Tax dividend evaluation of major urban renewal projects

This paper proposes a parsimonious methodology to evaluate the impact of large urban renewal projects on public revenues. The impact is largely endogenous, external to projects and may encompass a broad range of instruments, ranging from local to regional to central governments. We look at licence fees, user charges, piggyback levies, excise taxes, social security contributions, and taxation of property, corporate income, personal income, and sales or value added. All these revenues are labelled tax dividends for short. The evaluation of a project?s tax dividends may help governments on their licensing and, above all, on their co-financing decisions. However, the need for rigorous financial evaluations faces too many difficulties in practice, from modelling complexity to information shortages to time constraints to bureaucratic obstruction. The methodology in this paper aims precisely at delivering feasible, fast and reasonably sound assessments that can be computed before or after the projects? accomplishment. Revenue changes spring from the economic effects of renewal projects, which differ across space and time. Spatial effects are not restricted to the renewal site. Very often, they spill over to neighbouring city areas, and may also include region and nationwide outcomes. Most on-site effects are internalised by the developer but generate tax dividends too. The renewal project can also bring important benefits to adjacent city areas, because it either reduces a negative externality?pollution or crime, for example?or creates a positive externality?such as widely appraised amenities?for agents located therein. In the case of really large renewal projects, there may also be non-local effects to account for. In fact, the project?s own expenditure is likely to leak into regional and national suppliers, triggering macroeconomic consequences. Economic effects differ also on time, being temporary or permanent. The former come out of resource acquisition by the developer, and may include expenditure on planning, compulsory purchases, decontamination, demolition, and construction. Permanent effects on output occur because these projects increase the real value of capital in the economy. Real estate rents, on site and on neighbouring areas, capitalise the social net benefits of the renewal project. Hence, temporary effects are spatially diffuse and expand the economy in the short run. The methodology includes a tailored Mundell-Fleming design to quantify these effects. Permanent outcomes expand potential output, are normally restricted to an urban subspace and are quantifiable out of differential rents. The methodology is easily customisable to particular projects. As an example, we include an application to the large ongoing renewal project in Eastern Lisbon, Portugal, triggered by the 1998 world exhibition?Expo?98. Frequently, major renewal projects are prompted by a highly visible event, such as this exhibition or the Olympics. The event itself is likely to cause temporary effects, for example through its impact on the tourism sector? which is likely to boost within the city and its region. Our application shows also how to plug these effects into the analysis.

An Online Crowd-video service for collaborative event recording

Each day, technological evolution allows access to information in new ways. Traditional text-based newspapers were, in times past the main source of information, but now there is more and more options. First, with radio transmissions, then with the television, and more recently with the Internet. Nowadays, it is easy to get access to information and multimedia through images and video which can be accessed anytime, anywhere. This new source of information is gaining more and more fans, not only because it is easy to reach, but also because it offers the information needed in quick and effective ways. This technological evolution does not stop, so now mankind wants to be more than mere receptors, they also want to take an active part in this process as a source, sharing their own information through those new technologies, with people from all over the world. In this dissertation, we developed a collaborative system where users will share their own videos and collaborate between themselves to develop events related to a particular event. Our intention is to engage users into contributing to grow the available data regarding that event. With this solution we want to offer, not only some features that similar and already existing systems like Youtube and Vimeo present, that we assume to be basic and necessary, but also some new like timelines and the possibility to every user contribute to them.

A Genetic Programming Approach for Computer Vision: Classifying High-level Image Features from Convolutional Layers with an Evolutionary Algorithm

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceComputer Vision is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence that provides a visual perception component to computers, mimicking human intelligence. One of its tasks is image classification and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been the most implemented algorithm in the last few years, with few changes made to the fully-connected layer of those neural networks. Nonetheless, recent research has been showing their accuracy could be improved in certain cases by implementing other algorithms for the classification of high-level image features from convolutional layers. Thus, the main research question for this document is: To what extent does the substitution of the fully-connected layer in Convolutional Neural Networks for an evolutionary algorithm affect the performance of those CNN models? The proposed two-step approach in this study does the classification of high-level image features with a state-of-the-art GP-based algorithm for multiclass classification called M4GP. This is conducted using secondary data with different characteristics, to better benchmark the implementation and to carefully investigate different outcomes. Results indicate the new learning approach yielded similar performance in the dataset with a low number of output classes. However, none of the M4GP models was able to surpass the results of the fully-connected layers in terms of test accuracy. Even so, this might be an interesting route if one has a powerful computer and needs a very light classifier in terms of model size. The results help to understand in which situation it might be beneficial to perform a similar experimental setup, either in the context of a work project or concerning a novel research topic

Reference Model for Interoperability of Autonomous Systems

This thesis proposes a reference model to describe the components of an Un-manned Air, Ground, Surface, or Underwater System (UxS), and the use of a single Interoperability Building Block to command, control, and get feedback from such vehicles. The importance and advantages of such a reference model, with a standard nomenclature and taxonomy, is shown. We overview the concepts of interoperability and some efforts to achieve common refer-ence models in other areas. We then present an overview of existing un-manned systems, their history, characteristics, classification, and missions. The concept of Interoperability Building Blocks (IBB) is introduced to describe standards, protocols, data models, and frameworks, and a large set of these are analyzed. A new and powerful reference model for UxS, named RAMP, is proposed, that describes the various components that a UxS may have. It is a hierarchical model with four levels, that describes the vehicle components, the datalink, and the ground segment. The reference model is validated by showing how it can be applied in various projects the author worked on. An example is given on how a single standard was capable of controlling a set of heterogeneous UAVs, USVs, and UGVs

Protocol for the analysis of hematopoietic lineages in the whole kidney marrow of adult zebrafish

The whole kidney marrow (WKM) is the site for hematopoiesis in the adult zebrafish. Here, we present a protocol for analyzing hematopoietic lineages in the WKM of adult zebrafish. We describe steps for the isolation of hematopoietic cells from the WKM, the downstream analysis of total marrow cellularity, and analysis of cell populations by flow cytometry. We then detail procedures for May-Grünwald-Giemsa staining for analysis of cellular morphology and phenotyping.For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Mahony et al

Generic Real-Time Motion Controller for Differential Mobile Robots

Non

Citologia aspirativa da tiróide: utilidade diagnóstica atual e perspectivas futuras

Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Escola Paulista de Medicina Departamento de MedicinaUNIFESP, EPM, Depto. de MedicinaSciEL