Renaissance Willows

Despite rising popularity of subjective well-being (SWB) as a proxy for utility, its relationship with income is still unresolved. Against the background of debates around the ‘Easterlin paradox’, this paper seeks a compromise between two positions: one that insists on individual relative income, and one that finds similarity between individual and aggregate levels. Proposing a model which puts the emphasis on the interaction between individual and aggregate-level factors, it argues that the effect of relative income on SWB varies across countries as a function of average income, in addition to a relatively small direct effect of the latter, in partial agreement with the two major positions. The model is tested cross-sectionally on the data from the latest wave of World Values Survey. The results from hierarchical mixed-effect models confirm the main argument. But further examination reveals that there is still unaccounted variation especially in middle-income economies.publishe

Non-Ownership Principles as Understood by Lay Practitioners of Jainism and Quakerism

This thesis examines how lay members of the Jain and Quaker traditions understand and navigate ideals of non-ownership. The tenets of aparigraha (non-ownership) and the testimony of simplicity are explored to show how interpretation of sacred texts leave open the possibility for financial success. Through interviews with members of Jain and Quaker communities in the US, and textual research, I assert that proper methods for earning, maintaining and using capital in each tradition transcend prohibitions against excess accumulation. Following Foucault and Weber, I show that proper ethical ways of earning and spending money depend on community-based interpretations and self-policing. My research suggests that lay members focus on ethical ways to earn and spend money rather than the amount of wealth they possess. Due to these foci, transgressions of ideals are viewed within community-established norms, which maintain high levels of engagement with both the capital world and their own religious tradition

Eco-Traffic: Globalization, Materiality, and Subalternity in Asia-Pacific Literature

This project implicates globalization – the spreading of capital, neoliberalism, and Western totalitarianism – as a primary contributor to the continuing subalternity of colonized cultures and environments in the Global South. Under the guise of shrinking the world or spreading freedom, globalization has resulted in profound material consequences to biomes attempting political decolonization. Where postcolonial theory demands that attention be paid to anthropological difference, be it social, political, economic, or gendered, some ecocritical scholars of the Anthropocene wish to decenter the human from an era in which they – as a species – have emerged as a hazardous geologic force. This project offers “traffic” as a literal and metaphorical framework for the meshing of human subalternity within the material biomes of the Asia-Pacific region, as captured in literature. Examining texts from India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States reveals multiple traffics within globalization that intertwine the subaltern subject within their environs: the mapping and zoning of cities, the congestion of foreign-made automobiles and persons within cities, and the historical and current trade of illegal narcotics and humans. The dissertation actively contributes to a developing subset of ecocriticism that recognizes the subaltern in the intra-action of environmental entities, showing that each animal, plant, object and person has its own vibrancy, its own directionality, which leads to congestion and accidents, but often to new pathways

Credit conditions and consumption, house prices and debt: What makes Canada different?

There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. We trace the impact of shifts in non-price household credit conditions through joint estimation of a system of error-correction equations for Canadian aggregate consumption, house prices and mortgage debt. We find strong evidence that, after controlling for income and household portfolios, easier credit conditions raise house prices, debt and consumption. However, unlike in the United States, housing collateral effects on consumption are absent. Given credit conditions, rising house prices increase the mortgage down-payment requirement and reduce consumption, although there is evidence for some attenuation of this effect over the 2000s. We also find that high and rising levels of both house prices and debt since the late-1990s can be mostly explained by movements in incomes, housing supply, mortgage interest rates and credit conditions, suggesting that the outlook for house prices and debt could depend mainly on the future paths of these variables

Grain morphology of as-cast wrought aluminium alloys

Two of the most important microstructural features of alloys are the grain size and the dendrite arm spacing (DAS). Both grain refinement and the DAS depend upon alloy composition through constitutional undercooling, but in different ways. Grain size tends to be related to the initial rate of development of constitutional undercooling, whilst the DAS is more related to the amount of solute build-up towards the end of the solidification process. This means that element additions that have a large effect on the grain size, e.g. Ti, have much less effect on the DAS. With examples from a range of wrought Al alloys, this paper investigates how the interaction between alloy content, grain refiner additions and cooling rate affect the grain size, DAS and the grain morphology obtained in an alloy

Chemical ionization tandem mass spectrometer for the in situ measurement of methyl hydrogen peroxide

A new approach for measuring gas-phase methyl hydrogen peroxide [(MHP) CH_3OOH] utilizing chemical ionization mass spectrometry is presented. Tandem mass spectrometry is used to avoid mass interferences that hindered previous attempts to measure atmospheric CH_3OOH with CF_3O− clustering chemistry. CH_3OOH has been successfully measured in situ using this technique during both airborne and ground-based campaigns. The accuracy and precision for the MHP measurement are a function of water vapor mixing ratio. Typical precision at 500 pptv MHP and 100 ppmv H_2O is ±80 pptv (2 sigma) for a 1 s integration period. The accuracy at 100 ppmv H_2O is estimated to be better than ±40%. Chemical ionization tandem mass spectrometry shows considerable promise for the determination of in situ atmospheric trace gas mixing ratios where isobaric compounds or mass interferences impede accurate measurements