Public transportation policy plays a significant role in facilitating ridership as well as travel modes, economic activities, and environmental aspects. Seoul has experienced rapid urbanization. Also, high density developments and uncontrolled land use gave rise to extensive urban sprawl in the Seoul Metropolitan Areas (SMA). Due to increased use of private vehicles, which created serious traffic congestion, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has reformed public transportation policies-introduced bus transportation reform (BTR) in 2004 and reformed fare and ticketing structures in 2009. This research focuses on the relationships between socioeconomic characteristics and commuting patterns by applying smart card data that includes individual travel behaviors during commuting periods. Among regression results, average commuting times are significantly associated with the proportion of population with lower levels of education and the number of public transit stations. These results appear to support the idea that the lower educated people in each district tend to have longer commuting times. Also, the greater availability of public transit stations contributes to shorter commuting times. Finally, analyzing commuting times seems to be important for determining demographic movement as well as locational advantages in certain regions of Seoul based on public transportation policies.

Pyruvate kinase catalyses the final step in glycolysis and is responsible for net ATP production. There are four pyruvate kinase isoforms expressed in humans; LPYK, RPYK, M1PYK and M2PYK. The allosteric enzyme M2PYK plays an important role in cancer cell metabolism and is subject to complex regulation by numerous naturally occurring small-molecule metabolites. Post-translational modifications have also been found to play a key role in the regulation of M2PYK, among these cysteine oxidation. This thesis describes the production and characterisation of M2PYK cysteine point mutants in order to investigate the mechanism of regulation by cysteine modification. From a total of ten cysteines present in M2PYK, five were chosen for mutation based on a combination of the results from the cysteine oxidation prediction program (COPP) web interface and published experimental evidence for cysteine modification of M2PYK. Eight point mutants of these five cysteines were produced and characterised. Low resolution gel filtration of all the mutants shows that mutation of these cysteines has an effect on tetramer:dimer:monomer equilibrium of M2PYK suggesting that cysteine modifications could regulate M2PYK activity by affecting oligomeric state. Activity assays show that none of the cysteine point mutations are sufficient to protect M2PYK from oxidation by H2O2 indicating that more than one cysteine is involved in the regulation of M2PYK by oxidation. Nitric oxide (NO) imbalance has recently emerged as playing a key role in numerous diseases including cancer. NO regulates the function of target proteins through the addition of a nitroso moiety from NO-derived metabolites to a reactive cysteine, a process known as protein S-nitrosylation. M2PYK has been found to be S-nitrosylated in vivo. Using the biotin-switch assay in vitro combined with mass spectrometry I have shown that a likely candidate for the target of S-nitrosylation of M2PYK is C326. This thesis also describes the structures of two cysteine point mutants; M2PYK C424A and M2PYK C358S. The structures show that these mutations have very little effect on the overall conformation of M2PYK with only very subtle localised changes. The structure of the mutant M2PYK C358S shows some interesting features including varying occupation of the active site resulting in differing conformations of the B domains within the same tetramer, and an unusual B factor distribution which could be indicative of a perturbation in cooperativity within the tetramer caused by the mutation.

abstract: Generally speaking, many programs of interior design have had a gender imbalance in the student population. As a case in point, the interior design program at Arizona State University (ASU) is at present ninety percent female. While other design programs such as architecture or industrial design have achieved gender balance, interior design has not. This research explores the reasons why male students are not enrolling in the interior design program at ASU and to what degree gender influences the selection of a major. The objectives of this research are to determine: 1) what role gender plays in the selection of interior design as a choice of a major at ASU; 2) why might male students be hesitant to join the interior design program; 3) why female students are attracted to interior design; 4) if there are gender differences in design approach; and 5) if curricular differences between interior architecture and interior design impact the gender imbalance. A mixed method approach is used in order to answer the research questions including: a literature review, a visual ethnography, and interviews of interior design students and faculty members at ASU. The results reveal that gender might have an effect on students' decision to join the interior design program. For a male student, people questioned his sexuality because they assumed he would have to be of a certain sexual orientation to study interior design. According to a male faculty member upon visiting a middle school on career day, young boys would be interested in the projects displayed at the interior design booth until they figured out what it was. Even at a young age, the boys seemed to know that interior design was a female's domain. A participant stated that women seemed to be less critical of the men's projects and were more critical of each other. A male respondent stated that on the occasion there were no men in the class the studio culture changed. Another stated that interior design students did not take feedback as well as others and need to be affirmed more often. Gender socialization, the history of interior design as a feminine career, and the title "interior design" itself are all possible factors that could deter male students from joining the program. The insights acquired from this research will provide students and faculty members from The Design School and beyond a better understanding of gender socialization and what the interior design program has to offer. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S.D. Design 2014

A busca pelo crescimento econÃmico exacerbado gera consequÃncias que comprometem a qualidade de vida das pessoas no Planeta. Nas Ãltimas dÃcadas, o agronegÃcio tem se destacado como mais um elemento que acentuou os desequilÃbrios nas esferas ambiental e social. Nesse cenÃrio, os latifundiÃrios tradicionais expandiram as suas fronteiras agrÃcolas para regiÃes antes nÃo exploradas nessa dimensÃo: o Cerrado Piauiense, que teve como carro chefe de exploraÃÃo o cultivo da soja em grande escala. Assim, a pesquisa teve como objetivo estudar determinados impactos sociais e econÃmicos da cadeia primaria de produÃÃo da soja em uma amostra representativa de Unidades Produtoras do Distrito Nova Santa Rosa do municÃpio de UruÃuÃ-PI. A metodologia do estudo deu-se atravÃs de pesquisas bibliogrÃficas especializadas na temÃtica, associadas à coleta de dados e informaÃÃes de natureza primÃria obtidos junto a 55 Unidades representativas Produtoras de Soja do Distrito Nova Santa Rosa, em UruÃuÃ-PI. Essas foram divididas em dois estratos de dimensÃo. Os dados coletados foram submetidos inicialmente à anÃlise estatÃstica descritiva, por meio do cÃlculo de medidas de valor central e de dispersÃo para as variÃveis quantitativas e foi identificado o espectro dominante das variÃveis qualitativas separadamente para cada substrato de dimensÃo. Em seguida, realizou-se a AnÃlise de Componentes Principais para conhecer a importÃncia de cada variÃvel estudada sobre a variÃncia total disponÃvel atravÃs da definiÃÃo dos fatores. Verificou-se que hà uma grande heterogeneidade entre as Unidades Produtoras, a qual concentrou 78,71% da variaÃÃo total, com destaque para a SuperfÃcie AgrÃria Ãtil, e a proporÃÃo de cereais cultivados, acarretando em uma variaÃÃo dos gastos variÃveis. Genericamente, pode-se constatar que hà uma variedade de diferenciaÃÃo entre os LatifundiÃrios e MesofundiÃrios, centrando-se, sobretudo, nas vantagens com as quais aqueles operam, relativamente a estes. A pesquisa caracterizou-se por indicativos de crescimento econÃmico exÃgeno. Identificou-se a atuaÃÃo de uma empresa multinacional, que monopoliza a comercializaÃÃo de grÃos no Distrito. / The search for the exacerbated economic growth generates consequences that compromise the quality of life on the planet. In recent decades, agribusiness has emerged as one more element which accentuated the imbalances in the environmental and social spheres. In this scenario, traditional landowners expanded their agricultural frontiers to areas not previously explored in this dimension: Piauiense Cerrado, which had the flagship exploration soy cultivation on a large scale. Thus, the research aimed to study certain social and economic impacts of the primary chain of soybean production in a representative sample service units in New District of the city of Santa Rosa UruÃuÃ-IP. The study methodology was given through specialized bibliographic research on the issue, associated with data collection and primary nature of information obtained from 55 Units District Soybean Producers New Santa Rosa, in UruÃuÃ-IP. The study methodology was given through specialized bibliographic research on the issue, associated with data collection and primary nature of information obtained from representative 55 Units District Soybean Producers New Santa Rosa, in UruÃuÃ-PI. These dimensions were divided into two strata. The data collected were subjected to descriptive statistics, through the central measures of value calculation and dispersion for quantitative variables was identified and the dominant spectrum of qualitative variables separately for each dimension of the substrate. Then took place the Principal Component Analysis to know the importance of each variable studied on the total variance available by defining factors. It was found that there is great heterogeneity among the service units, which concentrated 78,71% of the total variation, especially for Land Surface Net, and the proportion of cultivated cereals, resulting in a variation of the variable expenses. Generally, it can be seen that there are a variety of differentiation between Lend Lords and Meium owners, focusing mainly on the advantages with which those operating in respect of these. The research was characterized by indicative of exogenous economic growth. Identified the role of a multinational company that monopolizes the marketing of grain in the District.

The United States has unusually high rates of violence among developed nations, including the victimization of and perpetration by youth. Using Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT) as the theoretical framework, this study analyzes the relationships between social institutions and crime and the interactive relationships among the institutions in a sample of Virginia localities. Multivariate analyses are conducted to produce additive and multiplicative models, and simple slope analyses are conducted to clarify interaction/moderation effects. Findings yield mixed support for IAT. Localities with higher levels of monthly welfare per recipient (a measure of polity) have lower juvenile violent crime arrest rates, and welfare moderates the relationship between income inequality and juvenile violent crime arrests. Controlling for all variables, no support was found for the direct effects of any other institution on juvenile violent crime arrests. Policy recommendations include maintenance of welfare programs and improvement of work participation supplementary programs.

Active learning is a common solution for reducing labeling costs and maximizing the impact of human labeling efforts in binary and multi-class classification settings. However, when we are faced with extreme levels of class imbalance, a situation in which it is not safe to assume that we have a representative sample of the minority class, it has been shown effective to replace the binary classifiers with a one-class classifiers. In such a setting, traditional active learning methods, and many previously proposed in the literature for one-class classifiers, prove to be inappropriate, as they rely on assumptions about the data that no longer stand. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to active learning designed for one-class classification. The proposed method does not rely on many of the inappropriate assumptions of its predecessors and leads to more robust classification performance. The gist of this method consists of labeling, in priority, the instances considered to fit the learned class the least by previous iterations of a one-class classification model. Throughout the thesis, we provide evidence for the merits of our method, then deepen our understanding of these merits by exploring the properties of the method that allow it to outperform the alternatives.

Within machine learning, the problem of class imbalance refers to the scenario in which one or more classes is significantly outnumbered by the others. In the most extreme case, the minority class is not only significantly outnumbered by the majority class, but it also considered to be rare, or absolutely imbalanced. Class imbalance appears in a wide variety of important domains, ranging from oil spill and fraud detection, to text classification and medical diagnosis. Given this, it has been deemed as one of the ten most important research areas in data mining, and for more than a decade now the machine learning community has been coming together in an attempt to unequivocally solve the problem. The fundamental challenge in the induction of a classifier from imbalanced training data is in managing the prediction bias. The current state-of-the-art methods deal with this by readjusting misclassification costs or by applying resampling methods. In cases of absolute imbalance, these methods are insufficient; rather, it has been observed that we need more training examples. The nature of class imbalance, however, dictates that additional examples cannot be acquired, and thus, synthetic oversampling becomes the natural choice. We recognize the importance of selecting algorithms with assumptions and biases that are appropriate for the properties of the target data, and argue that this is of absolute importance when it comes to developing synthetic oversampling methods because a large generative leap must be made from a relatively small training set. In particular, our research into gamma-ray spectral classification has demonstrated the benefits of incorporating prior knowledge of conformance to the manifold assumption into the synthetic oversampling algorithms. We empirically demonstrate the negative impact of the manifold property on the state-of-the-art methods, and propose a framework for manifold-based synthetic oversampling. We algorithmically present the generic form of the framework and demonstrate formalizations of it with PCA and the denoising autoencoder. Through use of the helix and swiss roll datasets, which are standards in the manifold learning community, we visualize and qualitatively analyze the benefits of our proposed framework. Moreover, we unequivocally show the framework to be superior on three real-world gamma-ray spectral datasets and on sixteen benchmark UCI datasets in general. Specifically, our results demonstrate that the framework for manifold-based synthetic oversampling produces higher area under the ROC results than the current state-of-the-art and degrades less on data that conforms to the manifold assumption.

This thesis is focused on study of global imbalances as they appear in these days. The deepening global financial imbalance as an impact of international capital flows is considered to be one of the most important. The study is also focused on other tendencies that could possibly endanger the future prosperity of the Euro-Atlantic civilization from the view of savings, consumption and problems with accumulation of capital regarding the demographic aging of the society. All these aspects are now more visible because of the financial, economic and on-going debt crisis. The situation looks unsustainable and needs changes that could be essential for avoiding a major decline of the Europian society in the view of the rest of the world.

Brisket disease, an affliction of cattle, is important because of : (1) economic losses, (2) similarities to chronic mountain sickness in humans, and (3) the provision of experimental animals for cardiac research. In afflicted cattle, right cardiac ventricular hypertrophy and dilatation occur and are manifestations of attempted compensation for reduced alveolar oxygen by increasing pulmonary circulation. Geographic variations in occurrence of brisket disease in Utah indicate that hypoxia is not the sole causative factor. From the findings that afflicted cattle exhibit hypocalcemia and hyperkalemia, and the disease occurs most commonly in wet meadowland environments where potassium is high and calcium low in browse, a dual stress theory of cause was hypothesized; i.e., altitude-induced hypoxia plus ionic calcium-potassium imbalance. To test the hypothesis, 40 Hereford calves were randomized into four equal groups, two at 1,372 meters (normal) and two at 2,745 meters (hypoxic) elevation. At each elevation there were control (balanced) and treated (calcium-potassium) groups. For 16 weeks, treated calves received, by diet, one-fourth the calcium and 10 times the potassium requirements; also, repeated injections of dipotassium ethylenediaminetetraacetate, potassium chloride, and an aldosterone inhibitor to further induce hypocalcemia and hyperkalemia. Control groups at each elevation received a balanced diet and no injections. Since optimal myocardial function is dependent upon proper ion balance, and concentrations of calcium, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, magnesium, chloride, iron, zinc, and copper in blood, heart, liver, kidney, and bone are indices, these elements were quantitated. Calcium concentration in serum was reduced by 1.6 milligrams per 100 milliliters from an initial value of 9.4 milligrams per 100 milliliters, and an average increase of 1.8 milliequivalents per liter in potassium concentration in whole blood, from the initial concentration of 12. 4 milliequivalents per liter, occurred in treated calves . Elevation caused an increase of 1.7 milliequivalents per liter in potassium concentration in serum from the initial concentration of 6.2 milliequivalents per liter. Iron concentration in whole blood increased in response to hypoxia and decreased due to treatment. In the serum, sodium and copper decreased and chloride increased due to treatment. Compared to low elevation, significant tissue compositional changes in calves at high elevation were as follows: (l) calcium: kidney 12 percent higher, heart 9 percent lower: (2) sodium: liver 5 percent lower, kidney 3 percent higher: (2) phosphorus: kidney 2 percent higher. More profound changes occurred in cattle subjected to treatment: compared to controls, the tissue compositions in imbalanced cattle were as follows: (1) calcium: heart 10 percent and liver 13 percent lower, kidney 92 percent higher; (2) potassium: heart 13 percent higher, liver and kidney 6 percent lower; (3) sodium: heart 18 percent, liver 8 percent, and kidney 14 percent lower; (4) magnesium: heart 20 percent and liver 5 percent higher, kidney 11 percent lower; (5) phosphorus: heart 6 percent and kidney 21 percent higher, liver xvi 2 percent lower; (6) absolute dry matter: liver 5 percent and kidney 13 percent lower; (7) total ash: kidney 4 percent lower. In addition, iron, zinc, and copper were decreased in both cardiac and hepatic tissues of treated calves. Treatment influenced bone ash composition as follows: compared to controls, calcium decreased to 25.3 from 32.5 percent; phosphorus decreased to 16.5 from 19.0 percent; potassium increased to 0.16 from 0.08 percent; and zinc increased to 319 parts per million from 227 parts per million. High altitude was also influential. Compared to controls, phosphorus increased to 18.1 percent from 17.5 percent, potassium decreased to 0.112 from 0.129 percent, sodium to 1.09 from 1.17 percent, and magnesium to 0. 64 from 0.70 percent.

In America, though it is traditional that the states assume the function of educating children, most of the funding and much of the control of the educational process has been carried on by local school districts. However, the inequities accompanying this situation have prompted Court decisions and then legislation which attempted to correct the social and economic disadvantages of such a system. The Supreme Court decision, Brown v. The Board of Education (1954), along with the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's had an impact on education in local communities all over the United States.