Kommunerna har som markägaren en viktig roll för att styra bebyggelseutvecklingen och locka aktörer att etablera sig i kommunen. Genom markanvisningar kan kommunen bjuda ut mark som ska exploaterats till intresserade byggherrar. Begreppet markanvisning är inte entydigt men innebär i huvudsak att en byggherre under en viss tid och under vissa villkor får en ensamrätt att förhandla med kommunen om att i ett senare skede förvärva ett område för bebyggande. Det har i tidigare studier påtalats brist på transparens och förutsägbarhet i den kommunalamarkanvisningsprocessen varför denna studie syftade till att utreda hur det ser ut idag vad gäller transparens och förutsägbarhet. För att få svar på frågeställningarna genomfördes en kvantitativ enkätundersökning som skickades ut till alla Sveriges 290 kommuner, dels för att kunna skapa en helhetsbild av nuläget och dels för att tidigare studier begränsat sig till större kommuner. Enkäten besvarades av 133 (46%) kommuner varav 62 (46%) angav att de använde markanvisningar och 70 (53%) att de inte gör det eller gör det vid enstaka tillfällen, en kommun svarade inte på frågan. Denna studie har endast gett en översiktlig bild av dagsläget och av resultatet framkom att rutinerna för att informera om och utvärdera markanvisningsprocessen skiljer sig åt och det finns fortfarande brister vad gäller transparens och förutsägbarhet, framförallt med avseende på motivering, uppföljning och utvärdering. Det fanns även skillnader mellan kommunerna och det framstår som att kommuner som genomfört fler markanvisningar i större utsträckning informera om, motivera, uppfölja och utvärdera markanvisningar. De flesta kommunerna ser även ut att uppleva att markanvisningssystemet och arbetet med markanvisningar fungerar ganska bra, men att det kan bli bättre. Slutligen bör nämnas att flertalet kommuner ser ut att befinna sig i en utvecklingsfas och det finns därav anledning att tro att markanvisningssystemet i framtiden kommer bli mer transparent och förutsägbart. / The municipalities as landowners have an important role to control the urban development and attract developers to establish themselves in the municipality. Municipalities can trough land allocation offer land for development to interested developers. The concept of land allocation is not clear but essentially means that a developer, during a certain time and under certain conditions has a right to negotiate with the municipality to subsequently acquire an area fordevelopment. There have been previous studies complaining of the lack of transparency and predictability in the municipal land allocation process. That’s why the purpose of this study is to investigate the situation of today in terms of transparency and predictability. To get answers to the questions a quantitative survey was conducted and it that was sent out to all 290 municipalities in Sweden, partly to create an overall picture of the current situation and partly because previous studies were limited to larger municipalities. 133 (46%) of the municipalities answered the questionnaire by witch 62 (46%) stated that they used the land allocation and 72 (53%) that they do not or do it occasionally, one municipal didn’t answer the question. This study only gives a general picture of the reality and the result showed that the routines to inform about and evaluate land allocation process differs and there are still shortcomings in terms of transparency and predictability, particularly with regard to motivation, follow-up and evaluation. There were also a differences between the municipalities and it appears that municipalities conducted more land allocation of teams to a greater extent inform, motivate, monitor and assess land allocation. The overall experience for the municipalities is that the land allocation system and work with land allocation works pretty well, but there are still areas for improvement. Most municipalities are in a development phases and there is hence reason to believe that the land allocation system in the future will become more transparent and predictable.

Transportation sector has been a major contributing factor to the overall emissions of most pollutants and thus their impacts on the environment. Among all transportation activities, on-road travel accounts for most part of the Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fuel use. It also has a very un-desirable impact on the transportation network conditions increasing the traffic congestion levels. The main aim of transportation planning agencies is to implement the policy changes that will reduce automobile dependency and increase transit and non-motorized modes usage. However, planning agencies can come up with proactive economic, land-use and transportation policies provided they have a model which is sensitive to all the above mentioned factors to predict the vehicle fleet composition and usage of households. Moreover, the type of vehicle that a household gets (vehicle type choice) and the annual mileage (usage) associated with that vehicle is very closely related to the person in the household who uses that vehicle the most (allocation to primary driver). So, it is no longer possible to view all these decisions separately. Instead, we need to model all these decisions- vehicle type choice, usage, and allocation to primary driver simultaneously at a household level. In this study, we estimate and apply a joint household-level model of the number of vehicles owned by the household, the vehicle type choice of each vehicle, the annual mileage on each vehicle, as well as the individual assigned as the primary driver for each vehicle. A version of the proposed model system currently serves as the engine for a household vehicle composition and evolution simulator, which itself has been embedded within the larger SimAGENT (for Simulator of Activities, Greenhouse emissions, Networks, and Travel) activity-based travel and emissions forecasting system for the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) planning region. / text

published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Space Link Extension (SLE) is a set of recommended standards for mission cross support developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). The SLE recommendations define protocols for extending the space link from ground terminals to other facilities deeper within a ground network, allowing distributed access to space link telecommand and telemetry services. The SLE protocols are widely used to provide cross support between sites, programs, and agencies. In traditional SLE deployments, individual service instances have been manually provisioned well in advance of the commencement of cross support for a particular mission, and hardware and software resources have been allocated to those service instances at the time of provisioning. While valid, this approach requires that dedicated resources be provided for each mission and service instance, and limits an SLE provider's ability to reallocate resources in real time based on system availability or other factors. This paper discusses an alternative approach to SLE service provisioning, in which individual service instances are assigned resources from a common resource pool at the time that each service instance is initialized. The paper addresses the key design elements and technical tradeoffs involved in this approach, and discusses the potential benefits with regard to load balancing, equipment reuse, and resiliency against system failure.

Teams have become increasingly popular in organizations (Devine, Clayton, Philips, Dunford, & Melner, 1999), and the issue of process loss in teams presents a persistent challenge to teamwork and team effectiveness (Karau & Williams, 1993). The present study addresses a basic issue in process loss; namely, team member motivation to contribute personal resources toward individual and team-level goals. This study identified three sources of motivation in teams: Task demands, team attributes, and member traits. Individual motivation increased with task difficulty, increased as deadlines approached, and declined overall with time on task. Team efficacy was positively associated with episodic increases in motivation over time, while cohesion was unrelated to motivation. Trait motivation was positively related, and psychological collectivism negatively related to individual motivation. This relationship persisted over the lifespan of the team. The results of this study have implications for understanding the unique and joint role of individual and contextual influences on team member motivation over time and experience.

published_or_final_version / Statistics and Actuarial Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

This dissertation consists of two essays in asset allocation. In the first essay, I measure the value of active money management. I explore this issue by comprehensively examining the parametric rule proposed by Brandt, Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2009) (the BSV rule) out-of-sample for portfolio selection among 3516 stocks in CRSP and comparing this rule to the mean-variance (MV) rule and the naïve 1/N rule recently advocated by DeMiguel, Garlappi and Uppal (2009). The BSV rule outperforms both the MV and 1/N rules and the outperformance is robust to investment horizons and stock market states. The BSV rule is effective for investors with different preferences or investment opportunities. The effectiveness of the BSV rule is robust to data screening criteria, estimation periods, portfolio performance evaluation models, the business cycle, and stock market states. In the second essay, I explore the question of whether macroeconomic state variables are able to predict cross-sectional stock returns from the perspective of asset allocation. I find that conditioning on macroeconomic state variables leads to optimal portfolios with a Carhart alpha that is 125 basis points per month higher than unconditional optimal portfolios out-of-sample. Unfortunately, conditioning on macroeconomic states is subject to an "overfitting" problem and can lead investors to experience unexpected huge losses. My results suggest that macroeconomic state variables mare able to predict cross-sectional stock returns but risk-averse investors need to combine other funds (e.g. market portfolio) to take advantage of this predictability.

Hand raising is a common method in schools and a way for students to engage in the classrooms turn-allocation (Andersson & Haglund 2006, p 35), but not all benefit from it. According to Dylan Wiliam (2011) hand raising divides the students by putting the students that participate in hand raising at an advantage versus the students that do not. This study aims to examine hand raising as a phenomenon and the students and teachers thoughts about hand raising. The main research questions were: How do the students perceive hand raising? How do the teachers reflect upon hand raising? How is hand raising usedas a tool by the students? The main reference to this study has been senior lecture Fritjof Sahlströms (1999) thesis Up the Hill Backwards. On International Constraints and Affordances for Equity-Constitution in the Classrooms of the Swedish Comprehensive School, were he debates around hand raising as a method for interaction with teachers and students. This study has also raised issues from social psychology such as norm and that humans are affected by the mere presence of other humans. The study has come about using both observations and group-intervjues with students from the range of six to eleven and a singel group-intervju with teachers. Results from the study shows that students consider hand raising as a method for keeping the classrooms atmosphere composed and that they raised their hands if they know the answer. The teachers discussed the difficulties concerning turn-allocations.

This thesis considers the problem of cross layer scheduling and radio resource allocation of multiple users in the downlink of time-slotted and frequency-slotted cellular data networks. For these networks, opportunistic scheduling algorithms improve system performance by exploiting time variations of the radio channel. Within the broader framework of opportunistic scheduling, this thesis solves three distinct problems and proposes efficient and scalable solutions for them. First, we present novel optimal and approximate opportunistic scheduling algorithms that combine channel fluctuation and user mobility information in their decision rules. The algorithms propose the use of dynamic fairness constraints. These fairness constraints adapt according to the user mobility. The optimal algorithm is an off-line algorithm that precomputes constraint values according to a known mobility model. The approximate algorithm is an on-line algorithm that relies on the future prediction of the user mobility locations in time. We show that the use of mobility information increases channel capacity. We also provide analytical bounds on the performance of the approximate algorithm. Second, this thesis presents a new opportunistic scheduling solution that maximizes the aggregate user performance subject to certain minimum and maximum performance constraints. By constraining the performance experienced by individual users, who share a common radio downlink, to some upper bounds, it is possible to provide the system operator with a better control of radio resource allocations and service differentiation among different classes of users. The proposed solution offers better performance than existing solution under practical channel conditions. Finally, we present a dynamic subcarrier allocation solution for fractional frequency reuse in multicell orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems. We formulate the subcarrier allocation as an equivalent set partitioning problem and then propose an efficient hierarchical solution which first partitions subcarriers into groups and next schedules subcarriers opportunistically to users. Simulation results for three solutions illustrate the usefulness of the proposed schemes.