7,977 research outputs found
Money for the big eyes
Get PDFThesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-49).Since ancient civilization, humanity has kept its eyes on the heavens, and the invention of telescopes has only increased its scrutiny. As astronomers strive to see the universe with increasing clarity, telescopes have been getting bigger, better, and more expensive. The astronomy community is currently preparing for the next generation of ground-based optical telescopes: giant behemoths that will have mirrors of over twenty meters in diameter, set atop of high, dark mountains. Technological advancements have finally made it possible to create telescopes this large, and they will be able to view the skies ten times more sharply than the Hubble Space Telescope. Once completed in a decade or so, these telescopes will shine light on our most pressing questions in astronomy. However, with price tags of around a billion dollars each, raising the money to build them is a challenge. This thesis explores the technology behind the extremely large telescopes and the politics behind their funding. Telescope research began as private ventures, the Medici family's patronage of Galileo being a famous historical example. Today, the story is not so simple, involving public governments, international collaborations, and endless fundraising. While over a dozen different extremely large telescopes have been proposed in the last two decades, only three remain as viable ventures: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the European Extremely Large Telescope. This thesis recounts their unfinished story.by Fangfei Shen.S.M.in Science Writin
An analysis of indirect real estate investments in South Korea
No full textThesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, September, 2020Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 39-40).Recently the South Korean government announced its comprehensive measure to revitalize the indirect real estate investment market, especially to expand the public offering market to be ten times larger than its current state. The measure can be interpreted as a change of state in the Korean real estate market and an acknowledgment of its need for the vital role of indirect real estate investments. As a low-interest environment continues and the amount of floating money increases, real estate speculation has never been more of an issue, which cannot be solved without changing the investment paradigm. Vitalization of the indirect real estate market can provide individuals alternative ways to invest their money in real estate and redistribute profits generated from real estate investments that are currently driven by few institutional investors. This thesis aims to study the overall indirect real estate investment market in Korea focused on two main vehicles, Real Estate Investment Trusts and Real Estate Funds. The two vehicles will be studied in depth on their history, current market status, behaviors and characteristics to analyze their roles in the market. Analysis will be done on indirect real estate investment vehicles in comparable countries to take away lessons learned and find areas for possible market improvements. Data will be collected from various literatures, journals, statistics from fund assessment companies and investment associations to attempt to find inefficiencies that can be improved in the market.by Cho Hae Park.S.M. in Real Estate DevelopmentS.M.inRealEstateDevelopment Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estat
Using money to suspend heavy or fragile objects
No full textThesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. [102]).The author suspends a 700-lb steel money safe from the ceiling, using ropes constructed from approximately 10,000 United States $1 bills. The role of money in this artwork is compared and contrasted with the role of money in artworks by other contemporary artists. It is noted that the presence of money has an irritating effect on most viewers, and hypothesized that this effect is based on the installation's exposure of differences in financial wealth between different persons. Accordingly, a proposal is made for the reduction of economic inequality by wasting the excess wealth of the very rich, and it is suggested that the author's artwork both enacts and visually supports this proposal.by Jedediah Smith Ela.S.M
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IMTFI Special PERSPECTIVES Series: Demonetization in India (Jan-Feb 2017)
Get PDFIn IMTFI's PERSPECTIVES blog series, IMTFI fellows take on the recent demonetization move in India through 7 posts on the IMTFI Blog from January-February 2017. This synthesis serves as a collation of the 7 blogposts.The series aims to foster an open dialogue on issues around money, technology and financial inclusion for the world’s poor. Individual contributions reflect contributors' own reflections on recent events - based on their research and areas of expertise. The topic of demonetization will conclude with a curated commentary by IMTFI on key themes, important questions, and what we can learn from these contributions for digital financial inclusion going forward.#1 - Demonetization and its Discontents (1/24/2017) by Janaki Srinivasan#2 - The Recent Indian Demonetisation and Cash Exclusion (1/26/2017) by Debashis Acharya#3 - The Dangerous Liaisons between Demonetization and the Indian Informal Economy (Part 1) (1/30/2017) by Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar and G Venkatasubramanian#4 - The Dangerous Liaisons between Demonetization and the Indian Informal Economy (Part 2) (2/13/2017) by Isabelle Guéin, Santosh Kumar and G Venkatasubramanian#5 - The Recent Indian Demonetization and Cash Exclusion (Part 2) (2/1/2017) by Debashis Acharya, V V Subbarao, and T K Venkatachalapathy#6 - Before Money isn't Money Anymore....(2/7/2017) by Vivian Dzokoto#7 - Insights, Challenges, and Ways Forward (2/22/2017) by Ursula Dalinghaus, Nima Lamu Yolmo, and Janaki Srinivasa
Amazon here
No full textThesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2019Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (page 203).Tech companies, bearing money, jobs and innovations assume state-level responsibilities and take on projects that address urban issues. Uber rethinks public transit; Google Sidewalk Labs designs Toronto's waterfront with integrated mobility system; Elon Musk's Boring Company privately funds a rapid transit line from O'Hare Airport to downtown; Amazon provides CIA data and security services for sensitive information. Willingly or reluctantly, governments are handing over civic infrastructure to these companies. While reshaping the public realm at an unprecedented pace, tech companies also put public spaces at risk. In negotiation of mega-corporation tenancy, as seen in Amazon's RFP for its second headquarters, space becomes a bargaining chip between misaligned agendas of companies and governments. This thesis investigates the unusual architectural opportunities this risk could bring to the city, the corporation, and the citizens while acknowledging that machines, supported by automation, are progressively reorganizing our environment and we are surrendering our control in gradual but consequential ways. Amazon Here is our case study in the urban context of Chicago, an abandoned historic building retrofitted into a densely-packed, hyper-efficient machine that weaves together business and public-oriented spaces. This hypothetical development pushes for a model in which corporate-sponsored public architecture operates as the fourth industrial revolution's version of a company town, balancing Amazon's interests with those of the community. In this experimental model, public space is a negotiation for corporate and civic interest; hefty logistical infrastructure normally hidden behind closed doors now becomes part of the new urban experience, transforming the industrial warehouse into a spectacle for all.by Anran Li, Yue (Chelsea) Qiu.M. Arch.M.Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architectur
Establishing guidelines for the Free Economic Zone in Shanghai
No full textThesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2014.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 109 blank.Includes bibliographical references (pages 107-108).This thesis focuses on an emerging urban form: Free Economic Zone. As a special enclave with tax incentives and policy experimentation, the FEZ undertakes the mission to grow the economy and test new rules in developing countries. In this context, the Chinese government established its FEZ project in Shanghai, September, 2013. The aim of the thesis is to reevaluate the criterion for establishing planning and urban design guidelines for the FEZ and subsequently to imagine alternative spatial, formal and typological organizations for Shanghai's new zone. Segregated by walls or highways, these enormous profit machines lacerate the urban connections and become privileged enclaves for governors and entrepreneurs. Residents nearby are only left with traffic pollutions and a lifeless town. Not taking FEZ as a pure profit machine, this thesis proposes a revision of the typical FEZ models by formulating a set of principles, which are: Temporality, Programmatic Diversity, Typological Variety and Spatial Continuity. First, FEZ is only in a temporal state in that it will be transformed to the normative city once it fulfills its economic and political obligations. Hence, the design of FEZ should leave possibilities and set frameworks for future developments. Second, programmatic diversity brings economic benefits to the zone and thus to better serve the goal of FEZ. Moreover, typological variety can offer the zone with flexibility and the ability to change in the future. Lastly, spatial continuity between city and FEZ sponsors the cultural and physical consistency. Not being a huge hiatus in the city, the FEZ can bring back public life to local residents and reconnect missing links in surrounding area. The thesis proposes a design scheme that performs crucial interventions to achieve the four principles previously mentioned while maintaining the autonomy and proceeds of private developers. By engraving planning guidelines into private development, the new organization of FEZ can bring both economic benefits and social responsibilities to the formerly money-oriented area.by Xing Huang.S.M
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Snapshots of Gender and Financial Inclusion: IMTFI Gender-Focused Projects from 2008-2014
Get PDFThese snapshots of gender and financial inclusion provide a glance at some of the ways women interact with different forms of money in a shifting global financial landscape. Based on research conducted by IMTFI researchers all around the world, these snapshots address the way gender relations get reworked when money circulates through digital technologies and is regulated by new financial institutions.Research from the Philippines, Kenya, Paraguay, Nigeria, Mexico and India demonstrates that women’s access to and engagements with money are extremely varied and strongly influenced by entrenched socio-cultural and economic modes of exclusion. Therefore women employ a host of different financial management strategies as means of empowerment – from hiding money in coke bottles, to rearing ruminants to speculating in gold. Moreover, financial education of women emerges as an important prerequisite for financial inclusion and one IMTFI research team recommends the use of cartoons and visual media to achieve that goal
Quantum money and scalable 21-cm cosmology
Get PDFThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2011.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 165-170).This thesis covers two unrelated topics. The first part of my thesis is about quantum money, a cryptographic protocol in which a mint can generate a quantum state that no one can copy. In public-key quantum money, anyone can verify that a given quantum state came from the mint, and in collision-free quantum money, even the mint cannot generate two valid quantum bills with the same serial number. I present quantum state restoration, a new quantum computing technique that can be used to counterfeit several designs for quantum money. I describe a few other approaches to quantum money, one of which is published, that do not work. I then present a technique that seems to be secure based on a new mathematical object called a component mixer, and I give evidence money using this technique is hard to counterfeit. I describe a way to implement a component mixer and the corresponding quantum money using techniques from knot theory. The second part of my thesis is about 21-cm cosmology and the Fast Fourier transform telescope. With the FFT telescope group at MIT, I worked on a design for a radio telescope that operates between 120 and 200 MHz and will scale to an extremely large number of antennas N. We use an aperture synthesis technique based on Fast Fourier transforms with computational costs proportional toN logN instead of N2. This eliminates the cost of computers as the main limit on the size of a radio interferometer. In this type of telescope, the cost of each antenna matters regardless of how large the telescope becomes, so we focus on reducing the cost of each antenna as much as possible. I discuss the FFT aperture synthesis technique and its equivalence to standard techniques on an evenly spaced grid. I describe analog designs that can reduce the cost per antenna. I give algorithms to analyze raw data from our telescope to help debug and calibrate its components, with particular emphasis on cross-talk between channels and I/Q imbalance. Finally, I present a scalable design for a computer network that can solve the corner-turning problem.by Andrew Lutomirski.Ph.D
Finite element simulation based design and optimization of electric motors for EV/HEV traction application
No full textThesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-129).The launch of so many commercial electric vehicles shows the effort toward pollution reduction and curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. A design for an electric vehicle does not just requires the electrical system to be efficient in particular; but it is required to perform in all extreme cases of thermal and mechanical stresses. And it is made possible by all the research and development in all the areas of electrical machines, power electronics and energy storage that electric vehicle systems can meet very challenging specifications. With the availability of reliable simulation tools, a lot of time and money can be saved in the designing process. Accurate simulation tools tends to be more time consuming. There are simplification methods that save time, but at the cost of some fidelity. Moreover, design is an iterative process and optimization of design based on some specific requirement multiplies the amount of computation and hence time consumption. This thesis deals with the design and optimization of permanent magnet based traction motors with given dimensions and drive constraints. The goal is to develop a method which has the accuracy of finite element method but with much smaller time consumption for designing and optimizing the motor. Since it is a traction motor, the optimization is carried for a specific load pattern of driving a car, called a drive cycle. The program developed is tested on various types of permanent magnet motors to verify the generality of the program. For the motor topologies that cannot achieve a particular specifications, the program specifies the maximum capability of the motor.by Krishan Kant.S.M.S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc
Socioeconomic implications of dirty industry and a guide to national cleandustrialization
No full textThesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-37).It is now common knowledge that China's data is bad, and China's environment is polluted. In this paper I develop a simple pollution intensity index to test China's existing national and local environmental data, to answer the questions: "Bad" how? "Polluted" why? And finally: what can be done? I find that China's existing data is rudimentary, piecemeal, and inaccurate. I find that government data is not detailed, not transparent, and that non-governmental attempts at improving data quality and transparency are hamstringed by lack of official support. These data quality and transparency issues contribute to the intractability of China's industrial pollution. I also find that a pollution intensity index, like the one I develop and test in this study, can help policymakers identify pollution hotspots years before the hotspots worsen into public health emergencies. By running 2010 data through a simple algorithm, I isolate a pollution hotspot that took the Chinese government until 2013 to discover without this framework. I show that better and more accurate data, along with a mandate for continuous monitoring and analysis, can shift the current strategy from pollution control to pollution prevention, ultimately saving time, money, and lives.by Yang Chu.M.C.P
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