The Financialization of Food: An Inquiry into the 2008-2011 Food Price Spikes

This dissertation investigates the question: has financial speculation contributed to global food price volatility since the mid 2000s? I problematize the mainstream academic literature on the 2008-2011 food price spikes as being dominated by neoclassical economic perspectives and offer new conceptual and empirical insights into the relationship between financial speculation and food. Presented in three journal style manuscripts, manuscript one uses circuits of capital to conceptualize the link between financial speculators in the global north and populations in the global south. Manuscript two argues that what makes commodity index speculation (aka ‘index funds’ or index swaps) novel is that it provides institutional investors with what Clapp (2014) calls “financial distance” from the biopolitical implications of food speculation. Finally, manuscript three combines Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and ‘the intellectual’ with the concept of performativity to investigate the ideological role that public intellectuals and the rhetorical actor the market play in the proliferation and governance of commodity index speculation. The first two manuscripts take an empirically mixed method approach by combining regression analysis with discourse analysis, while the third relies on interview data and discourse analysis. The findings show that financial speculation by index swap dealers and hedge funds did indeed significantly contribute to the price volatility of food commodities between June 2006 and December 2014. The results from the interview data affirm these findings. The discourse analysis of the interview data shows that public intellectuals and rhetorical characters such as ‘the market’ play powerful roles in shaping how food speculation is promoted, regulated and normalized. The significance of the findings is three-fold. First, the empirical findings show that a link does exist between financial speculation and food price volatility. Second, the findings indicate that the post-2008 CFTC and the Dodd-Frank reforms are unlikely to reduce financial speculation or the price volatility that it causes. Third, the findings suggest that institutional investors (such as pension funds) should think critically about how they use commodity index speculation as a way of generating financial earnings.

Palaeoenvironmental and palaeoceanographic changes during the lower to middle Jurassic (Toarcian-Aalenian, ~183-171 Ma). : new evidences from calcareous nannofossils of the Lusitanian Basin

Tese de doutoramento (co-tutela), Geologia (Paleontologia e Estratigrafia), Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, 2016

Lightweight Internet Traffic Classification - A Subject Based Solution with Word Embeddings

Internet traffic classification is a relevant and mature research field, anyway of growing importance and with still open technical challenges, also due to the pervasive presence of Internet-connected devices into everyday life. We claim the need for innovative traffic classification solutions capable of being lightweight, of adopting a domain-based approach, of not only concentrating on application-level protocol categorization but also classifying Internet traffic by subject. To this purpose, this paper originally proposes a classification solution that leverages domain name information extracted from IPFIX summaries, DNS logs, and DHCP leases, with the possibility to be applied to any kind of traffic. Our proposed solution is based on an extension of Word2vec unsupervised learning techniques running on a specialized Apache Spark cluster. In particular, learning techniques are leveraged to generate word-embeddings from a mixed dataset composed by domain names and natural language corpuses in a lightweight way and with general applicability. The paper also reports lessons learnt from our implementation and deployment experience that demonstrates that our solution can process 5500 IPFIX summaries per second on an Apache Spark cluster with 1 slave instance in Amazon EC2 at a cost of $ 3860 year. Reported experimental results about Precision, Recall, F-Measure, Accuracy, and Cohen's Kappa show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposal. The experiments prove that words contained in domain names do have a relation with the kind of traffic directed towards them, therefore using specifically trained word embeddings we are able to classify them in customizable categories. We also show that training word embeddings on larger natural language corpuses leads improvements in terms of precision up to 180%.

Raw data of SCADCP (self-contained Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) from three moorings in the Eastern Weddell Sea, 2005-2008

The success of any efforts to determine the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems depends on understanding in the first instance the natural variations, which contemporarily occur on the interannual and shorter time scales. Here we present results on the environmental controls of zooplankton distribution patterns and behaviour in the eastern Weddell Sea, Southern Ocean. Zooplankton abundance and vertical migration are derived from the mean volume backscattering strength (MVBS) and the vertical velocity measured by moored acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs), which were deployed simultaneously at 64°S, 66.5°S and 69°S along the Greenwich Meridian from February, 2005, until March, 2008. While these time series span a period of full three years they resolve hourly changes. A highly persistent behavioural pattern found at all three mooring locations is the synchronous diel vertical migration (DVM) of two distinct groups of zooplankton that migrate between a deep residence depth during daytime and a shallow depth during nighttime. The DVM was closely coupled to the astronomical daylight cycles. However, while the DVM was symmetric around local noon, the annual modulation of the DVM was clearly asymmetric around winter solstice or summer solstice, respectively, at all three mooring sites. DVM at our observation sites persisted throughout winter, even at the highest latitude exposed to the polar night. Since the magnitude as well as the relative rate of change of illumination is minimal at this time, we propose that the ultimate causes of DVM separated from the light-mediated proximal cue that coordinates it. In all three years, a marked change in the migration behaviour occurred in late spring (late October/early November), when DVM ceased. The complete suspension of DVM after early November is possibly caused by the combination of two factors: (1) increased availability of food in the surface mixed layer provided by the phytoplankton spring bloom, and (2) vanishing diurnal enhancement of the threat from visually oriented predators when the illumination is quasi-continuous during the polar and subpolar summer. Zooplankton abundance in the water column, estimated as the mean MVBS in the depth range 50-300 m, was highest end of summer and lowest mid to end winter on the average annual cycle. However, zooplankton abundance varied several-fold between years and between locations. Based on satellite and in situ data of chlorophyll and sea ice as well as on hydrographic measurements, the interannual and spatial variations of zooplankton mean abundance can be explained by differences in the magnitude of the phytoplankton spring bloom, which develops during the seasonal sea ice retreat. Whereas the vernal ice melt appears necessary to stimulate the blooming of phytoplankton, it is not the determinator of the blooms magnitude, its areal extent and duration. A possible explanation for the limitation of the phytoplankton bloom in some years is top-down control. We hypothesise that the phytoplankton spring development can be curbed by grazing when the zooplankton had attained high abundance by growth during the preceding summer.

Alternative-fueled vehicles: progress made in accelerating federal purchases, but benefits and costs remain uncertain.

Mode of access: Internet.

Planning local solar projects.

"Prepared by Design Alternatives, Inc., Washington, DC, for the Community Services Administration under contract no. B9AF-009."

Ambient ozone pollution and daily mortality in three megacities in China

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Chemical and physical characterization of clay bodies

Suitable methods for the assessment of the effect of freeze-thaw action upon ceramic tiles have been determined. The results obtained have been shown to be reproducible with some work in this area still warranted. The analysis of Whichford Potteries clays via a variety of analytical techniques has shown them to be a complex mix of both clay and non-clay minerals. 57Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy has highlighted the presence of both small and large particleα-Fe203, removable via acid washing. 19F MAS NMR has demonstrated that the raw Whichford Pottery clays examined have negligible fluorine content. This is unlikely to be detrimental to ceramic wares during the heating process. A unique technique was used for the identification of fluorine in solid-state systems. The exchange of various cations into Wyoming Bentonite clay by microwave methodology did not show the appearance of five co-ordinate aluminium when examined by 27Al MAS NMR. The appearance of Qo silicate was linked to an increase in the amount of tetrahedrally bound aluminium in the silicate framework. This is formed as a result of the heating process. The analysis of two Chinese clays and two Chinese clay raw materials has highlighted a possible link between the two. These have also been shown to be a mix of both clay and non-clay minerals. Layered double hydroxides formed by conventional and microwave methods exhibited interesting characteristics. The main differences between the samples examined were not found to be solely attributable to the differences between microwave and conventional methods but more attributable to different experimental conditions used.

Green technologies in the automotive industry

In most of the discussions about environmental issues and policies, transportation is highlighted as one of the main sources of pollutant emissions and energy consumption. The attention given to the automotive industry is understandable in this context due to its size, expansion, presence in our daily lives, and of course its environmental impact. If we scrutinize the “greenness” of car manufacturers we will find issues of concern from the raw material use, production processes, use, and end-of-life of vehicles. The main issues for production are high consumption of energy, raw materials, water and the waste stream, which contains the four substances of concern (cadmium, lead, hexavalent chromium, mercury). In respect of carbon emissions and energy use the use of cars is the main phase of its life-cycle due to the combination of internal combustion engines with fossil fuels. The most recent pressure is aimed at the end-of-life vehicles (ELV). In addition to the pollution from vehicle use, traffic jams and car accidents continue to be part of the downside of a car culture. Landfills sites are becoming scarce and the contamination of soil and aquifers completes the picture.

A quantum Jensen-Shannon graph kernel for unattributed graphs

In this paper, we use the quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence as a means of measuring the information theoretic dissimilarity of graphs and thus develop a novel graph kernel. In quantum mechanics, the quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence can be used to measure the dissimilarity of quantum systems specified in terms of their density matrices. We commence by computing the density matrix associated with a continuous-time quantum walk over each graph being compared. In particular, we adopt the closed form solution of the density matrix introduced in Rossi et al. (2013) [27,28] to reduce the computational complexity and to avoid the cumbersome task of simulating the quantum walk evolution explicitly. Next, we compare the mixed states represented by the density matrices using the quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence. With the quantum states for a pair of graphs described by their density matrices to hand, the quantum graph kernel between the pair of graphs is defined using the quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence between the graph density matrices. We evaluate the performance of our kernel on several standard graph datasets from both bioinformatics and computer vision. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quantum graph kernel.

Identificação das políticas de incentivo ao desenvolvimento da energia eólica no Rio Grande do Norte (RN)

Energy is a vital resource for social and economic development. In the present scenario, the search for alternative energy sources has become fundamental, especially after the oil crises between 1973 and 1979, the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The demand for the development of new alternative energy sources aims to complement existing forms allows to meet the demand for energy consumption with greater security. Brazil, with the guideline of not dirtying the energy matrix by the fossil fuels exploitation and the recent energy crisis caused by the lack of rains, directs energy policies for the development of other renewable energy sources, complementing the hydric. This country is one of the countries that stand out for power generation capacity from the winds in several areas, especially Rio Grande do Norte (RN), which is one of the states with highest installed power and great potential to be explored. In this context arises the purpose of this work to identify the incentive to develop policies of wind energy in Rio Grande do Norte. The study was conducted by a qualitative methodology of data analysis called content analysis, oriented for towards message characteristics, its informational value, the words, arguments and ideas expressed in it, constituting a thematic analysis. To collect the data interviews were conducted with managers of major organizations related to wind energy in Brazil and in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. The identification of incentive policies was achieved in three stages: the first seeking incentives policies in national terms, which are applied to all states, the second with the questionnaire application and the third to research and data collection for the development of the installed power of the RN as compared to other states. At the end, the results demonstrated hat in Rio Grande do Norte state there is no incentive policy for the development of wind power set and consolidated, specific actions in order to optimize the bureaucratic issues related to wind farms, especially on environmental issues. The absence of this policy hinders the development of wind energy RN, considering result in reduced competitiveness and performance in recent energy auctions. Among the perceived obstacles include the lack of hand labor sufficient to achieve the reporting and analysis of environmental licenses, the lack of updating the wind Atlas of the state, a shortfall of tax incentives. Added to these difficulties excel barriers in infrastructure and logistics, with the lack of a suitable port for large loads and the need for reform, maintenance and duplication of roads and highways that are still loss-making. It is suggested as future work the relationship of the technology park of energy and the development of wind power in the state, the influence of the technology park to attract businesses and industries in the wind sector to settle in RN and a comparison of incentive policies to development of wind energy in the Brazilian states observing wind development in the same states under study.

Síntese e caracterizações estrutural e magnética das ferritas de cobalto-manganês (Co1-xMnxFe2O4 E Co1,2Fe1,8-xMnxO4)

The cobalt-manganese ferrites (Co1¡xMnxFe2O4 and Co1,2Fe1,8¡xMnxO4) has a mixed structure of spinel type and it has been regarded as one of candidates for petitive wide variety of applications in devices from ultrasonic generation and detection, sensors, transformers, as well as in medical industry. Ferrites cobalt-manganese nanostructured were produced via mechanical alloying with subsequent heat treatment and were characterized by X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, scanning electron microscopy and magnetization. Samples of Co1¡xMnxFe2O4 and Co1,2Fe1,8¡xMnxO4 were obtained from the precursor powders Fe3O4, Co3O4 and Mn3O4 which were stoichiometrically mixed and ground by 10h and heat treated at 900°C for 2h. The diffraction confirmed the formation of the pure nanocrystalline phases to series Co1,2Fe1,8¡xMnxO4 with an average diameter of about 94nm. It was found that the lattice parameter increases with the substitution of Fe3Å by Mn3Å. The x-ray fluorescence revealed that the portions of metals in samples were close to the nominal stoichiometric compositions. The microstructural features observed in micrographs showed that the particles formed show very different morphology and particle size. The magnetic hysteresis measurements performed at low temperature showed that the saturation magnetization and remanence increased as the concentration of manganese, while the coercive field decreased. The anisotropy constant (Ke f ), was estimated from the data adjustments the law of approaching saturation. It was found that the anisotropy decreases substantially with the substitution of Fe by Mn.

Síntese, estrutura e propriedades de polímeros de coordenação à base de íons lantanídeos e ácidos benzenodicarboxílicos

Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are hybrids materials, often crystalline, consisting of metal or metal clusters, connected by polytopic organic ligands repetitively, leading to structures, usually porous. In this work, MOFs based on lanthanide ions (La3+ and Gd3+) and dicarboxylate type of ligands (isophthalic and terephthalic acids), were synthesized by hydrothermal, solvothermal and hydro(solvo)thermal methods. The effects of the synthetic route as well as the type of heating, conventional or by microwave, on the structure and properties of MOFs were studied. The powder samples obtained were characterized by X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, thermal analysis and scanning electron microscopy. The results suggest that the addition of an organic or inorganic base is needed to promote the deprotonation of the ligand, since in the samples prepared by the hydrothermal method, without the use of a base, no formation of the metalorganic framework was observed. On the other hand, the presence of DMF as solvent or cosolvent, afforded the deprotonation of the ligand with the consequent formation of MOFs. At least two different crystalline structures were identified for the samples prepared with terephthalic acid. These samples are isostructural with those reported for phases Eu(1,3-BDC)DMF, Eu2(1,4-BDC)3 (DMF)2 and Tb(1,4-BDC)H2O. The presence of water in the reaction medium in the hydro(solvo)thermal method, provoked the growth of the structure different from that observed in the absence of water. This can be explained by the difference in the coordination mode of water and DMF to lanthanide ions. Although not identified by XRD, the samples prepared with isophthalic acid, also present metalorganic structures, which was confirmed by the presence of the characteristic displacement of the carbonyl group band in their infrared spectra, compared to the spectrum of the pure ligand. This shift was also observed in the samples prepared with terephthalic acid. Thermal analisys shows that the metal organic frameworks do not collapse occurs at a temperature below 430°C.The analysis of scanning electron microscopy suggests that the morphology of powders is highly dependent on the type of heating used, conventional or by microwave.

Caracterização e avaliação da atividade fotocatalítica de catalisadores baseados no TiO2, sintetizados mediante hidrólise em uma mistura de solventes

This study involved the synthesis of photocatalysts based on titanium dioxide (TiO2). The photocatalysts were synthesized by the sol-gel method using three different proportions of acetone (25%, 50% and 75% v/v) in water/acetone mixtures, in order to control the hydrolysis of the precursor of titanium (titanium tetraisopropoxide). Aiming to investigate the structural, morphological and electronic changes provoked by the use of the solvent mixtures, different methodologies were used to characterize the oxides, such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), RAMAN spectroscopy, UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, and measurements of specific surface area (BET). XRD combined to RAMAN analyses revealed that the products are two-phase highly crystalline oxides involving anatase as main phase and brookite. Besides, the refined XRD using the method of Rietveld demonstrated that the presence of acetone during the synthesis influenced in the composition of the crystalline phases, increasing the proportion of the brookite phase between 13 and 22%. The band gap energy of these oxides practically did not suffer changes as function of the synthesis conditions. As shown by the isotherm, these photocatalysts are mesoporous materials with mean diameter of pores of 7 nm and approximately 20% of porosity. The surface area of the oxides prepared by hydrolysis in presence of acetone was 12% higher compared to the bare oxide. After characterized, these oxides had their photocatalytic activities evaluated by photodegradation of the azo dyes Ponceau 4R (P4R), Tartrazine (TTZ) and Reactive Red 120 (RR120), and also by the ability to mediate the photocatalytic production of hydrogen. Using the most efficient photocatalyst, the mineralization achieved for the dyes P4R, RR120 and TTZ was of respectively 83%, 79% and 56% in 120 minutes of reaction, while the discoloration of P4R e RR120 reached 100% and 94% for TTZ. In addition, the same photocatalyst in the presence of 0.5% w/w of Platinum and suspended in a 5:1 v/v water/methanol mixture, produced 56 mmol of gaseous hydrogen in five hours of experiment, corresponding to a specific rate of hydrogen production of 139.5 mmol h-1 g-1.

Physical oceanography during Nathaniel B. Palmer cruises NBP06-01 and NBP06-08 to the Ross Sea

We calculate net community production (NCP) during summer 2005-2006 and spring 2006 in the Ross Sea using multiple approaches to determine the magnitude and consistency of rates. Water column carbon and nutrient inventories and surface ocean O2/Ar data are compared to satellite-derived primary productivity (PP) estimates and 14C uptake experiments. In spring, NCP was related to stratification proximal to upper ocean fronts. In summer, the most intense C drawdown was in shallow mixed layers affected by ice melt; depth-integrated C drawdown, however, increased with mixing depth. Delta O2/Ar-based methods, relying on gas exchange reconstructions, underestimate NCP due to seasonal variations in surface Delta O2/Ar and NCP rates. Mixed layer Delta O2/Ar requires approximately 60 days to reach steady state, starting from early spring. Additionally, cold temperatures prolong the sensitivity of gas exchange reconstructions to past NCP variability. Complex vertical structure, in addition to the seasonal cycle, affects interpretations of surface-based observations, including those made from satellites. During both spring and summer, substantial fractions of NCP were below the mixed layer. Satellite-derived estimates tended to overestimate PP relative to 14C-based estimates, most severely in locations of stronger upper water column stratification. Biases notwithstanding, NCP-PP comparisons indicated that community respiration was of similar magnitude to NCP. We observed that a substantial portion of NCP remained as suspended particulate matter in the upper water column, demonstrating a lag between production and export. Resolving the dynamic physical processes that structure variance in NCP and its fate will enhance the understanding of the carbon cycling in highly productive Antarctic environments.