The safety of dams is crucial in ensuring the continual availability of water, safety of the surrounding communities and infrastructure. Surveillance systems are implemented to monitor the structural integrity of certain dams which have a safety risk. The components and extent of the surveillance systems adopted depends on many factors, which include the type of dam wall structure used to impound the reservoir, geotechnical and environmental conditions. The case study used for this thesis is Kouga Dam located in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is a double curvature, concrete arch dam which supplies water for domestic, irrigation and industrial use to the Gamtoos River Valley and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan. During construction the stability of the right flank was questioned and subsequently, remedial measures were taken in order to increase the shear resistance of this flank. Previous dam safety evaluations also noted the possibility of Alkali Silica Reaction (ASR) occurring within the structure which resulted in concrete swelling and loss of strength. Due to these factors and the large hazard potential rating associated with this dam an intensive surveillance system has been used to monitor the dam's behaviour during operation. In this thesis the results of the surveillance system is analysed. A strong linear relationship exists between the temperature loading and displacement response of the dam wall. Changes in temperature initiate the response of the structure almost instantaneously. A more complex relationship exists between hydrostatic loading and the displacement response of the structure. A phase lag of approximately one to three months is evident between these two variables. Since construction the displacement and strain rates in the upstream (y) and upward (z) directions are 0.3mm/annum and 8.6με/annum respectively. However, since 1989 there has been a reduction in the average displacement and strain rates in all directions by approximately 70%. This may suggest that the ASR has stabilized. The vertical construction joints, especially the central and upper joints, are relatively open during low water levels. The structure is found to transfer the imposed loading mainly to the central foundation via dominant cantilever action. As a result the reaction forces on the upper foundation have been found to be relatively low, lowering the risk of potential shear failure of the right foundation. Small foundation movements of less than 0.3mm have been observed within the foundation downstream of the dam wall on the right flank. These movements are between 10 and 40m within the foundations.

This study was carried out in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in June 2018. Its main objective was to investigate how the current DART services are delivered with a view of improving urban transport in the city of Dar as Salaam. In all, 260 city residents using DART services were interviewed on their perception of the quality of services on offer. The respondents were selected using the convenience sampling method. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The study findings show that the majority of DART users are generally satisfied with services provided. About 96.9 per cent of the interviewed passengers consider continuing using DART services. Service quality attributes, which were perceived with high levels of satisfaction, include security at stations (perceived as adequate by 33.6 per cent and average by 57.8 per cent of interviewed passengers). Another is travel time (88.3 per cent of the passengers were satisfied with the travel time) and shelter (perceived as adequate by 49.6 per cent and average by 38 per cent of the passengers interviewed). The fares charged were reported as affordable by 72.7 per cent of the passengers. Breakdown of buses was reported as a rare occurrence. Critical shortfall perceived by the passengers includes discomfort on the buses due to overcrowding which is a result of too few buses in operation. To reduce congestion, passengers suggested that the number of buses offering the services should be increased. Some 56.8 per cent of the passengers indicated to have failed to arrive at their respective destinations within the planned time. To address this, passengers suggested that timetables should be provided to enable them to plan their journeys and thus arrive within the planned time. Other challenges the passengers faced while using DART services include lack of service when it rains heavily, long queues at ticket booths, and scrambling in the process of boarding the buses. The study findings have not shown a difference in the levels of satisfaction between male and female passengers. Significant difference in the levels of satisfaction has been observed among passengers aged above 45 years in relation to comfort on the buses and the arrival time. Furthermore, the study found that the public was not invited to contribute views on the project. Thus, the public should be invited to contribute their opinions when undertaking future phases of DART. In addition, the current phase of DART should be improved by considering the passengers’ opinions as established by this study.

The study investigated the critical success factors of funding infrastructure development in South Africa and how they can be used by the BRICS' New Development Bank (NDB) to develop strategies for funding infrastructure development in the country. The quantitative research methodology was used in the investigation. The study used IDC and DBSA employees as the population and simple random sampling was used to select 20 employees from the two Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). Data was collected through questionnaires sent to 20 employees and descriptive analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and ranking analysis were then utilised to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that (DFIs) are the preferred source of funds for infrastructure development in South Africa and the appropriate strategy is the Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs). Critical success factors to successful infrastructure development funding were found to include project attributes, financing attributes, government attributes, the borrower or implementing agency attributes, and political and economic attributes. Factors that were found to have the highest impact on infrastructure development funding include economic viability of the project, the risk profile of borrower or implementing agency, availability of funding, strong financial instruments, financial risk, political and economic stability, political support and the social and economic benefits of the project. The first recommendation for the study is that it is suitable for the NDB to fund infrastructure development in the country and secondly that the NDB should employ PPPs to fund infrastructure development in the country. Furthermore, the DFI should only fund economically viable projects, projects that are accepted by the community and projects for borrowers or implementing agencies with a low-risk profile. Finally, the NDB ought to lobby the government for support and creation of conducive political and legal environments to guarantee successful funding of the infrastructure projects.

Amazon Spot Instances provide inexpensive service for high-performance computing. With spot instances, it is possible to get at most 90% off as discount in costs by bidding spare Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. In exchange for low cost, spot instances bring the reduced reliability onto the computing environment, because this kind of instance could be revoked abruptly by the providers due to supply and demand, and higher-priority customers are first served. To achieve high performance on instances with compromised reliability, Spark is applied to run jobs. In this thesis, a wide set of spark experiments are conducted to study its performance on spot instances. Without stateful replicating, Spark suffers from cascad- ing rollback and is forced to regenerate these states for ad hoc practices repeatedly. Such downside leads to discussion on trade-off between compatible slow checkpointing and regenerating on rollback and inspires us to apply multiple fault tolerance schemes. And Spark is proven to finish a job only with proper revocation rate. To validate and evaluate our work, prototype and simulator are designed and implemented. And based on real history price records, we studied how various checkpoint write frequencies and bid level affect performance. In case study, experiments show that our presented techniques can lead to ~20% shorter completion time and ~25% lower costs than those cases without such techniques. And compared with running jobs on full-price instance, the absolute saving in costs can be ~70%.

Allt professionellt mätningsarbete i Sverige styrs av olika dokument för att säkerställa att kvalitetskraven uppnås, anläggningsarbeten är inget undantag. Därför var syftet att sammanställa de objektspecifika kraven på väg 55 Yxtatorpet – Malmköping och undersöka vilka rutiner och kontroller som genomförs för att säkerställa kvaliteten. Litteraturstudier har gjorts för att sammanställa kraven, främst av dokument som finns på arbetsplatsen. Sökningar på Internet har gjorts främst för att hitta kravdokument som styr handlingarna på arbetsplatsen. Intervjuer genomfördes med 2 personer på arbetsplatsen, med olika arbetsuppgifter för att ta reda på om det finns rutiner och kontroller som genomförs och vilka dessa i sådana fall är. Resultatet blev en sammanfattning av styrande dokument speciellt de som gäller för väg 55. De styrande dokumentens krav på metoder och kontroll styrks av de två intervjuerna.

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Tel Aviv is a rapidly changing city. Since its establishment only a century ago, the city has developed into an innovation hub, rich with culture and architectural history. Part of its hasty evolution from the land of sand dunes to the current metropolis was the construction of the Tel Aviv New Central Bus Station, the largest bus station in the world at the time of completion. Almost three decades after Israeli Architect Ram Karmi designed the station, it opened in 1993, already nicknamed the “white elephant” due to its scale and lack of integration into the surrounding neighborhood of Neve Sha’anan. The New Central Bus Station never met the architect’s intended vision of “a city under a roof” and has significantly transformed over the years, as an attempt to create purpose within the large mass. Neve Sha’anan, in south Tel Aviv, is the poorest area of the city, ridden with homelessness, prostitution and drug addiction. It is also the home to the majority of the African refugee and asylum seeker community i Israel, making up less than half a percent of the population of the country. The small community has been the target of recent refugee policy reforms, which frame them as “infiltrators” or “labor migrants.” 1 The New Central Bus Station fractures the urban environment of Neve Sha’anan and causes spatial disorientation of a community already faced with cultural marginalization. Through an analysis of the impact that top down decision making causing cultural conflict has on architecture and place making, this thesis sets to develop a solution for intervention, which considers the users and urban context as a source for re-configuring existing infrastructure. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

Climate change and sea level rise are making it more dangerous to live in coastal towns and cities. Communities in these areas must learn how to become more disaster resilient and adaptive by creating more connected and educated populations. In places devastated by natural disasters, the most vulnerable populations are the ones who are left behind. Climate refuges will become more and more common as people are forced to move from the places they call home due to inhabitable conditions. It would be beneficial for these populations to move before a large scale disaster forces them to leave. As the Louisiana coast subsides and is flooded by rising sea levels, the area is becoming more vulnerable to intense floods and storms. While there is a levee surrounding the New Orleans metropolitan area, the communities outside of the levee's protection are exposed to the elements. In these neighborhoods, the frequent damage by storms and rising flood insurance rates are making it too expensive to stay. St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes are the areas that will lose the most land and where the land is vital to the local and national economy. An environmentally and contextually sensitive infrastructure will initiate the relocation of these populations, allowing them to remain in their communities while preserving their lifestyle and quality of life. To combat the dispersion of a strong community, I propose a system that allows the communities outside the levee walls to form new town centers within the flood protection. Specifically in St. Bernard Parish, a central hub would be built on the edge of the levee protection to attract people to move to a safer area. The town center is near the most southeastern part if the levee along Louisiana 46. The center will provide support for the intended increase in population as the area fills in with relocating residents. The center will increase the disaster resilience by providing spaces that can educate the public about climate change, facilitating movement to outside the levee with a boat and automobile transit hub, provide economic support through agriculture and fishing, and help the elderly population stay connected with their community. With the creation of this new town center, the residents that are threatened with sea level rise and flooding will be able to remain connected to their land, their communities, and their livelihoods while reducing their risk. / 0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

This thesis contributes to the understanding of the most effective ways to promote sustainable and inclusive development. It uses public private partnerships in infrastructure projects as a case study for demonstrating that a holistic approach of development that incorporates human rights considerations is needed to achieve sustainable and inclusive development outcomes. The dissertation explores different notions of development and how they have influenced the regulatory frameworks for and the structuring of Infrastructure projects and their effectiveness in achieving their intended development outcomes. It demonstrates that public-private partnerships add several layers of complexity to infrastructure finance, planning and implementation, and that they can result in a significant gap between the project’s intended and actual developmental outcomes. The thesis proposes that governments and other project sponsors use human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) to address the challenges created by public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects and shows that this will help increase the possibility that infrastructure PPPs lead to sustainable development outcomes. The thesis also analyses a number of established human rights impact assessment methodologies and proposes a new approach that is specifically designed for the particular context of public-private partnerships in infrastructure projects. / Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / National Research Foundation (NRF) / Centre for Human Rights / LLD / Unrestricted

Sveriges storstäder växer och infrastrukturen byggs ut. Infrastrukturen anläggs till stor del under mark speciellt i Sveriges två största städer, Stockholm och Göteborg. Anläggning under markytan måste beakta husbyggnader och närliggande bergrum. Nya tunnlar kan på många ställen få en liten bergtäckning mellan befintliga tunnlar och markytan, vilket kan ställa till med problem vid konventionell sprängning.  Urbaniseringen kräver även nya bostäder och kontor, där de nya byggnaderna och anläggningarna konstrueras ibland nära befintliga. Sprängning måste i dessa fall utföras kontrollerat inom acceptabla nivåer för att inte skada de befintliga konstruktionerna.   Detta sätter stora krav på själva sprängningsarbetet. I extremt känsliga miljöer är de alternativa metoderna till sprängning det enda valen ifall konstruktionen ska uppföras. I detta examensarbete har de två vanligaste alternativa metoderna vajersågning och hydraulisk spräckning detaljstuderats för att utvärdera metoderna i urban miljö.  En kvalitativ studie har genomförts som består av litteratur- och intervjustudie. Litteraturstudien behandlar omgivningspåverkan från sprängning och beskriver även hur de alternativa metoderna fungerar. Intervjustudien har genomförts semi-strukturerad med entreprenörer inom vajersågning och hydraulisk spräckning och visar att metoderna fungerar bra och är här för att stanna. Vajersågning är lämplig vid tunneldrivning och känsliga bergkonturer i ovanjordsprojekt. Hydraulisk spräckning utförs med fördel i kombination med vajersågning vid tunneldrivning och fungerar bäst för stora ytor med lågt djup i ovanjordsprojekt. Entreprenörerna uppfattar generellt att projektörerna saknar kompetens inom vajersågning och hydraulisk spräckning, vilket påvisar betydelsen för detta examensarbete.