The urban component of the energy crisis

The spiral of higher oil prices that is occurring currently is mostly caused not by the lack of reserves, but by increasing demand on the existing supply. However, increase of supply would only temporarily attenuate the issue, as demand is expected to continue to soar and eventually outstrip the reserves of fossil fuels, which combined account of almost all our present energy sources. It is not that fossil fuels will disappear, but rather the certainty that they will become progressively scarcer and definitely more expensive as time goes by, has become an irreversible and well established trend. The cost increase of a critical resource - energy - will force unforeseen changes in production and in distribution of goods, affecting the whole productive matrix - including employment. Not only new products and distribution systems based on higher energy costs will need to be conceived and implemented but especially the current reliance on fossil fuels - oil, gas and coal - will need to be replaced almost entirely by sustainable sources - an extraordinarily complex enterprise that should consume our efforts in the next 40 years. Energy consumption will be further aggravated by the expected 2.3 billion population increase from now to 2050, which is expected to be almost entirely concentrated in the urban centres of Asia, Latin America and Africa. Since these additional urban spaces are still to be developed, urban development strategies that consider higher energy costs could effectively alleviate the transition period from fossil fuels to sustainable sources. Rather than providing a recipe for urban planning, this paper stresses the need for further research to incorporate the energy cost component with the urban development context and the dissemination of information on this matter.energy; environment; urban; development; planning;

South Sudan urban development strategy

Southern Sudan - the ten southern provinces of Sudan - has attained autonomy and may soon achieve total independence from Sudan. Yet decades of civil war not only prevented development but destroyed the infrastructure left over from the colonial period. While Southern Sudan is fortunate to have oil resources that can finance building up the new nation, the task is enormous - there are no cities, there is no established industrial base, there are no means of transport, agriculture is incipient and cattle raising still follows ancient nomadic traditions. To aggravate the situation, millions of returning refugees and internally displaced persons are returning to their homelands and need to be settled. This paper, by outlining a simple, pragmatic strategy to setup the 10 state capitals, is a response to the effort of the Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) in solving these issues. The establishment of a basic urban system - even with minimal services and infrastructure - is critical to support the establishment of initial economic activities, provide a base for the provincial administrations, supply basic human needs to the existing population and organize the resettlement effort. This effort would complement the works to recover the national road system and the development of Juba as the national capital and main base of operations of GOSS. After discussing the current issues and conditions, available resources and expected demand, a three phase urban development strategy is suggested to jump start the transformation of the existing settlements into operational urban centres. The development proposal is completed by a brief discussion on urban standards and design recommendations to be adopted.urban; regional; development; planning; strategy; sudan; africa

The Health Care Crisis in the United States: The Issues and Proposed Solutions by the 2008 Presidential Candidates

The United States has state of the art technology and world renowned expertise in medical treatment, yet in terms of healthcare it shows a dramatically poor performance in relation to the other industrialized countries. This situation is surprising, since one would expect that a free market system run almost entirely by the private sector should show a much better performance. This issue has reached the point of being one of the most important national concerns and the subject of serious political and economic arguments - not only regarding how the system should be improved, but also whether it should remain being run by the private sector under a free market approach or whether it should be run by the government and made accessible to the entire population. The first option is supported by the arguments that public initiatives often perform poorly and that free-market competition should prevail. Contrarily, the other side claims that the system is only nominally a free market, that empirical evidence shows it's not working as it should, and that other successful healthcare systems are mostly government operated. As is stands, the health care issue acquired national importance and is presented as a major component of both presidential candidates programs, yet each favoring a different approach to improve accessibility and lower healthcare costs. Republican Senator McCain relies on improving the system by maintaining its current private enterprise, free market characteristics, while Democratic Senator Barrack Obama favours providing universal coverage and lower costs through a higher government intervention in the system. This paper examines the approaches proposed by both candidates and analyses the potential impact their plans may have on the health care system. While the lack of more detailed implementation details makes difficult accessing the effective result of each policy, the comparative review of the alternative approaches presented in this paper will help the reader to to judge for him or herself which could be the more appropriate to upgrade the system and attain a higher performance level.Elections, General Elections, 2008, President, United States, Health Care, Healthcare, Crisis, McCain, Obama, Barack, Democrat, Republican, Private Market, Universal Healthcare, Competition

A simple model to evaluate relative urban conditions

The urban development process intends to enhance urban equipment, infrastructure and services to improve urban conditions and reduce inequalities. While planning activities usually demand a sizeable amount of data to assess these conditions, it is hard to find a straightforward procedure to translate these data into a comprehensive and balanced set of projects and programs. Most urban projects have a strong sectorial character and it is difficult to compare parks with roads or sanitation with schools. Development projects are normally justified in their own terms, yet rarely are sectorial demands equably met by the proposed projects. The following model intends to facilitate this task, providing a simple yet efficient means to assess urban conditions, evaluate and compare the sectorial demands and assemble a balanced set of development goals that can be used to estimate the overall investment needed. The proposed system assesses urban conditions through a set of selected indicators, derived from a compact data base. These indicators represent the performance of the basic urban sectors at each urban zone, thus providing the necessary spatial component to the system. The indicators are normalised to allow comparison of conditions between different sectors. The values of the normalised indicators are then used to evaluate the relative quality of services at each urban zone. By displaying the normalised indicators as bar charts, it is easier to visualise sectorial demands and spatial imbalances. The model is built on a spreadsheet, making fairly easy to verify how much improvement in the sector is needed to attain the desired performance level in each zone. New values can be entered interactively until a preferred urban conditions pattern is attained. The information produced by the model can be used as the basic guideline to dimension sectorial projects and compose a comprehensive development program. Besides describing and discussing all the procedures adopted, a simple yet complete example illustrates the use of the model.planning; urban; development; model; infrastructure; condition; regional

Pareto optimality in house allocation problems

We study Pareto optimal matchings in the context of house allocation problems. We present an O(\sqrt{n}m) algorithm, based on Gales Top Trading Cycles Method, for finding a maximum cardinality Pareto optimal matching, where n is the number of agents and m is the total length of the preference lists. By contrast, we show that the problem of finding a minimum cardinality Pareto optimal matching is NP-hard, though approximable within a factor of 2. We then show that there exist Pareto optimal matchings of all sizes between a minimum and maximum cardinality Pareto optimal matching. Finally, we introduce the concept of a signature, which allows us to give a characterization, checkable in linear time, of instances that admit a unique Pareto optimal matching

Singular Continuation: Generating Piece-wise Linear Approximations to Pareto Sets via Global Analysis

We propose a strategy for approximating Pareto optimal sets based on the global analysis framework proposed by Smale (Dynamical systems, New York, 1973, pp. 531-544). The method highlights and exploits the underlying manifold structure of the Pareto sets, approximating Pareto optima by means of simplicial complexes. The method distinguishes the hierarchy between singular set, Pareto critical set and stable Pareto critical set, and can handle the problem of superposition of local Pareto fronts, occurring in the general nonconvex case. Furthermore, a quadratic convergence result in a suitable set-wise sense is proven and tested in a number of numerical examples.Comment: 29 pages, 12 figure

Pareto law and Pareto index in the income distribution of Japanese companies

In order to study the phenomenon in detail that income distribution follows Pareto law, we analyze the database of high income companies in Japan. We find a quantitative relation between the average capital of the companies and the Pareto index. The larger the average capital becomes, the smaller the Pareto index becomes. From this relation, we can possibly explain that the Pareto index of company income distribution hardly changes, while the Pareto index of personal income distribution changes sharply, from a viewpoint of capital (or means). We also find a quantitative relation between the lower bound of capital and the typical scale at which Pareto law breaks. The larger the lower bound of capital becomes, the larger the typical scale becomes. From this result, the reason there is a (no) typical scale at which Pareto law breaks in the income distribution can be understood through (no) constraint, such as the lower bound of capital or means of companies, in the financial system.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Simple Problems: The Simplicial Gluing Structure of Pareto Sets and Pareto Fronts

Quite a few studies on real-world applications of multi-objective optimization reported that their Pareto sets and Pareto fronts form a topological simplex. Such a class of problems was recently named the simple problems, and their Pareto set and Pareto front were observed to have a gluing structure similar to the faces of a simplex. This paper gives a theoretical justification for that observation by proving the gluing structure of the Pareto sets/fronts of subproblems of a simple problem. The simplicity of standard benchmark problems is studied.Comment: 10 pages, accepted at GECCO'17 as a poster paper (2 pages