Leadership for resilient urban systems : two cases in Asheville, NC

The role of leadership in the resilience of urban systems is poorly understood. Leadership can be thought of as a complex practice, where the functions of leadership emerge from the relationships amongst actors, systems and institutions. There are five theorized functions of Complexity Leadership: Community Building, Information Gathering, Information Using, Generative and Administrative. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the connection, if any, between Complexity Leadership and the resilience of urban systems.  This was explored in the context of two cases in Asheville, NC: the Residents' Council of Public Housing of Asheville and Rainbow Community School. The Residents' Council is a non profit that represents residents’ interests; Public Housing in Asheville is a typical for a 100k small city. The case documents some of the Residents' Council's attempt to adopt Dynamic Governance, a set of self-organizing governance practices. Rainbow Community School is a private k-8 school, recognized internationally as an Ashoka Change-Maker School for its innovative model of education. Data was collected through a hybrid of traditional ethnographic techniques and distributed ethnography. Data was analyzed inductively, using a combination of qualitative analysis and set theoretic analysis. The research generated findings of three kinds.  First, complexity leadership was necessary but not sufficient to account for the observed resilience qualities. To explain the observed coordination across other functions and capacity to engage with mystery , this research theorizes an additional function of Complexity Leadership—a Spiritual function. Second, individual strategic leadership played a role in fostering resilience through strengthening weak functions of complexity leadership. Third, resilience qualities emerged over time through the process of Panarchy. Spiritual leadership plays a role in fostering Panarchy through creating conditions for cross-scale resonance. The dissertation closes with the contributions of this research to theory, practice, and methods for research in complex urban systems.Community and Regional Plannin

Monetary versus macroprudential policies:causal impacts of interest rates andcredit controls in the era of the UKradcliffe report

We have entered a world of conjoined monetary and macroprudential policies. But can they function smoothly in tandem, and with what effects? Since this policy cocktail has not been seen for decades, the empirical evidence is almost non-existent. We can only fix this shortcoming in a historical laboratory. The Radcliffe Report (1959), notoriously skeptical about the efficacy of monetary policy, embodied views which led the UK to a three-decade experiment of using credit controls alongside conventional changes in the central bank interest rate. These non-price tools are similar to policies now being considered or used by macroprudential policymakers. We describe these tools, document how they were used by the authorities, and craft a new, largely hand-collected dataset to help estimate their effects. We develop a novel identification strategy, which we term Factor-Augmented Local Projection (FALP), to investigate the subtly different impacts of both monetary and macroprudential policies. Monetary policy acted on output and inflation broadly in line with consensus views today, but credit controls had markedly different effects and acted primarily to modulate bank lendin

An Empirical Assessment of the Mall Intercept as a Method of Data Collection.

Over the years, survey researchers have devoted significant effort toward conceptualizing and empirically investigating all facets of the survey research process. Recently, the mall intercept method of data collection has emerged as one of the most popular methods among market researchers. However, little progress has been made in the way of assessing the mall intercept method. Consequently, either data has been collected in these central locations without knowledge of its quality or market researchers have stayed away from this method entirely because of the possible biases associated with a nonprobability sample. Based on this scenario, this empirical investigation is an attempt to provide much needed insights into the mall intercept method of data collection. More specifically, the dissertation assesses the mall intercept by comparing it with the telephone method in the following five major areas: (1) demographic characteristics of its respondents; (2) lifestyle characteristics of its respondents; (3) shopping behavior of its respondents; (4) the nonresponse rate; and (5) response quality. The dissertation addresses these major areas in two phases. That is, the more general questions concerning demographics, lifestyles, shopping behavior and the nonresponse rate will be investigated separately in the first phase of data collection. The more specific questions dealing with response quality will be addressed in the second phase of data collection. Based on the dissertation\u27s findings, it can be concluded that the mall intercept serves as a viable alternative for data collection to market researchers. Not only are respondents from this convenient sample similar in demographics and lifestyles to respondents selected via a more probability-oriented method, but they also yield quality data with lower refusal rates. However, due to the exploratory nature of the study the findings should not be generalized across all situations. Further research is needed in different shopping centers and in different cities for better generalizability

Economics and the Evolution of Non-Party Litigation Funding in America: How Court Decisions, the Civil Justice Process, and Law Firm Structures Drive the Increasing Need and Demand for Capital

This paper views civil litigation initiated by a party seeking money damages through the lens of the underlying economics that impact the civil justice system\u27s ability to achieve fair outcomes. It examines how access to capital has impacted the functioning of civil justice in the United States

Economics and the Evolution of Non-Party Litigation Funding in America: How Court Decisions, the Civil Justice Process, and Law Firm Structures Drive the Increasing Need and Demand for Capital

This paper views civil litigation initiated by a party seeking money damages through the lens of the underlying economics that impact the civil justice system\u27s ability to achieve fair outcomes. It examines how access to capital has impacted the functioning of civil justice in the United States

Atomic tiles: Manipulative resources for exploring bonding and molecular structure

A simple manipulative resource, Atomic Tiles, is described for scaffolding the learning of Lewis structures without using algorithmic, rule-based methods of drawing. Students use Atomic Tiles to (1) create models of bonding that lead to drawing Lewis structures, (2) use the structures they create to infer patterns required for rational structures and common organic functional groups, (3) translate between Lewis structures and molecular models, and (4) use molecular models to identify isomers

Gating related activity in a syringeal muscle allows the reconstruction of zebra finches songs

Birdsong production involves the simultaneous and precise control of a set of muscles that change the configuration and dynamics of the vocal organ. Although it has been reported that each one of the different muscles is primarily involved in the control of one acoustic feature, recent advances have shown that they act synergistically to achieve the dynamical state necessary for phonation. In this work, we present a set of criteria that allow the extraction of gating-related information from the electromyographic activity of the syringealis ventralis muscle, a muscle that has been shown to be involved in frequency modulation. Using dynamical models of the muscle and syringeal dynamics, we obtain a full reconstruction of the zebra finch song using only the activity of this muscle.Fil: Döppler, Juan Francisco. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Bush, Alan. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Amador, Ana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Goller, Franz. University Of Utah. Department Of Biology; Estados UnidosFil: Mindlin, Bernardo Gabriel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Statistical Communication Theory

Contains reports on three research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant GP-2495)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NsG-496)National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-04