A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Pietermaritzburg, 2015 / This thesis considers economy and cosmology in the Iron Age of KwaZulu-Natal. It draws on models derived from anthropological and historical analyses of precolonial agriculturists in southern Africa and applies these to archaeological data. Critics argue that anthropological approaches in archaeology are not conducive to the creation of a socially dynamic past. In contrast, I believe that their potential is considerable. The models targeted, principally Huffman’s Central Cattle Pattern, obviously represent socially dynamic relationships. This is clear if we look at lower-level models: Ngubane’s analysis of Zulu sickness and healing, which reveals fracture lines and tensions within the homestead, and Hammond-Tooke’s observation that the Nguni and Sotho pollution systems are variations related to the specifics of marriage and settlement. Ngubane’s analysis couples neatly with Guy’s identification of the ‘history-making’ principle—the struggle for the accumulation, creation and control of human productive and reproductive capacity— that gave Iron Age societies their dynamism. It is an engagement that firmly integrates systems of symbolism and belief with economy. Throughout this study I focus on the expression of this dynamic principle in cosmology and material culture. Consideration of pollution concepts in the Early Iron Age showed that the high exchange value of women created extensive lateral alliance networks as cattle moved as bridewealth from one homestead to another. The system worked against a concern for male agnatic continuity and so generated considerable structural tension within society, which was expressed in material culture. My focus on fish remains in Iron Age sites generated an ‘ethnography’ and political history of fishing where none had existed previously. It established a cultural logic that explained the avoidance of fish eating in some societies, and its adoption and significance in others. The approach combined with Kopytoff ’s frontier model revealed two key findings. First, the marginal category, amalala, originated at the Early and Late Iron Age interface. Secondly, the Zulu kingdom emerged from a dynastic shift in a complex of chiefdoms around the Babanango plateau, with the Zulu leadership usurping Khumalo authority. An analysis of Nguni rainmaking, and of the record of interaction between huntergatherers and agriculturists, revealed no evidence that hunter-gatherers made rain for agriculturists until the late nineteenth century. This work marked their final tragedy, their loss of independent life as the colonial world closed in about them.

[pt] Esta dissertação documenta uma relação interessante: crime parece induzir poupança. Enquanto a literatura de economia do crime vem focando-se nos determinantes da criminalidade, esse estudo analisa a questão reversa: como o crime afeta decisões econômicas? Esta pergunta é interessante e importante, já que variáveis chaves podem ser influenciadas pela criminalidade. Usando dados no nível do município para o estado de São Paulo, encontramos que cidades com mais crimes também tem um nível de poupança mais alto. Esse resultado é robusto à endogeneidade do crime, diferentes medidas de poupança, e um grande número de controles demográficos. Mais ainda, esse padrão só surge quando considerado o crime contra o patrimônio, o que é consistente com a teoria desenvolvida no segundo capítulo dessa dissertação. / [en] This dissertation documents a striking relationship: crime appears to induce savings. While the crime literature has focused the determinants of crime, we study the reverse question: how does crime affect economic decisions? This question is interesting and important, for key economic variables can be influenced by crime. Using Brazilian city level data, we find that high crime cities also have high savings rates. The results are robust to endogeneity of crime, different measures of savings, and a large set of demographic controls. Furthermore, this pattern only arises when property crime is considered, which is consistent with the theory developed in the second chapter of this thesis.

Energy conservation can mitigate significant issues such as climate change and fuel poverty, yet the determinants of this behaviour are poorly understood. It is important to understand the antecedents of energy conservation in order to effectively stimulate this behaviour in society. Traditional models have focused on normative and intentional processes to explain environmental behaviour, but have proven largely unsuccessful for predicting energy use. Considering that day-to-day energy behaviour is likely to be habitual and context dependent, models such as the Comprehensive Action Determination Model (CADM, Klöckner & Blöbaum, 2010), which have integrated these factors with more traditional antecedents of behaviour, may better account for people’s actions. The early research in this thesis tests the application of this model to energy saving behaviour using a mixed-methods approach. Findings show that such a model is suitable to account for the drivers of energy behaviour, particularly because of the important role of habits and situational influences on this behaviour. Although this model can successfully predict daily energy behaviours that involve the routine curtailment of household energy use, one-off energy efficiency investment behaviours are unlikely to be determined by the variables considered by the CADM. That is, these behaviours may be more dependent on people’s understanding of the energy consumption in their household, or their energy literacy. Therefore, the second part of this thesis investigates the cognitive processes that inform conscious energy judgements to explore the antecedents of this energy literacy. The studies in this thesis uncover an unprecedented variety of energy judgement heuristics in this decision-making process, and these heuristics are further investigated, again using various methods. This thesis concludes that, to maximally facilitate energy conservation, the habitual and situational antecedents of energy saving behaviour, as captured in such frameworks as the CADM, need to be considered alongside the cognitive processes that shape people’s energy literacy when designing effective energy conservation interventions that target both routine and non-routine actions.

Chan Bun Bun. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-67). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / English Abstract --- p.ii / Chinese Abstract --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.iv / Table of Contents --- p.v / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Hong Kong Social Security System / Chapter 2.1 --- The Needs of Old Age Protection in Hong Kong --- p.3 / Chapter 2.2 --- Current Situation in Hong Kong --- p.4 / Chapter 2.3 --- Review of the Development of Old Age Protection in Hong Kong --- p.7 / Chapter 2.4 --- The MPF System in Hong Kong --- p.9 / Chapter 2.5 --- The Policy Issues of the MPF System --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Singapore Social Security System / Chapter 3.1 --- The Needs Old Age Protection in Singapore --- p.18 / Chapter 3.2 --- The CPF System in Singapore --- p.20 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- The CPF in Singapore and the MPF in Hong Kong / Chapter 4.1 --- Reasons for Comparing the CFP in Singapore with the MPF in Hong Kong --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2 --- Comparing the CPF in Singapore with the MPF in Hong Kong --- p.26 / Chapter 4.3 --- Comparing the Impact of the MPF and the CPF on Aggregate Savings --- p.28 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Literature Review / Chapter 5.1 --- The Impact of Social Security Wealth on Aggregate Savingsin United States --- p.33 / Chapter 5.2 --- The Impact of Social Security Wealth on Aggregate Savingsin Other Countries --- p.38 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- The Theory --- p.42 / Chapter Chapter 7 --- The Empirical Set Up / Chapter 7.1 --- The Data --- p.49 / Chapter 7.2 --- The Model --- p.50 / Chapter 7.3 --- Method of Estimation --- p.53 / Chapter Chapter 8 --- Results Interpretation --- p.56 / Chapter Chapter 9 --- Conclusion --- p.61 / Bibliography --- p.63 / Data Appendix --- p.75

In the early nineteenth-century United States, many social reformers, public commentators, and legislators argued that workers must engage in prudent financial planning in order to remain independent in a capitalist economy. Their belief that personal mismanagement was the primary cause of poverty led some of them to create the first financial institutions to help Americans of limited means save and invest their earnings: savings banks. From this modest start rose both a widespread ideology that related personal financial practice to personal virtue and a multibillion dollar industry that used the savings of millions of American workers to finance government, business, and personal debt. "Little Capitalists" charts this evolution from the philanthropic savings banks of the early-nineteenth century to the myriad commercial, cooperative, and public financial institutions for the working classes of the early-twentieth century. It shows how conceptions of individual and civic responsibility interacted with actual savings practices to integrate American workers into the national economy, building the financial apparatus that funded the expansion of wage-labor capitalism by harnessing the capital of wage laborers themselves. American institutional savings pioneers sought to address increased poverty wrought by urban growth and the creation of a wage-earning class in the first half of the nineteenth century. These reformers organized the country's original savings banks on the premise that all workers were capable of saving some of their earnings--no matter how little--so that they could remain financially independent in times of unemployment, injury, or old age. Their institutions tried to teach workers how to save money by providing secure facilities in which they could do so in the small amounts that no other financial institutions would handle. They also offered depositors a chance to earn a small profit from interest paid on deposits. Because this interest derived from investing those deposits in securities, mortgages, and other loans, savings banks brought millions of nineteenth-century wage earners into the American economy as investors. In this way, these institutions promoted the idea that working-class depositors could be their own "capitalists." As more Americans saved growing amounts, legislators, political economists, social reformers, and other observers took it as evidence that any worker who exercised virtues like thrift and self-denial could save money. Because generations of Americans viewed these personal attributes as the bases of moral civilization, they increasingly looked to savings institutions to foster a better citizenry and nation. The US Congress chartered the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company after the Civil War not only to provide financial services to former slaves but also to train them for a life of citizenship grounded in the principles of free labor ideology. Likewise, a nationwide movement beginning in the late-nineteenth century brought together governments, educators, and bankers to create a system of school savings banks to inculcate virtue in children by teaching them how to save pennies and nickels. In both cases, the point was to mold a working class steeped in the social, political, and moral values that would make them amenable to the emerging system of wage-labor capitalism. Even as some savings institutions attempted social indoctrination, workers' growing deposits also demonstrated their financial power. From the 1870s to the 1910s, this motivated entrepreneurs and legislators to design and encourage new institutions to collect savings deposits and invest them widely, including: industrial life insurance firms, employee thrift plans, trust company and commercial bank savings departments, and a postal savings system. Meanwhile, organizations like building and loan associations slowly added the extension of working-class credit to the collection of working-class savings. These new institutions gave many Americans increased discretion over how to save (and spend) money. But as they began to utilize them, workers also became a significant component of the nation's for-profit finance economy as both creditors and debtors. In the process, they assumed new financial risk. "Little Capitalists" outlines this history. It shows how a group of social experiments designed to foster an independent working class in the early-nineteenth century spawned, by the second decade of the twentieth century, both an ideology of saving at the center of popular perceptions about good citizenship and a small finance industry that was indispensable to the American economy.

This thesis empirically investigates the effects of two main financial liberalisation policies namely interest rate liberalisation and capital market liberalisation on capital formation and economic growth in ten Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1970 to 2014. The empirical analysis employs revised time series and panel estimation techniques. The time series methodology allows for structural breaks in the multiple regression analysis, unit root tests, cointegration tests as well as Granger causality tests. The panel data methodology employs both fixed effects and random effects estimation techniques. A major novelty of this thesis is that it incorporates the so-called Mundlak procedure in the panel data methodology that enables the decomposition of the effects of each of the two financial liberalisation policies on capital formation and growth into transitory effects and permanent effects. Overall, the time series results provide evidence of mixed effects. Although, interest rate liberalisation and capital market liberalisation have significant positive short run effects on capital formation and economic growth in majority of the countries, there is evidence that the long run effects of both liberalisation policies are insignificant. The Mundlak decomposition provides evidence that the transitory effect of interest rate liberalisation is to boost capital formation and economic growth, and that capital market liberalisation tends to be insignificant to capital formation and growth in the short run. The Mundlak decomposition also provides evidence that both interest rate liberalisation and capital market liberalisation have a permanent effect on economic growth, but the permanent effect of both liberalisation policies on capital formation is insignificant. On the balance of evidence, there is an indication that the introduction of both financial liberalisation policies may not be as beneficial as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund claim and may not be a safe road to capital formation and growth, at least in the Sub-Saharan African region.

Le banc de poisson est un exemple typique d’auto organisation de groupe. Ce système implique des interactions complexes d’individus dans un milieu fluide et fait l’objet de nombreuses recherches multidisciplinaire théoriques, numériques ou expérimentales.Plusieurs hypothèses ont déjà été formulées pour expliquer la formation de ces bancs: la fuite face à des prédateurs, l’optimisation dans la recherche de nutriments ou encore l’économie d’énergie. Dans la plupart des recherches, les travaux se concentrent sur ce que les poissons devraient faire pour optimiser une tâche plutôt que sur des observations directes. Cela conduit à des différences dans les conclusions issus du travail des physiciens théoriciens ou ingénieurs avec ce qui est observé dans la nature par les biologistes. Dans ce travail, nous apportons, basées sur des observations directes tetra Hemigrammus bleheri, de nouveaux éléments sur les interactions des poissons lors de la nage collective comme le phénomène de burst-and-coast ou la synchronisation des cinématiques entre plus proches voisins. Enfin, nous démontrons que les bancs de Hemigrammus bleheri privilégient la configuration en ligne plutôt que celle en diamant souvent mise en avant dans la littérature / Fish school is the classical example of self-emergent system of collective behavior in animal locomotion, which involves complex interactions between individuals and has drawn fascination of numerous multidisciplinary analytical, numerical and experimental researches. Various reasons have been cited for the formation of fish school such as evading predators, enhancing foraging success or advantage in terms of energy consumption. However, most of the works primary focus on what fish should do in a school instead of what fish really do, leading to discrepancies between the works of theoretical physicists and engineers and what is observed in the nature by biologists. This thesis is an attempt to bridge this gap. In this work, we investigate the swimming dynamics of the red nose tetra fish Hemigrammus bleheri in a controlled experiment. The tetra fish are observed to swim using a burst-and-coast strategy, which could be for the purpose of active flow sensing. We also address the case of red nose tetra fish Hemigrammus bleheri swimming in groups in a uniform flow, giving special attention to the basic interactions and cooperative swimming of a single pair of fish. We first bring evidence of synchronization of the two fish, where the swimming modes are dominated by "out of phase" and "in phase" configurations. At last, we challenge the question of energy benefit by discussing the channeling effect versus the vortex interaction hypothesis (Weihs, Nature 241:290-291, 1973) about diamond shape. We provide the experimental observation that fish prefer inline formation or phalanx formation over the diamond shape while swimming in a school

In this dissertation, I develop a framework to study the effects of tax-deferred saving accounts on the aggregate economy. I incorporate tax-deferred saving accounts in a theoretical model of household's life-cycle decisions, which is then linked to the real world data by calibration. I study the effects of tax-deferred saving accounts on the aggregate savings and the aggregate output, and further analyze their impacts of different policy changes. In the first chapter, I present the important features of tax-deferred saving accounts in the U.S. and their institutional changes over time. I highlight the differences between IRA and 401(k) on their contribution limits and household's eligibility. While IRA has a lower contribution limit and is available to all households, 401(k) has a much higher contribution limit but is only accessible by a fraction of households. In the second chapter, I present an overlapping-generations model to capture the effects of tax-deferred saving accounts in a general equilibrium framework. There are four key aspects to the model: first, households can save in both ordinary saving account and tax-deferred saving account. Second, there is a nonlinear progressive income tax system. Third, households are heterogeneous in their labor productivity and 401(k) eligibility. Fourth, households decide consumption, savings and labor supply endogenously. The model is calibrated to the US economy in 2000, with the distribution of 401(k) eligibility being an endogenous outcome that matches the data reported in Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) in 2001. In the third chapter, I study the quantitative effects of tax-deferred saving accounts on the aggregate economy and investigate their policy implications. Specifically, I estimate the macroeconomic impacts of eliminating tax-deferred saving accounts from the economy. To highlight the role played by the heterogeneity of 401(k) eligibility, I conduct a quantitative exercise that provide universal 401(k) eligibility to all households. In these experiments, I maintain government revenue neutrality by introducing a new proportional income tax (subsidy) that has the same effects as a upward (downward) shift of all marginal tax rates in the US income tax schedule. Since the institutional settings of tax-deferred saving accounts essentially provide consumption tax treatments on households retirement savings, I further explore the implications of tax-deferred saving accounts for a proportional consumption tax reform. Results from this study indicate that tax-deferred saving accounts have significant impacts on the aggregate economy and demonstrate that these accounts substantially reduce the impacts of a consumption tax reform.

<p>Wireless sensor networks offer easy implementation, flexibility and mobility of hand held </p><p>devices. Sensors consist of an internal power source, which is the great limitation for </p><p>the life time and the usage of sensor networks. To increase the life time, sensors should </p><p>stay in energy saving sleep mode as long as possible, because in sleep mode the radio is </p><p>either shut down or working with less energy. Better energy handling is implemented in </p><p>different power saving mechanism of common Medium Access Control protocols, which are </p><p>evaluated and analyzed and further extensions and ideas to improve the energy efficiency </p><p>are presented. Slotted PSM is simulated with the NS2 and compared to the WLAN 802.11 </p><p>PSM technology and the results show that energy efficiency and power consumption are </p><p>much better implemented and life time increases with the use of Slotted PSM.</p>

<p>The typical residential building is located at the crossing of S. Centralgatan Street and Nedre Akargatan Street in the city of Gavle. It is a quadrangle building of six floors with a yard in the middle. There are 180 apartments of five types in total, and at the first floor there is a kindergarten. There is a District Heating in the building and heating recovery system ventilation which use heat exchanger to reheat.</p><p>Several solutions are used for reducing the heat loss. In the first step, the heat loss  and heat  in  has  been  calculated. There  are  several parameters  that involve the heat loss and heat in of whole building, so each parameter in the energy balance equation is extracted and calculated. And then the Energy Balance Sheet has been built. Among the heat loss part, the transmission is 1237MWh,  the  hot  tap  water  is  332MWh,  the  mechanical  ventilation  is 1041MWh, the natural ventilation is 325.7MWh.In the part of heat in, the DH is 1265.7MWh, the heat pump is 793MWh, the solar radiation is 562MWh, the internal heating is 315MWh.Later in the second step, after analyzing data of heat loss part, the improvements will be focused on the transmission and hot tap water parts because the heat loss in those two parts occupy the most. At the end of final step, the solutions have been discussed to optimize the heating system.</p><p>As conclusion, there are several suggested solutions. The total reduction of heat loss after adjustment is 163MWh, accounts 5.6% of originally heat loss. The  heat  loss  of  the  building  has  been  reduced  from  2935.7MWh  to 2772.7MWh.</p>