En hållbar utveckling består av en balans mellan social, ekologisk och ekonomisk hållbarhet. Inom transportsektorn omfattar det ett samspel mellan jämställdhet, jämlikhet och trafiksäkerhet, minskad klimatpåverkan och ett systemet som utvecklas på ett kostnadseffektivt sätt. Att införa avgiftsfri kollektivtrafik är en metod som flera kommuner och städer har provat för att nå målet om en hållbar utveckling. Syftet med den här studien är att utvärdera resultaten av olika sådana projekt och hitta vilka framgångsfaktorerna har varit. Resultatet har blivit övervägande positivt med följderna att det kollektiva resandet ökade stort. Många orter och städer runt om i världen har idag avgiftsfri kollektivtrafik, men många har också återgått till vanlig taxa. Främsta orsaken har varit svårigheten att finansiera systemet. Kommuner och städer har olika geografiska, strukturella, ekonomiska och politiska förutsättningar, vilket är anledningen till varför resultaten blivit så varierande. Bland framgångsfaktorerna som har identifierats utmärker sig möjligheterna att samordna olika trafikslag, ett bra samarbete mellan ansvariga myndigheter och ett politiskt engagemang. Orter där en betydande andel av befolkningen reste rabatterat tidigare har haft lättare att finansiera ett helt avgiftsfritt system. De ökade kostnaderna i kombination med förlorade biljettintäkter har för många varit en svår ekvation att lösa.

The vaccine cold chain is an integral part of the process of storing and distributing vaccines prior to administration. A key component of this cold chain for developing countries is the primary vaccine storage warehouse. As the starting point for the distribution of vaccines throughout the country, these buildings have a significant amount of refrigerated space and therefore consume large amounts of energy. Therefore, this thesis focuses on analyzing the relative importance of parameters for the design of an energy efficient primary vaccine storage warehouse with the end goal of achieving Net-Zero Energy operation. A total of 31 architectural design parameters, such as roof insulation U-Value and external wall thermal mass, along with 14 building control parameters, including evaporator coil defrost termination and thermostat set points, are examined. The analysis is conducted across five locations in the developing world with significant variations in climate conditions: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Tunis, Tunisia; Asuncion, Paraguay; Mombasa, Kenya; and Bangkok, Thailand. Variations in the parameters are examined through the implementation of a Monte Carlo-based global uncertainty and sensitivity analysis to a case study building layout. A regression-based sensitivity analysis is used to analyze both the main effects of each parameter as well as the interactions between parameter pairs. The results of this research indicate that for all climates examined, the building control parameters have a larger relative importance than the architectural design parameters in determining the warehouse energy consumption. This is due to the dominance of the most influential building control parameter examined, the Chilled Storage evaporator fan control strategy. The importance of building control parameters across all climates examined emphasizes the need for an integrated design method to ensure the delivery of an energy efficient primary vaccine warehouse.

Machine learning algorithms have been successfully applied to learning classifiers in many domains such as computer vision, fraud detection, and brain image analysis. Typically, classifiers are trained to predict a class value given a set of labeled training data that includes all possible class values, and sometimes additional unlabeled training data. Little research has been performed where the possible values for the class variable include values that have been omitted from the training examples. This is an important problem setting, especially in domains where the class value can take on many values, and the cost of obtaining labeled examples for all values is high. We show that the key to addressing this problem is not predicting the held-out classes directly, but rather by recognizing the semantic properties of the classes such as their physical or functional attributes. We formalize this method as zero-shot learning and show that by utilizing semantic knowledge mined from large text corpora and crowd-sourced humans, we can discriminate classes without explicitly collecting examples of those classes for a training set. As a case study, we consider this problem in the context of thought recognition, where the goal is to classify the pattern of brain activity observed from a non-invasive neural recording device. Specifically, we train classifiers to predict a specific concrete noun that a person is thinking about based on an observed image of that person’s neural activity. We show that by predicting the semantic properties of the nouns such as “is it heavy?” and “is it edible?”, we can discriminate concrete nouns that people are thinking about, even without explicitly collecting examples of those nouns for a training set. Further, this allows discrimination of certain nouns that are within the same category with significantly higher accuracies than previous work. In addition to being an important step forward for neural imaging and braincomputer- interfaces, we show that the zero-shot learning model has important implications for the broader machine learning community by providing a means for learning algorithms to extrapolate beyond their explicit training set.

Most of the work investigating the representation of concrete nouns in the brain has focused on the locations that code the information. We present a model to study the contributions of perceptual and semantic features to the neural code representing concepts over time and space. The model is evaluated using magnetoencephalography data from different paradigms and not only corroborates previous findings regarding a distributed code, but provides further details about how the encoding of different subcomponents varies in the space-time spectrum. The model also successfully generalizes to novel concepts that it has never seen during training, which argues for the combination of specific properties in forming the meaning of concrete nouns in the brain. The results across paradigms are in agreement when the main differences among the experiments (namely, the number of repetitions of the stimulus, the task the subjects performed, and the type of stimulus provided) were taken into consideration. More specifically, these results suggest that features specific to the physical properties of the stimuli, such as word length and right-diagonalness, are encoded in posterior regions of the brain in the first hundreds of milliseconds after stimulus onset. Then, properties inherent to the nouns, such as is it alive? and can you pick it up?, are represented in the signal starting at about 250 ms, focusing on more anterior parts of the cortex. The code for these different features was found to be distributed over time and space, and it was common for several regions to simultaneously code for a particular property. Moreover, most anterior regions were found to code for multiple features, and a complex temporal profile could be observed for the majority of properties. For example, some features inherent to the nouns were encoded earlier than others, and the extent of time in which these properties could be decoded varied greatly among them. These findings complement much of the work previously described in the literature, and offer new insights about the temporal aspects of the neural encoding of concrete nouns. This model provides a spatiotemporal signature of the representation of objects in the brain. Paired with data from carefully-designed paradigms, the model is an important tool with which to analyze the commonalities of the neural code across stimulus modalities and tasks performed by the subjects.

As the third largest energy consumer, the residential sector in Canada is responsible for 17% of energy consumption and 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. With the increase in population, the number of new houses is expected to increase by 2.8 million from 2005 to 2020, and more energy is expected to be consumed despite the emergence of better insulated houses and more efficient heating methods. The primary objective of this study is to determine the prospects of reducing CO2 emissions from the residential sector in Waterloo Region by achieving a higher building standard, such as the Passivhaus (PH) and Net Zero Energy (NZE). The profile of the building envelope, including the initial CO2 emissions was compared against the requirements of the PH and NZE standards, using the Residential Energy Efficiency Project dataset (2007-2012). The second objective evaluates the barriers and drivers that influence the setting of higher building envelope standards. Ontario Building Codes (1975-2012) were analysed to determine the changes to insulation requirements over time, and Ontario Legislative Assembly debates (1970-2012) were reviewed to determine the barriers and drivers expressed in political debates. Content analysis was applied to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario’s documents to determine the frequency of nine word categories prior to each new building code. This study identified three main categories of drivers: awareness of environmental issues, resource limitation, and the implications of climate change; and three categories of barriers: financial, political and structural, and barriers related to information, promotion, and education. The findings of this study confirm that existing houses in Waterloo Region can achieve substantial reductions in CO2 emissions and energy usage by meeting higher building standards. Building code improvements have certainly played an important role in the evolution of Ontario houses, and the 2012 building code, achieves the R-2000 standard universally. More advanced standards show the potential for greater savings, but have only been adopted on a voluntary basis.

This thesis begins with an introduction and methodology that presents two major research questions: “Can restorative justice exist within a zero-tolerance framework,” and, “What are the challenges that stand in the way of implementing restorative justice ideologies fully at Glenside High School?” The author provides an autobiographical statement to give context to his positionality within this research. A comprehensive literature review highlights a brief history of restorative justice, a description of the harmful effects of punitive discipline, and results from different communities that have implemented restorative justice. The three major respondents are introduced in order to provide context to their positionality within this research. The author presents his research findings based on qualitative field notes from site visits to a public, Southern California high school in addition to responses from interviews with teachers and a restorative justice expert. The author concludes by arguing for the implementation of restorative justice in a widespread manner in individual schools, in addition to comprehensive teacher training in pre-professional programs for prospective teachers and the need to shift from “teach to the test” ideologies to holistic student development pedagogies.

The Qweak experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) will measure the proton's weak charge by measuring the parity violating asymmetry in elastic electron-proton scattering at very low momentum transfer, with the aim of determining the proton's weak charge with 4% combined statistical and systematic errors. The experimental apparatus includes a longitudinally polarized electron beam, a liquid hydrogen target, a room temperature toroidal magnetic spectrometer, and a set of precision detectors for the scattered electrons. The toroidal magnetic spectrometer, which will deflect away the inelastic scattered electrons and focus the elastic scattered electrons onto the detectors, plays a crucially important role in the experiment. In this thesis, in order to meet the requirements for the installation and calibration of the toroidal magnetic spectrometer, the numerical simulation of the spectrometer's magnetic field based on a realistic magnet model is discussed, a precise 3D field mapping is introduced, and some simulation results are provided. The zero-crossing analysis technique, which can be used to precisely infer the individual coil locations of the toroidal magnet, is presented and explored in detail.

This thesis is an auto-ethnographic study of teaching methods proposed to be effective in developing thinking skills that advance meaning making in my middle school art classes. The study explored the use of Visible Thinking Routines Ritchart et all, 2001) and Art Investigations (Herz, 2010) in middle school art classes.Reflections and other field texts reveal the extent to which I found these methods effective in guiding students to develop higher order thinking skills that support more meaningful outcomes in art and could be beneficial in other areas of their lives.

Perfect zero-knowledge proofs enable one party (the prover) to prove an assertion to another party (the verifier) but without revealing anything but the truth of the assertion. The class of problems admitting such proofs is rich, including Graph Isomorphism, Quadratic Residuousity, and other problems that play a key role in cryptography and complexity theory. Due to their strong privacy guarantee, perfect zero-knowledge proofs are very difficult to study. Despite extensive research since the 1980s, especially in the area of statistical zero-knowledge proofs, many fundamental questions about them remain open, and it is not even clear how to address these questions. This thesis initiates a general investigation of perfect zero-knowledge proofs. Our main results are as follows. 1. We prove that all the known problems admitting perfect zero-knowledge PZK proofs can be characterized as non-interactive instance-dependent commitment schemes, and use this result to generalize and strengthen previous results, as well as to prove new results about PZK problems. 2. We give a new error shifting technique that allows us to overcome barriers in the study of PZK. Using this technique we present the first complete problem for the class of problems admitting non-interactive perfect zero-knowledge proofs (NIPZK), and the first hard problem for the class of problems admitting public-coin PZK proofs. 3. We make the first investigation into one of the most important questions in the field, namely, whether the number of rounds in PZK proofs can be collapsed to a constant. We give the first perfectly hiding commitment scheme, and prove that obtaining such a scheme that is also constant round is equivalent to collapsing the rounds in PZK proofs to a constant.

Der Elfmeterschuss steht stellvertretend für eine ganze Kategorie sozialer Interaktionen - den Nullsummenspielen. Diese sind insofern von besonderem Interesse, als sich hier Akteure mit exakt gegenläufigen Interessen gegenüber stehen, die weder kommunizieren wollen noch können, dennoch interagieren und dabei eine stabile und vorhersagbare Form von sozialer Ordnung entstehen lassen. Und dies obschon beide Akteure gerade kein Interesse an der Entstehung oder Aufrechterhaltung einer solchen Ordnung haben. Die Fragestellung des Artikels: Verhalten sich Bundesligaspieler (Schützen und Torhüter) beim Elfmeterschuss gemäß den Vorhersagen der Spieltheorie? Die Analyse wird folgendermaßen gegliedert. Im nächsten Abschnitt werden erst die fußballerischen Grundlagen des Problems gelegt. Dann wird das Entscheidungsproblem spieltheoretisch analysiert und daraus ein entsprechendes LÄosungskonzept in Hypothesenform deduziert. Darauf folgt eine Darstellung des Stands der Forschung. Die empirische Überprüfung der Hypothesen mittels eines Datensatzes aus der ersten Bundesliga erfolgt in Abschnitt 4. Im letzen Abschnitt werden die Ergebnisse diskutiert und dabei insbesondere die Fragen in den Vordergrund gerückt, welche theoretischen Implikationen sich aus der Analyse für den RC-Ansatz im allgemeinen und die Spieltheorie im speziellen ergeben und was daraus aus methodischer Sicht zur Überprüfung von spieltheoretischen Hypothesen geschlossen werden kann.