Aporia of Participatory Planning: Framing Local Action in the Entrepreneurial City

This essay examines the hegemonic-discursive barriers facing local action in cities today, first, by revisiting the New Left/Frankfurt School critique of modern institutions, which not incidentally proved a key inspirational source for the original grassroots movements of the 1960s and 1970s.In this first section of the essay, Adorno's analysis of the Culture Industry is reconsidered alongside Berger’s and Bourdieu's critical sociology. Second, it is argued that the institutional recuperation of localism since the 1970s has resulted in a paradoxical abandoning or overturning of its earlier revolutionary-utopian motives, which has subsequently sowed the seeds for a new counterrevolutionary trend in local politics (so-called NIMBYism). This trend is seen as attendant to still larger city-transformative processes of gentrification and neoliberalisation, or ‘urban entrepreneurialism.’The essay concludes, finally, with an exposition of the central challenges at hand, and presents an alternative envisioning of participation as a mode of nonintegrative or counterhegemonic praxis

Mind the partisan trust gap: why the 2016 elections are making some Americans worse off

How do we determine whether or not we should trust someone we don’t know? Often we use shortcuts, and party affiliation is one of them. People are less likely to trust someone who is part of a political party they oppose than they are to trust someone who is part of a political party they support – something known as the “partisan trust gap”. Using a multi-country study of partisan trust, Ryan Carlin and Gregory Love find that the more polarized people think their country’s politics are, the wider their partisan trust gap. Such trust gaps are important, as they reduce the ability of elites to reach a compromise and to tackle policy challenges

Adiabatic Quantum Simulation of Quantum Chemistry

We show how to apply the quantum adiabatic algorithm directly to the quantum computation of molecular properties. We describe a procedure to map electronic structure Hamiltonians to 2-body qubit Hamiltonians with a small set of physically realizable couplings. By combining the Bravyi-Kitaev construction to map fermions to qubits with perturbative gadgets to reduce the Hamiltonian to 2-body, we obtain precision requirements on the coupling strengths and a number of ancilla qubits that scale polynomially in the problem size. Hence our mapping is efficient. The required set of controllable interactions includes only two types of interaction beyond the Ising interactions required to apply the quantum adiabatic algorithm to combinatorial optimization problems. Our mapping may also be of interest to chemists directly as it defines a dictionary from electronic structure to spin Hamiltonians with physical interactions

In defense of biblical literacy in English and American literary studies

Dr. William Kerwin, Thesis Supervisor.This study seeks to address a nationwide lack of concern for biblical education in English literary studies. More specifically, it evaluates and offers potential remedies for the current state of biblical illiteracy within the academy. By showing the academic consequences of textual misinterpretation that derive from biblical illiteracy, this essay hopes to educationally and pedagogically promote the adherence of biblical scholarship in English literature. Through biblical explications of select representational texts, this also study intends to effectively contribute to efforts that value foundational biblical education in secular literary academia.Dr. William Kerwin, Thesis Supervisor.Includes bibliographical references (pages 56-60)

The impacts of glacial runoff and pCO₂ on centennial-to millennial-scale climate variability during the last glacial cycle

Freshwater is hypothesized to have a critical role in previous centennial-to millennial-scale climate variability(CMCV),e.g. Dansgaard Oeschger events, the Younger Dryas, and may play a central role in future climate change as ice sheet and glacier melt accelerates. Similarly, anthropogenic climate change demonstrates the need to understand the impact of carbon dioxide (pCO₂) on climate variability. The relationship between freshwater and rapid climate change in the paleoclimate records has been a subject of intense study, but past approaches have generally relied upon an approximation of freshwater entering the oceans via wide bands in the North Atlantic in `hosing' experiments. This design element of hosing experiments, which supports the relationship between freshwater and climate cooling, artificially amplifies the climate response by introducing freshwater directly over sites of deep water formation. As well, previous studies have yet to characterize the role of either pCO₂ or freshwater on CMCV under appropriate boundary conditions. This thesis explores the impact two likely controls of CMCV, freshwater and pCO₂ concentrations. I achieve this by first determining where coastally released freshwater is transported using an eddy permitting ocean model configured for the the Younger Dryas interval during the last deglaciation. It is found that by explicitly resolving features important for the transport of coastally released freshwater, such as mesoscale eddies, that hosing overestimates the amount of freshwater transported to sites of deepwater formation by 2-4x. Next, using these results I then derive a novel method of freshwater injection, the freshwater fingerprint, and examine the relative climate impact of different freshwater injection distributions. In comparing the fingerprint method against both conventional band hosing and regional injection methods I conclude that the fingerprint methodology allows for emulation of some features of the eddy permitting representation in a coarse resolution coupled climate model. Finally, I examine the impact that pCO₂ and freshwater has on a specific form of CMCV, Dansgaard-Oeschger events during Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS3), with boundary conditions consistent with the MIS3 interval. When examining characteristics of CMCV I find that both increasing freshwater and decreasing carbon dioxide levels lead to similar changes in interstadial & stadial durations

Microstructure analysis of the effects of news on order flows and on price discovery in foreign exchange markets.

This thesis brings together a number of studies using high frequency foreign exchange (FX) data. The first part examines the effects of scheduled, publicly released macroeconomic news, while the final chapter considers another, related, aspect of FX microstructure. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the thesis and reviews the literature in high frequency empirical FX research. In Chapter 2, I use up to ten months of FX transactions and quote data to analyse foreign exchange activity around times of scheduled news releases. The effects of news on exchange rate levels are examined, as well as the effects on spreads, trading volume and volatihty. Chapter 3 extends this analysis, asking how public information enters prices. Under rational expectations and efficient markets hypotheses, the news contained in public information announcements should be impounded directly, with there being no role for trades in this process of information assimilation. However, the results suggest that up to two thirds of the price relevant information enters via trading (order flow in particular). Chapter 4 provides an explanation why order flow is so important around public news releases and also examines the effects of news on market depths. In Chapter 5 I examine how much information is carried in trades by looking at the price impact of order flow when feedback trading is allowed. The model that is often used in the literature is proved to be misspecified when temporally aggregated data are employed and Chapter 5 introduces a method to estimate the otherwise unidentified model. Using impulse response functions, I show that trades actually carry more information than previous estimates suggest

Divided government shields leaders from blame for the economy but affords no quarter in the fight against terrorism

When disaster strikes, governments tend to be held accountable whether it is an economic disaster, such as the recent financial crisis, or a terrorist attack. In new research, Ryan E. Carlin, Gregory J. Love and Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo use data from Latin America to examine the effects of unified and divided government on how citizens ascribe blame when terrorism and negative economic outcomes occur. They find that because the executive shares responsibility with national and international factors for the state of the economy, citizens are more forgiving when government is divided. After terrorist attacks, on the other hand, citizens blame their leaders even if government is divided as they see their leaders as having near sole responsibility for issues of national security