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University of Massachusetts Amherst

Theses/Dissertations

2016

Articles 1 - 30 of 97

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Three Essays On Sustainable Development In China: Social, Economic And Environmental Aspects, Ying Chen Nov 2016

Three Essays On Sustainable Development In China: Social, Economic And Environmental Aspects, Ying Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

The first essay focuses on the role of the hukou (i.e. Household Registration System) with full awareness of the economic system it operates under, and the development model it assists. I find that hukou’s main role in the planned economy was to assist socialist industrialization while averting the Lewis development model, a development strategy based on unlimited supply of labors from the rural sector, largely adopted in developing countries. In the market reform period, hukou performed exactly the opposite function, which is to assist the Lewis model based on the unlimited supply of rural surplus labor “released” from the …

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When Mom Goes To School: Maternal Education And Intergenerational Mobility, Maura E. Devlin Nov 2016

When Mom Goes To School: Maternal Education And Intergenerational Mobility, Maura E. Devlin

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between the timing of maternal education and children’s educational attainment and the extent to which this relationship differs by gender. I used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Child and Youth Survey to determine the timing of mothers’ education relative to the birth of their children, with additional predictors associated with children’s educational attainment included in quantitative analyses. ANOVA analyses identified statistically significant differences in educational attainment among the children grouped by mother-category, based on the timing of their mothers’ education, and between genders. Regression analyses found no statistical difference …

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Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos Nov 2016

Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos

Doctoral Dissertations

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …

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The Effect Of Unique Labels On Face Perception In Infancy, Hillary R. Hadley Nov 2016

The Effect Of Unique Labels On Face Perception In Infancy, Hillary R. Hadley

Doctoral Dissertations

Faces are universally important for a variety of reasons, ranging from identifying individuals to conveying social information. During the first year of life, infants’ experience with commonly encountered face groups shapes how infants perceive familiar and unfamiliar faces. Between 6 and 9 months of age, infants become worse at differentiating among individual faces from unfamiliar face groups (e.g., other-species faces), a process known as “perceptual narrowing”. Labeling faces from a previously unfamiliar face group has been found to promote individual-level differentiation, as well as expert neural processing for the face group. However, it is currently unclear what influences individual-level labels …

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The Neural Correlates Of Emotion Reactivity And Regulation In Young Children With Adhd, Claudia I. Lugo-Candelas Nov 2016

The Neural Correlates Of Emotion Reactivity And Regulation In Young Children With Adhd, Claudia I. Lugo-Candelas

Doctoral Dissertations

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most frequently occurring pediatric neurobehavioral disorder. Although emotion reactivity and regulation are frequently impaired in ADHD, few studies have examined these factors in preschool aged children with ADHD, and none have explored the neural correlates of emotion reactivity and regulation in this group though event-related potentials (ERPs). Children aged 4 to 7 with (n = 24) and without (n = 30) ADHD symptoms completed an attention task composed of four blocks: baseline, frustration, suppression, and recovery. In the frustration and suppression blocks, negative affect was induced by false negative feedback. During the …

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Elite Capture, Free Riding, And Project Design: A Case Study Of A Community-Driven Development Project In Ceará, Brazil, Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth Nov 2016

Elite Capture, Free Riding, And Project Design: A Case Study Of A Community-Driven Development Project In Ceará, Brazil, Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the successes and failures of a community-driven development project, São José Agrário (SJA), conducted in Northeastern Brazil. The project was co-funded by the World Bank and the State of Ceará and co-directed by a social movement (the Landless Workers Movement, MST) and the State of Ceará. The dissertation employs a mixed methods approach based on eight case studies, a census survey of six communities, and interviews with a wide variety of actors connected to the project. I address the problem of elite capture, either by non-targeted communities or by an elite within the targeted communities disproportionately benefiting …

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Do We Have A Climate For Change? Insights About Adaptation Planning Actions In Coastal New England, Ana M. Emlinger Nov 2016

Do We Have A Climate For Change? Insights About Adaptation Planning Actions In Coastal New England, Ana M. Emlinger

Doctoral Dissertations

“I just drink more coffee and stay late” – declared the town planner of a small coastal community in the South of Boston, Massachusetts (MA) referring to the need of extra work to address climate change adaptation in a short-staffed planning department. These words illustrate one of the many common issues faced by planners of small and medium coastal communities in the region. A systematic incorporation of climate change concerns into formal community planning, management, and infrastructure design is in nascent stage. The challenges of effective adaptation are complex and likely to be politically hard, especially at the local level …

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Three Essays On The Social Determinants Of Early Childhood Health And Development, Andrew Barenberg Nov 2016

Three Essays On The Social Determinants Of Early Childhood Health And Development, Andrew Barenberg

Doctoral Dissertations

This three-paper dissertation examines the social determinants of early childhood and in-utero health. The first chapter examines the impact of early childhood stunting on educational outcome in Tanzania. Using the extent of third-trimester overlap with the Tanzania hunger season to create an exogenous variation in stunting, I find that a one standard deviation stunting decreases educational achievement by .88 school years compared to a child's siblings. A placebo group not affected by the hunger season is used to confirm that in-utero nutrition deprivation is the cause of the education differences. The second paper utilizes the food price shocks and price …

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Acculturation Stress, Psychological And Sociocultural Adjustment, And Development Of American Adolescents: A Qualitative Study Of Newton High School Exchange Students In China, Binbin Zhu Nov 2016

Acculturation Stress, Psychological And Sociocultural Adjustment, And Development Of American Adolescents: A Qualitative Study Of Newton High School Exchange Students In China, Binbin Zhu

Doctoral Dissertations

Theories from the extant acculturation literature functioned to categorize international students’ adaptation experiences and predict their acculturation outcomes. Also, relevant studies focused mainly on students at the tertiary level. For adolescent students seeking self-development toward independence and autonomy, how they negotiated their identity challenges and tensions in a cross-cultural context, and how surrounding others in their socialization impacted on their psychosocial adjustment process and transformative experiences have not been actively explored. This qualitative study approached adolescent students’ acculturation as an integrated development and learning process to explore the effects of developmental and cultural factors on their cross-cultural adaptation, especially examined …

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The Role Of Adoptive Identity In Career Development Of College And Non-College Individuals, Yesel Yoon Nov 2016

The Role Of Adoptive Identity In Career Development Of College And Non-College Individuals, Yesel Yoon

Doctoral Dissertations

Identity development is a particularly salient developmental task that begins to take form during adolescence, and consolidation of multiple domains of identity is necessary for achieving successful outcomes in adulthood (Erikson, 1968). The purpose of this study was to examine the role of an ascribed adoptive identity on the individualization of one’s chosen career identity. Adoptive identity was examined using both individual and family-level factors, and career identity was measured across adolescence, emerging adulthood, and adulthood. The present study used a sub-sample of adoptees, adoptive mothers, and adoptive fathers from an ongoing longitudinal research study, the Minnesota/Texas Adoption Research Program …

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Detecting Candidate Preknowledge Of Items Using A Predictive Checking Method, Xi Wang Nov 2016

Detecting Candidate Preknowledge Of Items Using A Predictive Checking Method, Xi Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

In on-demand high-stakes testing programs such as GRE and TOEFL, some items are repeatedly used across test administrations to reduce the cost of developing new items constantly. Item exposure provides an opportunity for examinees to have knowledge of particular test items in advance of their administration. It poses a threat to test security and ultimately will result in invalid test scores. Therefore, many testing programs conduct quality control to monitor test compromise at individual and/or group level. A predictive checking method is proposed in this study to detect examinee preknowledge on exposed items. We consider a scenario where a test …

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Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault Nov 2016

Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which female film critics practice film criticism in the convergent age. In original research drawn from ethnographic interviews with eight female film critics and bloggers as well as textual, historical, and reception analyses of criticism, this dissertation argues that women who write film criticism in the convergent era are not only writing from a space of marginalization based on the patriarchal dominance of the film industry, but also face a series of obstacles through gendered and discursive conflicts that are unique to writing online and which do not exert the same impact on male …

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Infants' Reasoning About Agents' Identity: The Case Of Sociomoral Kinds, Hernando Taborda Nov 2016

Infants' Reasoning About Agents' Identity: The Case Of Sociomoral Kinds, Hernando Taborda

Doctoral Dissertations

Recent studies in development psychology suggest that early on infants are able to distinguish characters who display a cooperative behavior from characters who display an antisocial behavior. The current research builds on these findings and aims at determining the extent to which infants possess the sociomoral distinction of “good” and “mean” agents. In particular, we propose that infants represent sociomoral behaviors through kind-based categories. This hypothesis was tested in the current research across 5 different experiments by investigating how infants represent the identity of agents in sociomoral situations. Experiment 1 used a looking-time paradigm to demonstrate 11-month-old infants’ bias to …

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The Political Economy Of Smallholder Incorporation And Land Acquisition, Alfredo R. Rosete Nov 2016

The Political Economy Of Smallholder Incorporation And Land Acquisition, Alfredo R. Rosete

Doctoral Dissertations

Of late, development institutions and economists have argued that one way to accomplish the modernization, and thus, poverty alleviation in the rural sector is through smallholder incorporation- partnerships between agribusiness firms and smallholders in order to cultivate high valued export crops. Smallholders in developing countries often face numerous challenges that result in low incomes, and limited opportunities. As a result of these challenges, smallholders in developing countries continue to cultivate subsistence crops, or, use less technologically intensive techniques. Thus, many are unable to maximize the use of their holdings. Agribusiness firms may provide the material inputs, infrastructure, and transport needed …

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Bidirectional Relationships Between Maternal Parenting Behaviors And Conduct Disorder Symptoms In Preschool Children, Benjamin Rolon Arroyo Nov 2016

Bidirectional Relationships Between Maternal Parenting Behaviors And Conduct Disorder Symptoms In Preschool Children, Benjamin Rolon Arroyo

Doctoral Dissertations

Conduct disorder (CD) symptoms emerge in preschool children, and some evidence for bidirectional effects between maternal parenting behaviors and these symptoms has been found in school-age children and adolescents. However, the strength and pattern of these effects are unknown during the preschool years. The present study examined the bidirectional relationships between several key maternal parenting behaviors (negative affect, warmth, overreactivity, and laxness) and CD symptoms across the preschool years. Participants were 197 preschool children (M = 44.24 months, SD = 3.37; Girls = 92) exhibiting significant behavior problems and their mothers who participated in a 3-year longitudinal study. Maternal …

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Identifying Examinees Who Possess Distinct And Reliable Subscores When Added Value Is Lacking For The Total Sample, Joseph A. Rios Nov 2016

Identifying Examinees Who Possess Distinct And Reliable Subscores When Added Value Is Lacking For The Total Sample, Joseph A. Rios

Doctoral Dissertations

Research has demonstrated that although subdomain information may provide no added value beyond the total score, in some contexts such information is of utility to particular demographic subgroups (Sinharay & Haberman, 2014). However, it is argued that the utility of reporting subscores for an individual should not be based on one’s manifest characteristics (e.g., gender or ethnicity), but rather on individual needs for diagnostic information, which is driven by multidimensionality in subdomain scores. To improve the validity of diagnostic information, this study proposed the use of Mahalanobis Distance and HT indices to assess whether an individual’s data significantly departs …

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Three Essays On Sustainability, Mark V. Paul Nov 2016

Three Essays On Sustainability, Mark V. Paul

Doctoral Dissertations

Chapter 1 investigates the inverse relationship between farm size and agricultural yield. While there are a large number of studies internationally, there have been few conducted in African countries. Using household-level data from a national survey we explore the relationship between farm size and yield in Ethiopia's post land reform scenario. We find a robust inverse relationship between farm size and yield, and a positive association between yield and land fragmentation. These findings raise important questions for current agricultural development strategies that favor larger farms and less fragmentation in Africa Chapter 2 investigates the uptake of top-down flood mitigation policies …

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Three Essays On Labor Market Friction And The Business Cycle, Jong-Seok Oh Nov 2016

Three Essays On Labor Market Friction And The Business Cycle, Jong-Seok Oh

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the macroeconomic impact of reduced labor market friction on the U.S. business cycle after the mid-1980s. The first two essays investigate the relationship between labor market flexibility and macroeconomic stability from a post-Keynesian perspective. In the third essay which reviews the relationship between labor market flexibility and patterns of U.S. business cycle, I test the argument that after 1985 Okun’s coefficient became larger due to the flexible labor market. In essay 1, considering two aspects of labor market flexibility, employment flexibility and real wage flexibility, I adopt the flex-output model (Skott, 2015) to first discuss employment flexibility …

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The Effect Of Interruptions On Primary Task Performance In Safety-Critical Environments, Cheryl Ann Nicholas Nov 2016

The Effect Of Interruptions On Primary Task Performance In Safety-Critical Environments, Cheryl Ann Nicholas

Doctoral Dissertations

Safety critical systems in medicine utilize alarms to signal potentially life threatening situations to professionals and patients. In particular, in the medical field multiple alarms from equipment are activated daily and often simultaneously. There are a number of alarms which require caregivers to take breaks in complex, primary tasks to attend to the interruption task which is signaled by the alarm. The motivation for this research is the knowledge that, in general, interrupting tasks can have a potentially negative impact on performance and outcomes of the primary task. The focus of this research is on the effect of an interrupting …

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First And Second Language Acquisition Of Recursive Operations: Two Studies, Jon S. Nelson Nov 2016

First And Second Language Acquisition Of Recursive Operations: Two Studies, Jon S. Nelson

Doctoral Dissertations

Linguistic theory has increasingly revolved around the notion of recursion. Most recently, many have advocated a view wherein it forms the essence of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) purportedly contained in the human mind, while others have argued that it remains a separate and not necessarily related component of language processing. L1 Acquisition theory has suggested that appropriate recursive input is required to activate the LAD’s recursive faculties; nonetheless, L1 recursive structures may resist instruction and cause initial confusion among children. The effect that any of this may have on L2 has only begun to be studied. This dissertation attempts …

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Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, And Exceptions, Aleksei I. Nazarov Nov 2016

Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, And Exceptions, Aleksei I. Nazarov

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores new perspectives in phonological hidden structure learning (inferring structure not present in the speech signal that is necessary for phonological analysis; Tesar 1998, Jarosz 2013a, Boersma and Pater 2016), and extends this type of learning towards the domain of phonological features, towards derivations in Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999), and towards exceptionality indices in probabilistic OT. Two more specific themes also come out: the possibility of inducing instead of pre-specifying the space of possible hidden structures, and the importance of cues in the data for triggering the use of hidden structure. In chapters 2 and 4, phonological features …

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Are People Motivated To Experience Emotions For Their Cognitive Impacts? The Motivational Implications Of Cognitive Appraisal Theories Of Emotion, Daniel R. Rovenpor Nov 2016

Are People Motivated To Experience Emotions For Their Cognitive Impacts? The Motivational Implications Of Cognitive Appraisal Theories Of Emotion, Daniel R. Rovenpor

Doctoral Dissertations

I propose a novel framework for understanding why people want to feel different emotions. I argue that people may be motivated to experience emotions for the cognitive appraisals they are associated with. In an effort to lay the foundation for an appraisal-based model of emotional preferences, I drew upon research on cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, emotional preferences, and basic human motivation. I tested my proposed model by either measuring (Study 1) or manipulating (Studies 2-7) appraisals and measuring emotional preferences, using anger (Studies 1-6) and guilt (Study 7) as specific test cases. I predicted that uncertainty appraisals would lead …

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"How Many Generations Will Be Spoiled At The Cost Of Such Compromises?" The Resolution Strategies Of High School Principals In Value-Conflict Situations Between School Law And Moral Values In Azad Kashmir, Muhammad N. Khawaja Nov 2016

"How Many Generations Will Be Spoiled At The Cost Of Such Compromises?" The Resolution Strategies Of High School Principals In Value-Conflict Situations Between School Law And Moral Values In Azad Kashmir, Muhammad N. Khawaja

Doctoral Dissertations

The phenomenon of ethical administration and decision-making in the context of school administration is a recent trend even in the Western scholarship on school administration. Although there have been a many academic endeavors in the last two decades of the 20th century to explore the ethical dimension of school leadership mainly in the works of Greenfield (1985), Starratt (1991,1994), and Hodgkinson (1996). However, in the first decade of 21st century, there have been much more concerted efforts to explore and propose theoretical models to explain the ethical dimension of school leadership. There have been a many attempts to …

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American Authoritarianism In Black And White, Matthew C. Macwilliams Nov 2016

American Authoritarianism In Black And White, Matthew C. Macwilliams

Doctoral Dissertations

How can African Americans be described simultaneously by political scientists as one of the most liberal and the most authoritarian groups in the United States? This conundrum frames the puzzle at the core of this dissertation. I argue that the political behavior of many African Americans is caught in a tug of war between their racial identity and their predisposition to authoritarianism. When the issue at hand engages African Americans’ authoritarian predisposition, authoritarianism can trump racial identity, produce attitudes that defy conventional wisdom, and dash the common theoretical assumption that African American political behavior is homogeneous. Counter to some of …

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Three Essays On The Macroeconomic Impacts Of Rent Seeking, Kurt Von Seekamm Nov 2016

Three Essays On The Macroeconomic Impacts Of Rent Seeking, Kurt Von Seekamm

Doctoral Dissertations

Chapter 1 of this dissertation focuses on the political economy of rent seeking. Using trading in financial markets, patent litigation and managerial privilege as descriptive examples from the modern economy, it identifies situations where rent seeking opportunities occur. The challenge of correctly distinguishing between productive activities and rent seeking activities demonstrate the empirical challenges of examining rent seeking. This chapter also suggests that in addition to the opportunity cost of physical capital, modern rent seeking has a significant opportunity cost in the form of the misallocation of human capital. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between increased rent seeking, aggregate demand, …

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Processing Messages For Reconciliation: What Produces Changes In Attitudes Instead Of Resistance?, Rachel R. Steele Nov 2016

Processing Messages For Reconciliation: What Produces Changes In Attitudes Instead Of Resistance?, Rachel R. Steele

Doctoral Dissertations

Conflicts between groups harm positive intergroup relations. Parties to intergroup conflict have developed a variety of methods for fostering reconciliation following conflicts. Out of these different mechanisms, intergroup apology is the most studied empirically but there are still a number of gaps in this research. To address these gaps, my research brought together intergroup apology research, attitude change and persuasion research, and findings on the role of group identification. In this research I assumed that apologies and other efforts for reconciliation function as persuasive messages for intergroup reconciliation. The research assessed the way in which participants from both victim and …

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Examining The Civil-Military Divide Through New (Institutional) Lenses: The Influence Of The Supreme Court, Allen Linken Nov 2016

Examining The Civil-Military Divide Through New (Institutional) Lenses: The Influence Of The Supreme Court, Allen Linken

Doctoral Dissertations

Civil-military relations have existed for as long as there has been a military, but only in the last sixty years has research in the field began to examine the relationships between civilian elites and the military. Who controls the military? What level of influence by the military is acceptable in a liberal society, such as the United States? What is the appropriate role of the military? Who serves in the military? What pattern of civil-military relations best ensures the effectiveness of the military instrument? The study of these questions began with examining relationships between the military and the President, and …

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Clay Pot Cookery: Dairy, Diet And Class During The South Levantine Iron Age Ii Period, Mary K. Larkum Nov 2016

Clay Pot Cookery: Dairy, Diet And Class During The South Levantine Iron Age Ii Period, Mary K. Larkum

Doctoral Dissertations

Goody’s (1982) model of cooking and its relation to hierarchy posits a correlation between class and cuisine that is typical of societies practicing intensive agriculture and creating storable surpluses. This archaeological case study tests his model using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analyses to investigate ancient food remains (fatty acids) preserved in unglazed clay cooking ceramics from archaeological sites across the Iron Age II period (1000-586 BCE) kingdoms of the southern Levant. These kingdoms are known historically as Ammon, Aram (Aram-Damascus), Edom, Israel, Judah, Moab and Philistia. Samples from this time period and region are suitable for use in this research …

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Anaphora, Inversion, And Focus, Nicholas J. Lacara Nov 2016

Anaphora, Inversion, And Focus, Nicholas J. Lacara

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a novel analysis of as-parentheticals, a class of anaphoric constructions introduced by the morpheme as. These include utterances like Mary kissed a pig, as John also will and Tim is happy, as is Daisy. I defend the view that the anaphoric component of these constructions is derived by verb phrase ellipsis. This builds on previous research (especially Lacara 2015, To Appear) that argues that as-parentheticals must contain elided syntactic structure rather than null operator movement as originally proposed by Potts (2002). I also propose an analysis for some of the unusual properties that as-parentheticals display. …

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Urban Metabolism And Land Use Modeling For Urban Designers And Planners: A Land Use Model For The Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool, Mohamad Farzinmoghadam Nov 2016

Urban Metabolism And Land Use Modeling For Urban Designers And Planners: A Land Use Model For The Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool, Mohamad Farzinmoghadam

Doctoral Dissertations

Predicting the resource consumption in the built environment and its associated environmental consequences (urban metabolism analysis) is one of the core challenges facing policy-makers and planners seeking to increase the sustainability of urban areas. There is a critical need for a single integrated framework to analyze the consequences of urban growth and eventually predict the impacts of sustainable policies on the urbanscape. This dissertation presents the development of an Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool (IUMAT) – an analytical framework that simulates urban metabolism by integrating urban subsystems in a single comprehensive computational environment. It reviews the existing literature on urban …

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