needs to be saved, saving this state traditionally imposes considerable performance costs. Our approach is to evaluate the use of speculation to address these two issues. For handling ordering and parallelization issues in a stateful operator, we propose a speculative approach that both reduces latency when the operator must wait for the correct ordering of the events and improves throughput when the operation in hand is parallelizable. In addition, our approach does not require that user understand concurrent programming or that he or she needs to consider out-of-order execution when writing the operations. For fault-tolerant applications, traditional approaches have imposed prohibitive performance costs due to pessimistic schemes. We extend such approaches, using speculation to mask the cost of fault tolerance.:1 Introduction 1 1.1 Event stream processing systems ......................... 1 1.2 Running example ................................. 3 1.3 Challenges and contributions ........................... 4 1.4 Outline ...................................... 6 2 Background 7 2.1 Event stream processing ............................. 7 2.1.1 State in operators: Windows and synopses ............................ 8 2.1.2 Types of operators ............................ 12 2.1.3 Our prototype system........................... 13 2.2 Software transactional memory.......................... 18 2.2.1 Overview ................................. 18 2.2.2 Memory operations............................ 19 2.3 Fault tolerance in distributed systems ...................................... 23 2.3.1 Failure model and failure detection ...................................... 23 2.3.2 Recovery semantics............................ 24 2.3.3 Active and passive replication ...................... 24 2.4 Summary ..................................... 26 3 Extending event stream processing systems with speculation 27 3.1 Motivation..................................... 27 3.2 Goals ....................................... 28 3.3 Local versus distributed speculation ....................... 29 3.4 Models and assumptions ............................. 29 3.4.1 Operators................................. 30 3.4.2 Events................................... 30 3.4.3 Failures .................................. 31 4 Local speculation 33 4.1 Overview ..................................... 33 4.2 Requirements ................................... 35 4.2.1 Order ................................... 35 4.2.2 Aborts................................... 37 4.2.3 Optimism control ............................. 38 4.2.4 Notifications ............................... 39 4.3 Applications.................................... 40 4.3.1 Out-of-order processing ......................... 40 4.3.2 Optimistic parallelization......................... 42 4.4 Extensions..................................... 44 4.4.1 Avoiding unnecessary aborts ....................... 44 4.4.2 Making aborts unnecessary........................ 45 4.5 Evaluation..................................... 47 4.5.1 Overhead of speculation ......................... 47 4.5.2 Cost of misspeculation .......................... 50 4.5.3 Out-of-order and parallel processing micro benchmarks ........... 53 4.5.4 Behavior with example operators .................... 57 4.6 Summary ..................................... 60 5 Distributed speculation 63 5.1 Overview ..................................... 63 5.2 Requirements ................................... 64 5.2.1 Speculative events ............................ 64 5.2.2 Speculative accesses ........................... 69 5.2.3 Reliable ordered broadcast with optimistic delivery .................. 72 5.3 Applications .................................... 75 5.3.1 Passive replication and rollback recovery ................................ 75 5.3.2 Active replication ............................. 80 5.4 Extensions ..................................... 82 5.4.1 Active replication and software bugs ..................................... 82 5.4.2 Enabling operators to output multiple events ........................ 87 5.5 Evaluation .................................... 87 5.5.1 Passive replication ............................ 88 5.5.2 Active replication ............................. 88 5.6 Summary ..................................... 93 6 Related work 95 6.1 Event stream processing engines ......................... 95 6.2 Parallelization and optimistic computing ................................ 97 6.2.1 Speculation ................................ 97 6.2.2 Optimistic parallelization ......................... 98 6.2.3 Parallelization in event processing .................................... 99 6.2.4 Speculation in event processing ..................... 99 6.3 Fault tolerance .................................. 100 6.3.1 Passive replication and rollback recovery ............................... 100 6.3.2 Active replication ............................ 101 6.3.3 Fault tolerance in event stream processing systems ............. 103 7 Conclusions 105 7.1 Summary of contributions ............................ 105 7.2 Challenges and future work ............................ 106 Appendices Publications 107 Pseudocode for the consensus protocol 109

[pt] A tese desenvolvida no âmbito do Programa de Literatura Cultura e Contemporaneidade resulta da pesquisa, reunião e apresentação de documentos e lembranças sobre uma expedição científica para o Pantanal que ocorreu em 1947. A investigação indaga sobre as dimensões artísticas e científicas da viagem nos contextos geral da expedição e particular de seus participantes, levanta questões sobre métodos para narrar e vislumbrar paisagens e concretiza-se no formato de uma miscelânea verbo-visual. O trabalho se desdobra em dois momentos: o primeiro é voltado para a apresentação da expedição que partiu da então capital federal, Rio de Janeiro, composta por um grupo de estudantes da Universidade do Brasil, liderados pelo geógrafo Hilgard Sternberg, e por outro formado por estudantes do Instituto Rio Branco liderados pelo diplomata e escritor João Guimarães Rosa. O segundo momento volta-se para a metodologia de pesquisa empregada neste trabalho e para os deslocamentos dos estudos técnico-científicos para o âmbito especulativo e artístico, refletindo sobre o trânsito entre as diferentes esferas do conhecimento e experimentando com linguagens verbo-visuais, a partir de fragmentos da expedição e especulações conceituais. O trabalho se constitui na invenção de seu próprio arquivo, transformando vestígios, lembranças e papéis inúteis em documentos. O cerne da pesquisa é o material gerado pelos participantes da expedição, mantido em arquivos públicos e domésticos, como: publicações, lembranças narradas, fotografias, correspondências e cadernos, entre os quais encontramos manuscritos inéditos de Rosa. / [en] The thesis developed within the scope of the Culture and Contemporaneity Literature Program results from the research, gathering and presentation of documents and memories about a scientific expedition to the Pantanal region that took place in 1947. The investigation focuses on the artistic and scientific dimensions of the expedition, by presenting general contexts of the voyage and of its participants; it also raises questions about methods for narrating and envisioning landscapes and takes the form of a verbal-visual miscellany. The work unfolds within two moments: firstly, focuses on the presentation of the expedition that left the former Brazilian Federal District, Rio de Janeiro, composed of a group of students from the University of Brazil, led by the geographer Hilgard Sternberg, and another group of students from the Rio Branco Institute led by the diplomat and writer João Guimarães Rosa. The second moment turns to the research methodology used in the thesis and reflects on the transit from technical-scientific to speculative and artistic scopes, reflecting on different spheres of knowledge and experimenting with verbalvisual languages, working with fragments of the expedition and conceptual speculations. This effort constitutes the invention of an archive of its own, transforming traces, memories and useless papers into documents. The core of the research is the material generated by the expedition s participants, kept in public and domestic archives, such as: publications, narrated memories, photographs, correspondence and notebooks, among which we find unpublished manuscripts by Rosa.

A historical study of the urban texture of Gamla Stan shows how public space has been appropriated for private needs. Streets were built over, closed off or turned into private courtyards, some of which have started to disappear, being completely internalized. This process of space appropriation was one-directional until the early 1900s, when the fear of losing structures across town made authorities create a precedent and revert the process by removing specific houses from the urban texture. This approach is based on a set of rules which I changed when making my project: the re-examination of all the hidden, internal, private spaces and their re-introduction to public life.    My set of criteria is rooted in a research of the elements that constitute the borderline in Gamla Stan's public vs private realm: doors, passages and courtyards. Based on that I  limited my  intervention techniques to the removal of three elements: fences, structures, and doors. The last one has two sub-categories "the removed wall" (turned into a new door) and "the removed lock" (opening an existing door). By establishing the parameters of my work, I tested this speculation in a specific case scenario - a cluster of four blocks on the west side of Gamla Stan. Using the rule I that a door must be the beginning of a corridor path that leads to an open court, and having the historical knowledge of the  location of past public spaces, I surgically removed later additions of lesser architectural or historical quality. The result of this is a new interconnected, accessible network. Until now one was restricted to walking along the streets and alleys, and around buildings in Gamla Stan. With this intervention people can walk through the buildings and into the reclaimed spaces, thus shifting one’s perception of the urban texture. The new alternative, total system of navigation turns solid into permeable/perforated. Alley City has become Corridor City.

Den svenska fastighetsbranschen är genom bankernas höga exponering av stor vikt för Sveriges finansiella stabilitet. Sedan inflationen tagit fart under 2021, följde Riksbanken utvecklingen genom att från mitten av 2022 intensivt höja styrräntan till 4%. En identifierad sårbarhet har ansetts vara de ofta högt belånade fastighetsbolagen, vars finansieringskostnader stigit från tidigare periods noll- och minusränta.  En utbredd metod för ränteriskhantering är användandet av derivatinstrument, där bolagens storlek tidigare antytts ha stor påverkan. Syftet med studien är därför att undersöka hur de svenska medelstora fastighetsbolagen använt räntederivat för hantering av ränterisken under den senaste tidens ränteförändringar. Studien bygger på 11 intervjuer med Mid Cap noterade fastighetsbolag, som genom semistrukturerade intervjuer fått besvara frågor kring bolagens reaktion på ränteförändringen, incitamenten bakom derivatanvändning och strategiförändringar.  Resultatet visar att branschen inte väntat sig ränteförändringar av denna magnitud. Flera bolag beskriver sig ha förändrat sina finanspolicys och utökat sin räntesäkringsnivå avsevärt, men flera skillnader finns mellan bolagen. Incitamenten beskrivs primärt vara lånekovenanter såväl som intresset av att stabilisera kassaflödet. Det finns en stor variation i val av derivatinstrument, men klart står att derivat är betydligt mer flexibla än fasträntelån. Framöver beskrivs räntechocken som något bolag kommer att ha i beaktning vid utformandet av nya strategier för derivatanvändningen samt uppsättandet av finanspolicy. / The Swedish real estate sector is crucial to the financial stability of Sweden due to the banks' significant exposure. Following the rise in inflation in 2021, the Riksbank closely monitored the situation and, starting from mid-2022, aggressively raised the policy rate to 4%. A notable vulnerability identified is the highly leveraged nature of many real estate companies, whose financing costs have increased from the previous period of zero and negative interest rates. A common approach to managing interest rate risk is the use of derivative instruments, where company size has previously been indicated as a deciding factor. This study aims to investigate how medium-sized Swedish real estate companies have utilized interest rate derivatives to manage interest rate risk amid recent rate fluctuations. The study is based on 11 interviews with Mid Cap listed real estate companies, conducted through semi-structured interviews to explore their responses to interest rate changes, motivations for using derivatives, and strategic adjustments. The findings reveal that the industry did not anticipate interest rate changes of this magnitude. Several companies reported having revised their financial policies and significantly increased their level of interest rate hedging, although there are notable differences between companies. The primary motivations for using derivatives are described as loan covenants and the desire to stabilize cash flow. There is considerable variation in the choice of derivative instruments, but it is evident that derivatives offer significantly more flexibility than fixed-rate loans. Looking ahead, companies will take the recent interest rate shock into account when formulating new strategies for derivative use and establishing financial policies.