In recent decades, many Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) – federally mandated transportation planning agencies in urban areas with populations of 50,000 or more – have become active sustainability planners, integrating their regional transportation plans with land use strategies, and addressing wider impacts upon the regional economy, social equity, and natural environment. MPOs have taken up this stance to address mandated responsibilities that have widened over time, such as for addressing air quality problems and incorporating public and stakeholder input, and as a re-interpretation of their main traditional responsibility, namely to manage transport mobility within regions. Facing a tightening vise of environmental and fiscal constraints, these MPOs have focused on improving accessibility, rather than mobility, through coordinated transport-land use strategies to improve “location efficiency,” for example, through promoting infill, mixed-use development located near transit stations. Because this approach requires closer coordination of land use and transportation planning than traditionally pursued, these MPOs have become more activist agencies in working with local governments and their land use policymaking authority. Their work provides a basis for slow but steady advancement of a new sustainability paradigm for transport policy.

MPOs, however, face a severe disjuncture between the forces compelling them to advance sustainability goals, on the one hand, and institutional barriers that severely inhibit their ability to accomplish them, on the other. Long-standing governing arrangements in the US federal system sever authority over the elements of growth management that many MPOs now seek to integrate more fully. Constituted mainly as voluntary associations of local governments, MPOs lack independent authority; they control few resources autonomously, and provide instead a coordinating role for long-range transportation investment planning.

In spite of the obstacles, some MPOs are experimenting with institutional innovations to integrate transportation and land use planning more effectively, providing a major contribution to sustainability policymaking, which depends on developing new and effective modes of governance for public goods management across all sectors of the economy, including for transportation and land use. Thus, MPOs are at the center of both opportunities and obstacles for advancing sustainable planning practices in the US.

This dissertation evaluates how conflicting dynamics of path dependent institutional arrangements for growth management affect sustainability planning by MPOs. It provides a historical institutionalist account of the evolving role and planning strategies of MPOs since their inception in the 1970s, considering why and how some MPOs have begun to address sustainability concerns, and the opportunities and obstacles they face. It theorizes MPO planning practices in connection to concepts from the sustainability planning literature(s), in order to identify characteristics that distinguish MPO sustainability planning from more traditional practice. Using operational measures developed for the purpose, the incidence of sustainability planning by large MPOs across the US is assessed, and factors capable of predicting which MPOs take up sustainability planning techniques are evaluated. Then, findings from an in-depth case study of MPO planning in California are presented – a state where the largest MPOs have been sustainability leaders for more than a decade, and where the state government has recently adopted policy measures to support their efforts. Ultimately, prospects for MPO sustainability planning in California, and by extension elsewhere, are seen to depend substantially upon policy support from the state level, because state governments control land use authority under the US Constitution, and they shape the laws and programs – from fiscal policies such as redevelopment and taxing authority, to planning requirements, affordable housing programs, transit operating funds, and more – that frame local land use decisions more than any other level of government. However, as the California case study shows, striking the right balance between state-level and regional authority for managing “smart growth” programs can be problematic.

The work contributes to urban planning and sustainability literatures, because little in-depth attention has been paid by scholars to MPOs as sustainability planners. This lack of attention is unfortunate because the regional scale is critical in sustainability planning, given the many inter-connections among policies for the built environment that play out at that scale. At the same time, because this dissertation focuses especially on MPO institutional and decision-making dynamics, the research makes a contribution to literatures on federalism, multi-level governance, and policy formation and change. In particular, the research addresses questions raised by scholars in those fields about how collaborative governance in multi-level frameworks can help support sustainability.

This paper deals with the problem of robust model predictive control of an uncertain linearized model of a building envelope and HVAC system. Uncertainty of the model is due to the imperfect  predictions of internal and external heat gains of the building. The Open-Loop prediction formulation of the Robust Model Predictive Control (OL-RMPC) is known to be unnecessarily over-conservative in practice. Therefore, we adopt a Closed-Loop prediction formulation of Robust Model Predictive Control (CL-RMPC) which exploits an uncertainty feedback parameterization  of the control sequence and results in a tractable formulation of the problem. To improve on the efficiency of CLRMPC we propose a new uncertainty feedback parameterization of the control input, which leads to a number of decision variables linear  in time horizon as opposed to quadratic  as in previous approaches. To assess our approach we compare three different robust optimal control strategies: nominal MPC which does not have a priori information of the uncertainty, OL-RMPC and CL-RMPC. We show results from a quantitative  analysis of performance of these controllers at different prediction error values of the disturbance. Simulations show that CL-RMPC provides a higher level of comfort with respect to OL-RMPC while consuming 36% less energy. Moreover, CL-RMPC maintains perfect comfort level for up to 75% error in the disturbance prediction. Finally, the newly proposed parameterization maintains the performance of CL-RMPC while reducing the simulation time by an average of 30%.

Planners, both academic and professional, have good reason to be grateful to Christopher Steins and his collaborators for creating and sustaining Planetizen, the lively and provocative web site devoted to ideas and practice in urban planning. Planetizen's appearance in 2001 was a landmark in moving planning into the internet era, and it continues to be a valuable asset for the field. Now, together with co-i!ditors Abhijeet Chavan and Christian Peralta, Steins has produced a book that provides a sampling of Planetizen's past offerings cast into the form of debates in planning. To pull this off and to review the results are no mean tasks. In 183 pages, the book manages to include essays by no less than 31 authors, in addition to comments by numerous anonymous respondents to the original website postings. Some essays were written specifically for the book, but the majority date from Planetizen postings during the years 2001 to 2006.

Modern science and engineering often generate data sets with a large sample size and a comparably large dimension which puts classic asymptotic theory into question in many ways. Therefore, the main focus of this thesis is to develop a fundamental understanding

of statistical procedures for estimation and hypothesis testing from a non-asymptotic point of view, where both the sample size and problem dimension grow hand in hand. A range of different problems are explored in this thesis, including work on the geometry of hypothesis testing, adaptivity to local structure in estimation, effective methods for shape-constrained problems, and early stopping with boosting algorithms.

Our treatment of these different problems shares the common theme of emphasizing the underlying geometric structure.

To be more specific, in our hypothesis testing problem, the null and alternative are specified by a pair of convex cones. This cone structure makes it possible for a sharp characterization of the behavior of Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) and its optimality property. The problem of planar set estimation based on noisy measurements of its support function, is a non-parametric problem in nature. It is interesting to see that estimators can be constructed such that they are more efficient in the case when the underlying set has a simpler structure, even without knowing the set beforehand. Moreover, when we consider applying boosting algorithms to estimate a function in reproducing kernel Hibert space (RKHS), the optimal stopping rule and the resulting estimator turn out to be determined by the localized complexity of the space.

These results demonstrate that, on one hand, one can benefit from respecting and making use of the underlying structure (optimal early stopping rule for different RKHS); on the other hand, some procedures (such as GLRT or local smoothing estimators) can achieve better performance when the underlying structure is simpler, without prior knowledge of the structure itself.

To evaluate the behavior of any statistical procedure, we follow the classic minimax framework and also discuss about more refined notion of local minimaxity.

This thesis explores the spectral properties of Schrödinger-type operators on various

domains such as R^2, rectangles, and metric graphs. In particular, we consider special types of operators called point scatterers that act as the Laplacian away from a discrete set of points. Such a model provides a simple tool to study how the presence of point-wise potentials perturbs the spectral properties of the Laplacian.

In Chapter 1, we introduce the general procedure to properly define the point scatterers

on a general domain. The theory of self-adjoint extension and Krein’s formula play important

roles in the process.

In Chapter 2, we formulate point scatterers in R^2 using the renormalization process

mentioned in the previous chapter. We start with the one-point scatterer which is the

simplest case and then generalize the result to finitely many point scatterers and infinitely

many point scatterers. Then we consider a special case in which the scatterers are placed

periodically as a combination of infinitely many point scatterers and the Floquet-Bloch

theory of solid-state physics for crystal structures. As an application inspired by carbon

nano-structures such as graphene, we prove that honeycomb lattice point scatterers generate

conic singularities on the dispersion relation.

In Chapter 3, we consider a point scatterer on a rectangular domain to investigate how

the eigenfunctions on the rectangle are affected by the point-wise perturbation. We prove

that a point scatterer eventually acts as a barrier confining the eigenfunction as the domain

gets thinner.

In Chapter 4, we introduce how the point scatterers can be incorporated with the notion of

quantum graphs. In addition, the resonances of quantum graphs are investigated. We provide

the quantum graph version of a Fermi golden rule, which provides an explicit expression for

the infinitesimal change of states in terms of the scattering resonances.

Until the break-up of the Soviet Union, dominant intellectual and educational cultures in Europe worked primarily with national concepts. In the twentieth century, nationalist ideologies have, of course, lost some of their glamour due to the impact of two disastrous world wars. But while leading European intellectuals over the past 50 years developed a research program that transcended the national spirit, they nonetheless remained bound by the concept of “modernity,” which comprises the concept of the modern nation state and the modern nation state system. Steeped in this cultural unconscious, Europe has neglected the systematic study of alternative modernities and alternative systems of governmentality -- including systems of democratic governmentality in the internet age -- especially as these alternative modernities relate to the influx of Muslim populations.

Key conceptual relations: modernity and violence; intellectuals north-south; ontology of peace and ontology of violence; modern modes of knowledge organization and alternative modes of knowledge organization; history of jurisprudence 1500-1700 and inversion of rights; principle of rights and principle of the mind/soul; anthropological principal of the human capacity for justice; ontology of violence and modern philosophy; ontology of violence and modern social sciences; right to the right to knowledge on global peace and disciplinary censorship.