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Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouettes. Scholars such as Salamishah Tillet argue that Walker's art, along with art by some of her post-civil rights contemporaries, offers 'aesthetic interventions' to problematic racial histories as part of a larger project of memory reclamation and justice. Walker's A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant is another such interventionist project. Debuting in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York in May of 2014, A Subtlety explores how a figure like mammy 'survives as a cultural force that influences and reflects a national conscience' (Wallace Sanders [2008]. Mammy: a century of race, gender, and southern memory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 12). And yet, to say that the historical rootedness of the title, sugar sphinx sculpture, and molasses-covered walls and cherub-faced small figures throughout the installation were ambiguous to some spectators, is an understatement. Hundreds of photographs and videos were uploaded to social media sites with people making gestures towards the figure that some critics deemed highly inappropriate. This paper explores how A Subtlety both understands and undermines representations of Black women's bodies and how Black artists in the African diaspora contend with complex cultural signs of the past in the present. Utilizing studies of Black feminist theory and visual culture, I argue that Walker's A Subtlety – and her art more broadly – offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as in the Black nostalgic imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kosciuszko Bridge carries a 1.8 km long segment of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek between Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, USA. The roadway is a vital link in the region's transportation network, carrying over 170 000 vehicles/day. Owing to structural and operational deficiencies, the existing structure was replaced. The new bridge consists of two parallel structures, one eastbound and one westbound, with main spans mirroring one another. Each structure consists of a single-tower cable-stayed main span over Newtown Creek with unbalanced main and back spans. This was the first cable-stayed bridge to be constructed in New York City, joining the ranks of the city's most iconic bridges. Here, two main span structures are discussed, with the focus primarily on the design and construction of the westbound, phase 2 bridge. Some key design aspects are outlined, including outboard cable anchorages, a concrete-filled counterweight and other details intended to facilitate construction, maintenance and inspection. The eastbound, phase 1 bridge was constructed under a design–build contract, and the westbound, phase 2 bridge as a design–bid–build. The paper also touches on some of the design aspects that were refined during the second phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the neighborhood of Bushwick from the post–World War II (WWII) era to the onset of the neighborhood's gentrification, this paper traces the fundamental significance of race in the policy decisions that led to the evolution of Bushwick from a vibrant middle-class community to one of concentrated poverty and blight by the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on firsthand accounts, senate hearings, court trials, media accounts, as well as the secondary literature, this paper shows how policy actions and inaction led to the inevitable destruction in the neighborhood during the blackout of 1977. Although the blackout marks one of the most turbulent periods in the neighborhood's history, the community's resilience is accentuated throughout the destruction and its aftermath. Today, as Bushwick's residents face a new threat in the form of gentrification, this paper seeks to situate this contemporary development within the historical and ongoing significance of race in urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reaching population-level impact for families in poverty requires moving beyond a sole focus on individuals, to a wider focus on interactions between individuals and their broader environmental contexts. Place-based initiatives have emerged as a policy response to promote community-level change around these broader interactions between individuals and their local communities through addressing long-standing disparities in housing, employment, education, and health. Together Growing Strong (TGS) is one such place-based initiative focused on transforming the health, wellbeing, and development of young children and their families in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Children, Caregivers, and Community (C3) Study is an outcomes-based study designed to assess the trajectories of children and families in Sunset Park along indicators such as family health and wellbeing and child development in relation to TGS program participation. The aims, scope, and protocol of the C3 Study are the subjects of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investigation of linguistic landscapes (LL) among the Arab community in downtown Brooklyn, New York City, is an underserved public space in the literature. This research focused on social and commercial or 'bottom-up signs' in LL to understand their purpose, origin and target audience. Drawing upon discourse analysis, the study was conceptualized according to the principles of border theory and geosemiotics. The latter was used to analyze the data, which consisted of random photographs of shopfronts in Brooklyn taken with a digital camera during the summer of 2016. The three semiotic aggregates used for analysis consisted of interaction order, visual and place semiotics. The data analysis showed the multi-layered nature of LL in this urban community and the subjectiveness of spatial borders through a combination of text and symbolic imagery. The paper highlights the importance of commercial signs in the LL among ethnic minority communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to high-quality data is an important barrier in the digital analysis of urban settings, including applications within computer vision and urban design. Diverse forms of data collected from sensors in areas of high activity in the urban environment, particularly at street intersections, are valuable resources for researchers interpreting the dynamics between vehicles, pedestrians, and the built environment. In this paper, we present a high-resolution audio, video, and LiDAR dataset of three urban intersections in Brooklyn, New York, totaling almost 8 unique hours. The data were collected with custom Reconfigurable Environmental Intelligence Platform (REIP) sensors that were designed with the ability to accurately synchronize multiple video and audio inputs. The resulting data are novel in that they are inclusively multimodal, multi-angular, high-resolution, and synchronized. We demonstrate four ways the data could be utilized — (1) to discover and locate occluded objects using multiple sensors and modalities, (2) to associate audio events with their respective visual representations using both video and audio modes, (3) to track the amount of each type of object in a scene over time, and (4) to measure pedestrian speed using multiple synchronized camera views. In addition to these use cases, our data are available for other researchers to carry out analyses related to applying machine learning to understanding the urban environment (in which existing datasets may be inadequate), such as pedestrian-vehicle interaction modeling and pedestrian attribute recognition. Such analyses can help inform decisions made in the context of urban sensing and smart cities, including accessibility-aware urban design and Vision Zero initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates practices of urban discursive place-making in selected neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. I investigate the forms and functions of hitherto neglected multimodal data – semiotic landscapes written on the body, (hidden) Wi-Fi Service Set Identifiers, that is, SSIDs or Wi-Fi names, and #Brooklyn Tweets – and how I have compiled these into a corpus. The corpus currently consists of multivariate data including – among others – ca. 1.3 million words of semi-structured interviews with Brooklynites, ca. 8,000 photographs of the semiotic landscapes in Brooklyn, New York, and ca. 47,000 Wi-Fi SSIDs. The aim of this paper is to show which semiotic forms and constructions of both Wi-Fi SSIDs and #Brooklyn Tweets take on foregrounded practices of so-called discursive urban-place-making and how these interact in the various neighborhoods of Brooklyn and in the virtual spheres related to them. I will show how these practices carry the potential for (re-)indexing specific social values of an urban neighborhood or even the borough itself and how Brooklynites and others comment on the respective neighborhoods. They position themselves in the social, cultural, political, and economic spheres of urbanity. The mixed-methods approach draws on corpus linguistic, sociolinguistic, and stylistic methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devastating impacts of frequent coastal storms, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 or Superstorm Sandy in New York City in 2012, in major low-lying metropolitan areas have had repercussions far beyond previously experienced disasters. Two key findings that describe these repercussions related to these events were stated as follows: in the case of Katrina, there was a lack of holistic or system-based thinking, and in the case of Sandy, there was an insufficient integration of critical infrastructure. Among different remediation actions, inland placement of best management practices (BMPs) in order to protect coastal cities from storm surges has received a lot of attention. However, nearshore BMPs as a way of source (wave height) reduction have not yet been thoroughly investigated. Nearshore practices are especially attractive in coastal areas that experience significant wave heights as a total water level component. In this paper, the effects of bathymetric shallowing through an apron on reducing the wave height and water level during storms are investigated in coastal areas. Southern Brooklyn in New York City is selected as the case study. A hydrodynamic model is utilized to generate wave height and storm tide. A water-level hydrograph in ungauged areas of the case study is constructed, which has not been realized before in similar coastal flood studies. Water level variations are investigated to include generated storm surge and wave characteristics. The results show that shallowing can reduce the peak of wave height and water level by 47% and 10%, respectively, in open coastal areas. In a more contained bay area, the reduction of a water level was more than 13%. These figures show the potential of nearshore BMP applications that could significantly improve our flood preparedness plans. The proposed methodology can be applied to other coastal geographical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a flavor of Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg's view of the expanding role of libraries, his curiosity, and his tolerance for taking educated risks, through the creation and nurturing of National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project. That project produced the Visible Man and Visible Woman datasets and a suite of tools for presenting and analyzing those and similar datasets. The results are used in teaching anatomy and other medical school courses and in software from the open-source Insight Tool Kit (ITK) that is included in many if not most volume-reconstructing systems. This story is a bit personal. From the beginning we recognized and understood each other since we were both "boys from Brooklyn". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Operational and safety measures can be calibrated simultaneously in microsimulation. • Severity distributions of TTC encode rich information for safety calibration. • Aerial imagery can be good data source for traffic conflict extraction and safety calibration. • Driver behaviors under a CV environment demand for more rigorous calibration efforts. Proper calibration process is of considerable importance for traffic safety evaluations using simulation models. Allowing for a pure with and without comparison under identical circumstances that is not directly testable in the field, microsimulation-based approach has drawn considerable attention for the performance evaluation of emerging technologies, such as connected vehicle (CV) safety applications. Different from the traditional approaches to evaluate mobility impacts, safety evaluations of such applications demand the simulation models to be well calibrated to match real-world safety conditions. This paper proposes a novel calibration framework which combines traffic conflict techniques and multi-objective stochastic optimization so that the operational and safety measures can be calibrated simultaneously. The conflict distribution of different severity levels categorized by time-to-collision (TTC) is applied as the safety performance measure. Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) algorithm, which can efficiently approximate the gradient of the multi-objective stochastic loss function, is used for model parameters optimization that minimizes the total simulation error of both operational and safety performance measures. The proposed calibration methodology is implemented using an open-source software SUMO on a simulation network of the Flatbush Avenue corridor in Brooklyn, NY. 17 key parameters are calibrated using the SPSA algorithm and are compared with the real-world traffic conflicts extracted using vehicle trajectories from 14 h' high-resolution aerial and traffic surveillance videos. Representative days are identified to create variation envelopes for performance measures. Four acceptability criteria, including control for time-variant outliers and inliers, bounded dynamic absolute and system errors are adopted for results analysis. The results show that the calibrated parameters can significantly improve the performance of the simulation model to represent real-world safety conditions (i.e., traffic conflicts) as well as operational conditions. The case study also demonstrates the usefulness of aerial imagery and the applicability of the proposed model calibration framework, so the calibrated model can be used to evaluate the safety benefits of CV applications more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]