Ad valorem housing subsidies may reduce house building

In this paper it is shown that an ad valorem housing subsidy set by a central regulator (or a raise in the ad valorem housing subsidy rate) may reduce the number of houses built in the market and increase the price paid by the buyers of houses. The analysis considers a situation where there is imperfect competition in the housing market and a local regulator that decides on density, or on the number of sites for housing development, and that cares about a combination of the profits of housing developers and the surplus of buyers of houses.

Squaring the circle. Social and environmental implications of pre-pottery neolithic building technology at Tell Qarassa (South Syria)

We present the results of the microstratigraphic, phytolith and wood charcoal study of the remains of a 10.5 ka roof. The roof is part of a building excavated at Tell Qarassa (South Syria), assigned to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (PPNB). The Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) period in the Levant coincides with the emergence of farming. This fundamental change in subsistence strategy implied the shift from mobile to settled aggregated life, and from tents and huts to hard buildings. As settled life spread across the Levant, a generalised transition from round to square buildings occurred, that is a trademark of the PPNB period. The study of these buildings is fundamental for the understanding of the ever-stronger reciprocal socio-ecological relationship humans developed with the local environment since the introduction of sedentism and domestication. Descriptions of buildings in PPN archaeological contexts are usually restricted to the macroscopic observation of wooden elements (posts and beams) and mineral components (daub, plaster and stone elements). Reconstructions of microscopic and organic components are frequently based on ethnographic analogy. The direct study of macroscopic and microscopic, organic and mineral, building components performed at Tell Qarassa provides new insights on building conception, maintenance, use and destruction. These elements reflect new emerging paradigms in the relationship between Neolithic societies and the environment. A square building was possibly covered here with a radial roof, providing a glance into a topologic shift in the conception and understanding of volumes, from round-based to square-based geometries. Macroscopic and microscopic roof components indicate buildings were conceived for year-round residence rather than seasonal mobility. This implied performing maintenance and restoration of partially damaged buildings, as well as their adaptation to seasonal variability

Stimulation discomfort comparison of asynchronous and synchronous methods with multi-field electrodes

Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is a technique that consists on applying electrical current pulses to artificially activate motor nerve fibers and produce muscle contractions to achieve functional movements. The main applications of FES are within the rehabilitation field, in which this technique is used to aid recovery or to restore lost motor functions. People that benefit of FES are usually patients with neurological disorders which result in motor dysfunctions; most common patients include stroke and spinal cord injury (SCI). Neuroprosthesis are devices that have their basis in FES technique, and their aim is to bridge interrupted or damaged neural paths between the brain and upper or lower limbs. One of the aims of neuroprosthesis is to artificially generate muscle contractions that produce functional movements, and therefore, assist impaired people by making them able to perform activities of daily living (ADL). FES applies current pulses and stimulates nerve fibers by means of electrodes, which can be either implanted or surface electrodes. Both of them have advantages and disadvantages. Implanted electrodes need open surgery to place them next to the nerve root, so these electrodes carry many disadvantages that are produced by the use of invasive techniques. In return, as the electrodes are attached to the nerve, they make it easier to achieve selective functional movements. On the contrary, surface electrodes are not invasive and are easily attached or detached on the skin. Main disadvantages of surface electrodes are the difficulty of selectively stimulating nerve fibers and uncomfortable feeling perceived by users due to sensory nerves located in the skin. Electrical stimulation surface electrode technology has improved significantly through the years and recently, multi-field electrodes have been suggested. This multi-field or matrix electrode approach brings many advantages to FES; among them it is the possibility of easily applying different stimulation methods and techniques. The main goal of this thesis is therefore, to test two stimulation methods, which are asynchronous and synchronous stimulation, in the upper limb with multi-field electrodes. To this end, a purpose-built wrist torque measuring system and a graphic user interface were developed to measure wrist torque produced with each of the methods and to efficiently carry out the experiments. Then, both methods were tested on 15 healthy subjects and sensitivity results were analyzed for different cases. Results show that there are significant differences between methods regarding sensation in some cases, which can affect effectiveness or success of FES.

A Featureless Approach to 3D Polyhedral Building Modeling from Aerial Images

This paper presents a model-based approach for reconstructing 3D polyhedral building models from aerial images. The proposed approach exploits some geometric and photometric properties resulting from the perspective projection of planar structures. Data are provided by calibrated aerial images. The novelty of the approach lies in its featurelessness and in its use of direct optimization based on image rawbrightness. The proposed framework avoids feature extraction and matching. The 3D polyhedral model is directly estimated by optimizing an objective function that combines an image-based dissimilarity measure and a gradient score over several aerial images. The optimization process is carried out by the Differential Evolution algorithm. The proposed approach is intended to provide more accurate 3D reconstruction than feature-based approaches. Fast 3D model rectification and updating can take advantage of the proposed method. Several results and evaluations of performance from real and synthetic images show the feasibility and robustness of the proposed approach.

Building TRACE (translations censored) theatre corpus: some methodological questions on text selection

Editores:Micaela Muñoz-Calvo; Carmen Buesa-Gómez

Building up a frequency stabilisation based on a wavemeter for a diode laser and characterisation for a digital mirror device for artificial potentials

It has built and characterised a laser and It has learned what each of the components does. It has been able to run the laser in single-mode and stabilised it around a desired setpoint thanks to a PID controller that It has programmed. It has established a communication between the PID controller programmed in LabVIEW and Arduino Due, the DAC that It has chosen after comparing it with another candidate. It has learned some basics of how the LightCrafter 4500 DMD works. The projected light is the composition of the lights of three LED’s, each of which has a certain on-time. The mirrors chose to be in on- or off-stages depending to the amount of intensity that we want for each colour.