Survey forms used in urban freight studies

Report produced as part of the Green Logistics project (EPSRC and Department for Transport funded). This report contains examples of survey forms used in urban freight studies both in the UK and overseas. The studies from which these examples have been drawn range in data from 1970-2008. The purpose of the report is to provide insight into the types of questions used in different survey techniques and also into the design of survey forms. It is hoped that bringing together in a single document these examples of urban freight survey forms will be of use to researchers involved in such studies in future in planning and designing their survey work. Examples of several different types of survey techniques are provided including: Establishment surveys -- Commodity flow surveys -- Freight operator surveys -- Roadside interview surveys -- Driver surveys -- Vehicle observation surveys -- Parking surveys -- Vehicle trip diaries -- Service provider surveys

Survey techniques in urban freight transport studies

This article reviews and assesses the various survey techniques that have been used in studies in which data have been collected to obtain an understanding of road-based urban freight transport activities. The review identified 162 such studies in 18 countries over the last 50 years, and 12 different types of urban survey technique. In the studies reviewed, establishment surveys have been the most commonly used technique, followed by freight operator surveys, vehicle observation surveys, driver surveys, roadside interview surveys, and vehicle trip diaries. Few examples of other survey techniques (commodity flow, parking, global positioning system, supplier and service provider surveys) were identified. Establishment and vehicle observation surveys have the potential to offer insight into a wider range of issues associated with urban freight deliveries and collections to and from establishments in a specific urban area than the other survey techniques reviewed. These two survey techniques can provide insight into the frequency of goods vehicles deliveries and collections by time of day and day of week, the activities involved in the loading/unloading process, and the freight requirements of individual establishments. However, all 12 survey techniques provide insight into varying aspects of urban freight operations and various combinations are therefore likely to be used in future studies.

Repressive desublimation and the great refusal in Bret Easton Ellis's fiction

In 1968, Herbert Marcuse believed that a Great Refusal was possible, one that would deny the exploitative power of corporate capitalism. Marcuse's vision was never realised. This essay argues that society today is in an advanced state of that which the Frankfurt School termed repressive desublimation and questions whether a liberationary praxis is still possible. It claims that Bret Easton Ellis's fiction choreographs an internalising of the forms of critique that marked 1968 and about which Marcuse writes. It is Ellis's act of double voicing that allows him to develop a duplicitous recalcitrant voice within the state of assimilation and it is double voicing which emerges as the key technique in Ellis's work that effects an ongoing critique in commodity society. Looking at Slavoj iek's recent revisionism of the notion of repressive desublimation, which connects Marxism and psychoanalysis, the essay considers how Ellis's novels, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, function to address and reconfigure the relationship between the status of the Marxist fetishised object and the psychoanalytic phobic object in the present-day era of late capitalism. This essay seeks to illuminate how Ellis's fiction, through an involution of Marcuse's political theories, enacts a contemporary refusal from within the state of reification.

Floating on the same plane: metropolis, money and the culture of abstraction

This article argues that the emergence of a trans-disciplinary discourse of ‘visual culture’ must be understood as, above all, a constitutively urban phenomenon. More specifically, it is in the historically new form of the capitalist metropolis, as described most famously by Simmel, that the ‘hyper-stimulus’ of modern visual culture has its social and spatial conditions. Paradoxically, however, it is as a result of this that visual culture studies is also intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of the invisible: one rooted in those forms of ‘real abstraction’ which Marx identifies with the commodity and the money form. Considering, initially, the canonical urban visual forms of the collage and the spectacle, these are each read in a certain relation to Simmel’s account of metropolitan life and of the money form, and, through this, to what the author claims are those forms of social and spatial abstraction that must be understood to animate them. Finally, the article returns to the entanglement of the visible and invisible entailed by this, and concludes by making some tentative suggestions about something like a paradoxical urban ‘aesthetic’ of abstraction on such a basis.

Determination of carbamate and urea pesticide residues in fresh vegetables using microwave-assisted extraction and liquid chromatography

An analytical multiresidue method for the simultaneous determination of seven pesticides in fresh vegetable samples, namely, courgette (Cucurbita pepo), cucumber (Cucumis sativus), lettuce (Lactuca sativa, Romaine and Iceberg varieties) and peppers (Capsicum sp.) is described. The procedure, based on microwave-assisted extraction (MAE) and analysis by liquid chromatography– photodiode array (LC–PDA) detection was applied to four carbamates (carbofuran, carbaryl, chlorpropham and EPTC) and three urea pesticides (monolinuron, metobromuron and linuron). Extraction solvent and the addition of anhydrous sodium sulphate to fresh vegetable homogenate before MAE were the parameters optimised for each commodity. Recovery studies were performed using spiked samples in the range 250–403 µgkg- 1 in each pesticide. The pesticide residues were extracted using 20mL acetonitrile at 60 ºC, for 10 min. Acceptable recoveries and RSDs were attained (overall average recovery of 77.2% and RSDs are lower than 11%). Detection limits ranged between 5.8 µgkg- 1 for carbaryl to 12.3 µgkg- 1 for carbofuran. The analytical protocol was applied for quality control of 41 fresh vegetable samples bought in Oporto Metropolitan Area (North Portugal). None of the samples contained any detectable amounts of the studied compounds.

Self-similarity principle: the reduced description of randomness

A new general fitting method based on the Self-Similar (SS) organization of random sequences is presented. The proposed analytical function helps to fit the response of many complex systems when their recorded data form a self-similar curve. The verified SS principle opens new possibilities for the fitting of economical, meteorological and other complex data when the mathematical model is absent but the reduced description in terms of some universal set of the fitting parameters is necessary. This fitting function is verified on economical (price of a commodity versus time) and weather (the Earth’s mean temperature surface data versus time) and for these nontrivial cases it becomes possible to receive a very good fit of initial data set. The general conditions of application of this fitting method describing the response of many complex systems and the forecast possibilities are discussed.

O Processo de internacionalização da música portuguesa: contexto histórico, desafios atuais e futuro

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Empreendedorismo e Internacionalização, sob orientação do Professor Doutor Freitas Santos

Exploring profitability diversity through financial statement analysis

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Systemic risk for financial institutions in UK

Marginal Expected Shortfall (MES) is an approach used to measure the systemic risk financial institutions face. It estimates how significantly systemic events (poor market performance, out of 1.6 times Standard Deviation borders) are expected to affect market capitalization of a particular firm. The concept was developed in the late 2000s and is widely used for cross-country comparisons of financial firms. For the purposes of generalization of this technique it is often used with market data containing non-domestic currencies for some financial firms. That may lead to results having currency noise in them as it is shown for 77 UK financial firms in our analysis between 2001 and 2014.

Getting the carry trade's jackpot

This Working Project studies five portfolios of currency carry trades formed with the G10 currencies. Performance varies among strategies and the most basic one presents the worst results. I also study the equity and Pure FX risk factors which can explain the portfolios’ returns. Equity factors do not explain these returns while the Pure FX do for some of the strategies. Downside risk measures indicate the importance of using regime indicators to avoid losses. I conclude that although using VAR and threshold regression models with a variety of regime indicators do not allow the perception of different regimes, with a defined exogenous threshold on real exchange rates, an indicator of liquidity and the volatilities of the spot exchange rates it is possible to increase the average returns and reduce drawdowns of the carry trades

Introducing risk parity on momentum and carry portfolios

The momentum and carry anomalies have been extensively documented in the literature. However, there are still many issues relating to the risks associated to them that are left unexplained. One is the fact that an investor holds for too long the most volatile assets, both under momentum and carry strategies. Therefore, they present a level of risk and a probability of extreme events to happen inconsistent. This work project hypothesizes and proves the introduction of risk parity rules on the weights of the portfolios do increase risk rewarding of carry strategies. However, it fails under momentum strategies.

Macroeconomic risk in commodities market

The thesis studies the presence of macroeconomic risk in the commodities futures market. I present strong evidence that there is a strong relationship between macroeconomic risk and individual commodities future returns. Furthermore, long-only trading strategies seem to be strongly exposed to systematic risk, while long-short trading strategies (based on basis, momentum and basis-momentum) are found to present no such risk. Instead, I found a strong sentiment exposure in the portfolio returns of these long-short strategies, mainly during recessions. The advantages of following long-short strategies become even clearer when analyzing different macroeconomic regimes.

Noble energy oil & Gas

Equity research report

Carry and trend-following strategies

Recent research has shown that carry and trend strategies when combined lead to significant risk-adjusted returns that can be very attractive to investors, at a low cost with small and positive skewness. This study proposes to combine both carry and trend-following, considering a data set of ten years (09/2005-09/2015), within a portfolio composed by three major asset classes: currencies, commodities and equity indices. Following a futures-based methodology, the obtained results show that, indeed, the strategy results inevitably in higher returns and greater sharpe ratios for every asset class in study. This outcome results from the fact that trend proved to provide a significant hedge to the downside risk that carry is exposed to.

Impactos territoriais de processos de cooperação transfronteiriça : caso de estudo : Elvas e Badajoz

A cooperação transfronteiriça é vista na União Europeia como um modelo de integração territorial e como uma alternativa para o desenvolvimento das regiões de fronteira, devido ao seu afastamento em relação aos grandes centros urbanos. No início da década de 90 foi lançado o programa do INTERREG tendo em vista a maior permeabilidade da fronteira e o desenvolvimento destes territórios, entre os quais o das regiões do Alto Alentejo e da Extremadura. A grande proximidade territorial entre Elvas e Badajoz permitiu desde sempre relações de cooperação mais ou menos intensas e consentidas, mesmo antes da abertura da fronteira, motivadas sobretudo pela diferença de valor entre as duas moedas. Contudo, com a entrada conjunta dos países ibéricos na CEE (1986), essas relações intensificaram-se ao nível do comércio, do emprego, do turismo, do lazer e da procura de serviços. Impactos territoriais como a procura e utilização conjunta de infraestruturas e de espaços públicos pelas populações das duas cidades, a promoção e realização de espetáculos culturais, a prática de cross-border shopping, a procura de uma segunda residência, em ambos os lados da fronteira, e a tendência para uma urbanização contínua no futuro, justificaram a criação da Eurocidade Elvas-Badajoz (2013). Esta iniciativa tem como principais objetivos promover a conceção, gestão e prestação conjunta de serviços, desenvolver projetos de cooperação em áreas de interesse comum, estimular a cooperação entre empresas e atrair investimentos geradores de novos postos de trabalho. No entanto os desafios para ambas as cidades prendem-se com a existência de um quadro jurídico e legal distinto que tem condicionado algumas das ações ou iniciativas e o desenvolvimento territorial conjunto ainda carece de uma proposta estratégica.