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Coastal cities are grappling with how to shift their approach in designing the built environment to respond to global warming and sea level rise. With the potential increase of sea level rise by 1 metre by the year 2100, and climate change projecting more intense and frequent storms to British Columbia’s coasts, Vancouver will need to consider more resilient approaches to address flood risk along its shores. One area that will be exposed to flood risks includes the False Creek Flats, a historic tidal flat converted to rail and industrial hub in the core of the city, and on the cusp of transforming into the city’s next employment hub. At present, it is indiscernible that the False Creek Flats at one time was a historic tidal flat with a rich ecology supporting a variety of plants and wildlife, providing food and sustenance to the Indigenous people whose traditional territory included this land. The emergence of the rail and industry erased this history, the connection to the water, and the dynamic coastal processes that shaped the landscape. With the False Creek Flats undergoing a significant transformation over the next number of years, there is a window of opportunity to reconnect False Creek Flats to the coastal landscape, while also making room for flood waters and shifting perspectives on how we live with and build with water. This practicum seeks to develop a resilient design approach for False Creek Flats through three lenses: robustness, ensuring people are safe; adaptive, making room for the water; and transformative, shifting perspectives through design interventions. Leveraging the opportunity to make False Creek Flats resilient to climate change and flooding will benefit Vancouver by creating opportunities to shift public perspectives on how the city should adapt to sea level rise and climate change, while also bolstering public policy that will make the city and its residents more adaptive and resilient to change.

HIV/AIDS, discovered in the early 1980s, has now become a world-wide epidemic. The most affected area is Africa, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. This exploratory research project examined the challenges facing grandmothers and focused on Zambia because with 1,291,079 orphans, Zambia has the highest proportions of orphans in the world. Evidence demonstrates that grandmothers care for approximately 43% of the 845,546 AIDS orphans. Young men and women aged between 15 and 49, despite good health and higher education, have continued to die from AIDS, leaving behind children who are cared for by their grandparents and in particular their grandmothers. The experiences of these grandmothers are not known due to a paucity of studies on the subject. This study is a scoping review of literature on HIV/AIDS in Zambia and its impact on the family. A number of journals, books, and reports were investigated. The major themes arising from the literature were identified and discussed; they include HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and HIV/AIDS in Zambia, impact of HIV/AIDS on households and Zambia’s response to the epidemic. This research uses three perspectives: conflict theory, social capital and role conflict to guide the exploration of the social impact of HIV/AIDS on families and society. The study provided an opportunity to identify and examine the challenges facing grandmothers who care for their AIDS orphans and consequently to offer potential solutions. It also contributed to a broader understanding of the social significance of HIV/AIDS.

Title: Towards Automated Construction of Tabular Expressions, Author: Yazhi Wang, Location: Thode

Process systems design, operation and synthesis problems under uncertainty can readily be formulated as two-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear and nonlinear (nonconvex) programming (MILP and MINLP) problems. These problems, with a scenario based formulation, lead to large-scale MILPs/MINLPs that are well structured. The first part of the thesis proposes a new finitely convergent cross decomposition method (CD), where Benders decomposition (BD) and Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition (DWD) are combined in a unified framework to improve the solution of scenario based two-stage stochastic MILPs. This method alternates between DWD iterations and BD iterations, where DWD restricted master problems and BD primal problems yield a sequence of upper bounds, and BD relaxed master problems yield a sequence of lower bounds. A variant of CD, which includes multiple columns per iteration of DW restricted master problem and multiple cuts per iteration of BD relaxed master problem, called multicolumn-multicut CD is then developed to improve solution time. Finally, an extended cross decomposition method (ECD) for solving two-stage stochastic programs with risk constraints is proposed. In this approach, a CD approach at the first level and DWD at a second level is used to solve the original problem to optimality. ECD has a computational advantage over a bilevel decomposition strategy or solving the monolith problem using an MILP solver. The second part of the thesis develops a joint decomposition approach combining Lagrangian decomposition (LD) and generalized Benders decomposition (GBD), to efficiently solve stochastic mixed-integer nonlinear nonconvex programming problems to global optimality, without the need for explicit branch and bound search. In this approach, LD subproblems and GBD subproblems are systematically solved in a single framework. The relaxed master problem obtained from the reformulation of the original problem, is solved only when necessary. A convexification of the relaxed master problem and a domain reduction procedure are integrated into the decomposition framework to improve solution efficiency. Using case studies taken from renewable resource and fossil-fuel based application in process systems engineering, it can be seen that these novel decomposition approaches have significant benefit over classical decomposition methods and state-of-the-art MILP/MINLP global optimization solvers.

The exam from SOCY344 (Dept of Sociology) taught by Cynthia B Levine-Rasky in December 2017

This painted terracotta bust (currently housed in Santa Maria Novella in Florence) is one of a series produced in the 1490s depicting Antoninus (1399-1459), archbishop of Florence, who had lived within recent memory. After Bernardino of Siena was made a saint in 1450 (only six years after his death), the Florentines were hoping for the same for Antoninus and actively campaigned for his cannonization in the 1480s and 90s by writing letters and donating money. These busts, which follow the format of those representing saints, were surely a part of that campaign, but the process only started in 1516, under the Florentine Pope Leo X, and Antoninus was made a saint in 1523. Antoninus, despite his status as archbishop, was an ascetic dedicated to simple living and poverty, and so he wore his rough Dominican robes rather than the silk embroidered ones of an archbishop and lived and ate simply. He is shown in those plain black robes here, with a hollow-cheeked visage that is the polar opposite of the stereotype of the well-fed monk. This portrait is naturalistic, taken from a death mask. The very molding of Antoninus' face at his death suggests that already at that point he was considered a candidate for cannonization. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Segregated funds are individual insurance contracts that offer growth potential of investment in underlying assets while providing a guarantee to protect part of the money invested. The guarantee can cause significant losses to the insurer which makes it essential for the insurer to hedge this risk. In this project, we discuss the hedging effectiveness of delta hedging by studying the distribution of hedging errors under different assumptions about the return on underlying assets. We consider a Geometric Brownian motion and a Regime Switching Lognormal to model equity returns and compare the hedging effectiveness when risk-free rates are constant or stochastic. Two one-factor short-rate models, the Vasicek and CIR models, are used to model the risk-free rate. We find that delta hedging is in general effective but large hedging errors can occur when the assumptions of the Black-Scholes' framework are violated.

Abstract: Larvae of winter ticks, Dermacentor albipictus (Packard), ascend vegetation in autumn and form clumps that attach to passing ungulate hosts. We tested the hypothesis that vegetation height determines the height of clumps. During the vegetation-to-ungulate transmission period (early September to mid-November), larvae were released. at the base of simulated vegetation (nylon rods 245 cm tall) in outdoor and laboratory trials and in the absence of host cues. Rod height exceeded the height of the tallest ungulate host, which is the moose, Alces alces (L.). Most larvae stopped climbing and formed clumps 50-190 cm above ground, which coincided with torso heights of moose; elk, Cervus elaphus L.; and deer, Odocoileus spp. Rafinesque. More clumps formed in outdoor trials than in laboratory trials and clump heights tended to increase over. the course of the experiment, but clump number, size, and height did not cell-elate with weather conditions. Winter tick larvae appear to determine their height above ground in the absence of external cues, but this mechanism may be modified by external conditions.