In the informal settlements of warm humid climates, where the majority of urbanites spend most of their time outdoors, a conducive thermal environment is crucial for their social and economic well-being. The overall aim of this thesis is to increase knowledge and understanding of outdoor thermal comfort in informal settlements in the warm and humid climate of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Urbanites’ th

OBJECTIVES: Coronary artery calcium score (CACS) is a marker of subclinical atherosclerosis. However, there is little data related to the association between arterial stiffness and CACS in the general population. The aim of this study was to explore the association between carotid femoral-pulse wave velocity (c-f PWV), a widely accepted marker of arterial stiffness, and CACS.METHODS: Participants

This chapter provides a survey of the existing quantitative research on antisemitism and social media. Through doing so, it argues that the sheer quantity of antisemitism on social media is much less than commonly perceived. In addition, the chapter argues that quantitative research often neglects counter-narratives calling out antisemitism, which are an important counterpoint to include in antise

Whilst network coordination games and network anti-coordination games have received a considerable amount of attention in the literature, network games with coexisting coordinating and anti-coordinating players are known to exhibit more complex behaviors. In fact, depending on the network structure, such games may even fail to have pure-strategy Nash equilibria. An example is represented by the we

We study extensions of the classical SIR model of epidemic spread. First, we consider a single population modified SIR epidemics model in which the contact rate is allowed to be an arbitrary function of the fraction of susceptible and infected individuals. This allows one to model either the reaction of individuals to the information about the spread of the disease or the result of government rest

The Bonacich centrality is a well-known measure of the relative importance of nodes in a network. This notion is, for example, at the core of Google’s Page Rank algorithm. In this paper we study a network formation game where each player corresponds to a node in the network to be formed. The action of a player consists in the assignment of m out-links and his utility is his own Bonacich centrality

We study deterministic continuous-time lossy dynamical flow networks with constant exogenous demands, fixed routing, and finite flow and buffer capacities. In the considered model, when the total net flow in a cell —consisting of the difference between the total flow directed towards it minus the outflow from it— exceeds a certain capacity constraint, then the exceeding part of it leaks out of the

We study a novel control problem in the context of network coordination games: the individuation of the smallest set of players capable of driving the system, globally, from one Nash equilibrium to another one. Our main contribution is the design of a randomized algorithm based on a time-reversible Markov chain with provable convergence guarantees.

We consider a novel adversarial shock/protection problem for a class of network equilibria models emerging from a variety of different fields as continuous network games, production networks, opinion dynamic models. The problem is casted into a min-max problem and analytically solved for two particular cases of aggregate performances: the mean square of the equilibrium or of its arithmetic mean. T

This work studies Nash equilibria for games where a mixture of coordinating and anti-coordinating agents, with possibly heterogeneous thresholds, coexist and interact through an all-to-all network. Whilst games with only coordinating or only anti-coordinating agents are potential, also in the presence of heterogeneities, this does not hold when both type of agents are simultaneously present. This

We study an optimal targeting problem for super-modular games with binary actions and finitely many players. The considered problem consists in the selection of a subset of players of minimum size such that, when the actions of these players are forced to a controlled value while the others are left to repeatedly play a best response action, the system will converge to the greatest Nash equilibriu

We undertake a fundamental study of network equilibria modeled as solutions of fixed-point equations for monotone linear functions with saturation nonlinearities. The considered model extends one originally proposed to study systemic risk in networks of financial institutions interconnected by mutual obligations. It is one of the simplest continuous models accounting for shock propagation phenomen