Urban Air Rights as Market Devices: Exploring Financialization in Taipei Metropolitan Area

This thesis is the first geographical study which critically explores the role of urban air rights - the right to build upwards on and above a land tract – in processes of urban financialization. The thesis highlights the economic lives of air rights in the Taipei Metropolitan Area, Taiwan, showing how they are not only a market-based urban policy and planning tool but are also closely involved in economic processes of making markets, assets, and profits. Three types of urban air rights - Bonus Floor Area (BFA), Transferable Development Rights (TDR) and Incremental Floor Area (IFA) – that are prevalent in urban Taipei are explored in detail. The thesis examines the relations between the proliferation of air rights production and urban financialization through an experimental methodology of ‘following urban air rights’ through the socio-technical operations of their assembly and circulation. It argues that air rights are ‘market devices’ and, as such, they are constitutive of the contingent processes of commodification, marketization and capitalization that amount to urban financialization. Through case studies, the thesis shows how airspaces are commodified and, significantly, how they also become an asset class that is marketized and traded and/or capitalized upon and borrowed against (i.e. leveraged). Moreover, by exploring these processes, the thesis shows how air rights ‘overflow’ into popular urban politics: air rights become a site of struggle over rights to the financialized city. More broadly, the thesis contributes to theoretical debates on urban financialization by examining how the urban-finance nexus is teeming with socio-technical practices. By focusing on air rights as market devices, the thesis provides an analytical grammar for studying how urban air rights constitute urban financialization. It also demonstrates how a methodology of ‘following the air rights’ enables exploration of the multifaceted qualities and multiple markets that air rights configure

Design of nearest neighbor classifiers: multi-objective approach

AbstractThe goal of designing optimal nearest neighbor classifiers is to maximize classification accuracy while minimizing the sizes of both reference and feature sets. A usual way is to adaptively weight the three objectives as an objective function and then use a single-objective optimization method for achieving this goal. This paper proposes a multi-objective approach to cope with the weight tuning problem for practitioners. A novel intelligent multi-objective evolutionary algorithm IMOEA is utilized to simultaneously edit compact reference and feature sets for nearest neighbor classification. Three comparison studies are designed to evaluate performance of the proposed approach. It is shown empirically that the IMOEA-designed classifiers have high classification accuracy and small sizes of reference and feature sets. Moreover, IMOEA can provide a set of good solutions for practitioners to choose from in a single run. The simulation results indicate that the IMOEA-based approach is an expedient method to design nearest neighbor classifiers, compared with an existing single-objective approach

Respiratory negotiations: The elemental biopolitics of medical masks in times of atmospheric crisis

Existing at the intersection of health, politics and affect, medical masks evoke lines and flights of contentions and resistance in everyday lives. They are instruments of negotiation that mediate across bodies, breaths, airs, faces, and lived experiences. Carrying a history that goes back only a few hundred years, masks gained unprecedented traction during the COVID-19 outbreak. The outbreaks of social anxiety, frustration, and anger following mask mandates live beyond immediate concerns of efficacy. In moment of atmospheric crisis masks articulate and give expression to racial, class, environmental, political, and cultural divisions. In this article, we study the development of medical masks through an exploration of three episodes of atmospheric crisis, starting with their earliest recorded appearance at the time of the first edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan to the present day. Using an elemental mode of thinking, which foregrounds embodied entanglement with air, we explore the ways in which masks speak to biopolitical concerns. The episodes we draw from constitute and represent different mask regimes, both in their materiality and design, mirroring historical change as well as evolving biopolitical orders. We show that medical masks are not simply filtering devices against exposure from respiratory viruses; instead, they are biopolitical techniques through which regimes of inclusion and exclusion are enacted. By focusing on masks, we make a broader argument that work on biopolitics could gain insight from elemental thinking

Fin reduction is a novel and unexpected teratogenic effect of amikacin-treated zebrafish embryos

[[abstract]]We used zebrafish as a model to assess amikacin-induced embryotoxicity. We exposed zebrafish embryos to amikacin, using different amikacin doses (0-10 ppm), durations (12-48 h), and onsets (0, 24, 48 hpf). Amikacin-induced embryonic toxicity and reduced survival rate were found dependent on the exposure dose, duration and onset. Based on immunostaining with neuron-specific antibodies, amikacin reduced the number and size of zebrafish neuromasts. In addition, Amikacin caused pelvic, dorsal and anal fin defects in dose-dependent and duration-dependent manners. Proliferating cell nuclear antigen immunostaining revealed that amikacin-induced fin defects were not due to reduction of proliferating mesenchymal cells. TUNEL assay demonstrated that amikacin-induced fin defects might not associate with apoptosis. Therefore, further investigations are required to elucidate if other cell death pathways are involved in amikacin-induced fin defects.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[booktype]]紙

THE EFFECT OF HAND-HELD WEIGHTS ON STANDING LONG JUMP PERFORMANCE

The standing long jump was one of the events in ancient Olympiad Games. Extra weights were held in the hands of athletes during the jump. It has long been debated whether the extra weights were used to make the challenge more difficult or to enhance the jumping performances. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of extra weights on standing long jump performance. A Redlake high-speed camera was synchronized with a Kistler force platform to collect the data of eight male jumping performances. The results Indicate that the total horizontal propelling time, time to maximal horizontal force, horizontal impulse and horizontal velocity of body CG at takeoff all increased. with loaded jumps. In addition, the vertical velocity of body CG and angles at takeoff decrease with loadedl weights. It was suggested optimal extra weights for extending standing jump distance is 8% of body mass

Optical transitions between Landau levels: AA-stacked bilayer graphene

The low-frequency optical excitations of AA-stacked bilayer graphene are investigated by the tight-binding model. Two groups of asymmetric LLs lead to two kinds of absorption peaks resulting from only intragroup excitations. Each absorption peak obeys a single selection rule similar to that of monolayer graphene. The excitation channel of each peak is changed as the field strength approaches a critical strength. This alteration of the excitation channel is strongly related to the setting of the Fermi level. The peculiar optical properties can be attributed to the characteristics of the LL wave functions of the two LL groups. A detailed comparison of optical properties between AA-stacked and AB-stacked bilayer graphenes is also offered. The compared results demonstrate that the optical properties are strongly dominated by the stacking symmetry. Furthermore, the presented results may be used to discriminate AABG from MG, which can be hardly done by STM

Torsion of right middle lobe after a right upper lobectomy

Lobar torsion after lung resection is a quite rare complication. A 50-year-old woman presented typical features on chest radiographs and CT(computed tomography) scan of lobar torsion after a right upper lobectomy. After emergency lobectomy of right middle lobe, the patient recovered well and discharged 10 days after the second operation