Environmental and Natural Resources Management: Lessons from City Program Innovations

The enactment of the 1991 Local Government Code has brought greater responsibilities for local government units to manage their natural resources and the environment. This move has encouraged greater dynamism and innovation in some Philippine cities. Strategies employed and programs undertaken by various cities largely depend on the stage of development and their respective focus and priorities. For large urban cities, environmental problems are associated with growth and economic activity and thus, a special attention is given for a clean air and a healthy environment. This paper aims to draw lessons from selected cities that have undertaken innovative environmental programs and to highlight key elements that have made their programs successful and sustainable.metropolitan structure, environmental issues, metropolitan planning and development, environmental management

Managing the Environment and Natural Resources: Lessons from City Program Innovations

The enactment of 1991 Local Government Code has brought greater responsibilities for local government units to manage their natural resources and the environment. This move has encouraged greater dynamism and innovation in some Philippine cities. Strategies employed and programs undertaken by various cities largely depend on the stage of development and their respective focus and priorities. For large urban cities, environmental problems are associated with growth and economic activity and thus, a special attention is given for a clean air and a healthy environment. This paper aims to draw lessons from selected cities that have undertaken innovative environmental programs and to highlight key elements that have made their programs successful and sustainable.metropolitan structure, metropolitan planning and development, environmental management

Environmental and Natural Resources Management: Lessons from City Program Innovations

The enactment of the 1991 Local Government Code has brought greater responsibilities for local government units to manage their natural resources and the environment. This move has encouraged greater dynamism and innovation in some Philippine cities. Strategies employed and programs undertaken by various cities largely depend on the stage of development and their respective focus and priorities. For large urban cities, environmental problems are associated with growth and economic activity and thus, a special attention is given for a clean air and a healthy environment. This paper aims to draw lessons from selected cities that have undertaken innovative environmental programs and to highlight key elements that have made their programs successful and sustainable.metropolitan structure, environmental issues, metropolitan planning and development, environmental management

Improving the Spatial Dimension of the Annual Budget

With the delivery of most basic social services now devolved in the hands of local government units, has the process of budgeting followed suit? How far has the spatial dimension of the annual budget taken shape? Has regional budgeting--which was introduced as far back as the 1970s--become the norm and institutionalized as a process?fiscal management, fiscal sector

Asymptotic Correlations in Gapped and Critical Topological Phases of 1D Quantum Systems

Topological phases protected by symmetry can occur in gapped and---surprisingly---in critical systems. We consider non-interacting fermions in one dimension with spinless time-reversal symmetry. It is known that the phases are classified by a topological invariant $\omega$ and a central charge $c$. We investigate the correlations of string operators, giving insight into the interplay between topology and criticality. In the gapped phases, these non-local string order parameters allow us to extract $\omega$. Remarkably, ratios of correlation lengths are universal. In the critical phases, the scaling dimensions of these operators serve as an order parameter, encoding $\omega$ and $c$. We derive exact asymptotics of these correlation functions using Toeplitz determinant theory. We include physical discussion, e.g., relating lattice operators to the conformal field theory. Moreover, we discuss the dual spin chains. Using the aforementioned universality, the topological invariant of the spin chain can be obtained from correlations of local observables.Comment: 35 pages, 5 page appendi

Metropolitan Arrangements in the Philippines: A New Urban Development Challenge

The formation of metropolitan arrangements has recently become the trend. As these are still in the early stage of developing their identity, this note deals with the policy issues concerning metropolis and how to sustain such arrangements. It also presents the profile of the different emerging metropolis in the country.urban management, urbanization, metropolitan structure, metropolitan planning and development

F-theory at order α′3\alpha'^3

We study the effective physics of F-theory at order $\alpha'^3$ in derivative expansion. We show that the ten-dimensional type IIB eight-derivative couplings involving the graviton and the axio-dilaton naturally descend from pure gravity in twelve dimensions. Upon compactification on elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau fourfolds, the non-trivial vacuum profile for the axio-dilaton leads to a new, genuinely N=1, $\alpha'^3$ correction to the four-dimensional effective action.Comment: 24 pages, minor improvements, typos correcte

Glassy Chimeras could be blind to quantum speedup: Designing better benchmarks for quantum annealing machines

Recently, a programmable quantum annealing machine has been built that minimizes the cost function of hard optimization problems by adiabatically quenching quantum fluctuations. Tests performed by different research teams have shown that, indeed, the machine seems to exploit quantum effects. However experiments on a class of random-bond instances have not yet demonstrated an advantage over classical optimization algorithms on traditional computer hardware. Here we present evidence as to why this might be the case. These engineered quantum annealing machines effectively operate coupled to a decohering thermal bath. Therefore, we study the finite-temperature critical behavior of the standard benchmark problem used to assess the computational capabilities of these complex machines. We simulate both random-bond Ising models and spin glasses with bimodal and Gaussian disorder on the D-Wave Chimera topology. Our results show that while the worst-case complexity of finding a ground state of an Ising spin glass on the Chimera graph is not polynomial, the finite-temperature phase space is likely rather simple: Spin glasses on Chimera have only a zero-temperature transition. This means that benchmarking optimization methods using spin glasses on the Chimera graph might not be the best benchmark problems to test quantum speedup. We propose alternative benchmarks by embedding potentially harder problems on the Chimera topology. Finally, we also study the (reentrant) disorder-temperature phase diagram of the random-bond Ising model on the Chimera graph and show that a finite-temperature ferromagnetic phase is stable up to 19.85(15)% antiferromagnetic bonds. Beyond this threshold the system only displays a zero-temperature spin-glass phase. Our results therefore show that a careful design of the hardware architecture and benchmark problems is key when building quantum annealing machines.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Evidence of a glass transition in a 10-state non-mean-field Potts glass

Potts glasses are prototype models that have been used to understand the structural glass transition. However, in finite space dimensions a glass transition remains to be detected in the 10-state Potts glass. Using a one-dimensional model with long-range power-law interactions we present evidence that a glass transition below the upper critical dimension can exist for short-range systems at low enough temperatures. Gaining insights into the structural glass transition for short-range systems using spin models is thus potentially possible, yet difficult.Comment: 4 pages, 1 table, 2 figure