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This paper introduces the Watermark Imaging System (WImSy) which can be used to photograph, document, and study sheets of paper. The WImSy provides surface images, raking light images, and transmitted light images of the paper, all in perfect alignment. We develop algorithms that exploit this alignment by combining several images together in a process that mimics both the "surface image removal" technique and the method of "high dynamic range" photographs. An improved optimization criterion and an automatic parameter selection procedure streamline the process and make it practical for art historians and conservators to extract the relevant information to study watermarks. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated in several experiments on images taken with the WImSy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the results are compared with manually optimized images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines communicating about complex challenges facing populations experiencing homelessness and examining alternative ways to communicate with these populations in times of crisis. Utilizing a case study approach, the researchers focused on cities in New York and California due to the high numbers of unhoused populations and individuals experiencing homelessness within these states. Experts in crisis and emergency management have provided invaluable recommendations on the general protection of life and property; however, individuals identifying as homeless or unhoused share characteristics that heighten their risk and vulnerability, such as lower socioeconomic status, unstable resilience levels prior to a crisis, and geographic disparities. The intersection of these attributes presents unique challenges for emergency managers and relevant public administrators when implementing crisis response and communication strategies, such as one-way written and oral messaging over media and social networks, along with enacting any new protocols needed in relation to the crisis itself, like targeted outreach. This paper discusses the evolution of crisis communication for homeless and unhoused populations, national statistics, along with analysis of case studies for Los Angeles, California, and New York City, New York. The paper concludes with eight major themes related to communicating with homeless and unhoused populations during times of crises and practical recommendations for emergency managers and relevant public administrators. It is critical that representatives and advocates for populations experiencing homelessness, or are unhoused, are involved in the dialogue and planning efforts. Stable investment in communication infrastructure and crisis communication programs and services is vital to assist homeless and unhoused populations in gaining access to the Internet and cell phone providers, outreach campaigns for printed messaging, alternative locations for media reporting, and receiving critical information during crisis and noncrisis periods. In terms of messaging, crisis-related alerts (oral and written) must be reviewed to ensure clarity in tone to avoid ambiguity and identify and remove any stigmatization language to open a two-way dialogue. Emergency managers and related public administrators must use a diverse array of communication avenues and strategies, such as social media and electronic messages (i.e., cell phones, media statements, and business signage) and traditional methods (i.e., leaflets at social service providers and shelters) with a focus on creating dialogue and empowering individuals to engage and seek out services. In addition, a crisis team dedicated to communicating with homeless and unhoused populations in times of crisis is needed along with dedicated resources for staffing, communication infrastructure, programs, and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to forecast New York and Los Angeles gasoline spot prices on a daily frequency. The dataset includes gasoline prices and a big set of 128 other relevant variables spanning the period from 17 February 2004 to 26 March 2022. These variables were fed to three tree-based machine learning algorithms: decision trees, random forest, and XGBoost. Furthermore, a variable importance measure (VIM) technique was applied to identify and rank the most important explanatory variables. The optimal model, a trained random forest, achieves a mean absolute percent error (MAPE) in the out-of-sample of 3.23% for the New York and 3.78% for the Los Angeles gasoline spot prices. The first lag, AR (1), of gasoline is the most important variable in both markets; the top five variables are all energy-related. This paper can strengthen the understanding of price determinants and has the potential to inform strategic decisions and policy directions within the energy sector, making it a valuable asset for both industry practitioners and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This gem of an article by Dr. Kate Marcus was tucked away for decades, comfortably settled in a drawer at the Library-Bookstore of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, readily available as a reprint for those who knew to ask. While preparing for a recent presentation, I tracked it down to refresh my memory of it. Marcus's article is the text of a lecture she presented in May 1956 for the Analytical Psychology Club of Los Angeles. In 1971, her paper was published in The Well-Tended Tree: Essays into the Spirit of Our Times, a Festschrift edited by Hilde Kirsch in honor of James Kirsch on his 70th birthday. As we would expect, Dr. Marcus's article reflects the time period in which it was written. Despite some outdated notions about women and men, it provides interesting and useful interpretations of the male stranger in women's dreams—dreams that are still dreamt today, more than 60 years after her paper was written. Marcus saw into and beyond her era, identifying and celebrating the prospective elements such dreams can offer. Psychological Perspectives wanted to make the article available to an audience wider than those who frequent our institute library-bookstore, and we extend our special thanks to Janet Casewell, and the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York, for allowing us to reprint this wonderful article. We trust Dr. Marcus would be pleased to learn her work is still read and remains of value decades after her death. –Pamela Freundl Kirst, PhD [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary films and the law make a well-suited pair, due to four key similarities. Firstly, the accessibility of criminal law and its reliance on familiar concepts of good and evil. Secondly, the narrative structure: the arc of accusation, evidence and judgement within a criminal trial mirrors the arc of set up, confrontation and resolution found in cinema. Thirdly, the use of evidence, particularly the use of 'evidence verité' and the assumption of truth associated with photographs. Finally, the law and documentaries have a similar understanding of the concept of truth, as a product of persuasion and argument. As true-crime documentaries garner more attention , the stylistic choices of filmmakers carry more weight on the opinions of their audiences and subsequently the criminal justice system itself. Discussion in this paper focuses on the stylistic choices in documentaries such as Making a Murderer (Demos, Moira, and Laura Ricciardi. 2015. Making a Murderer. Los Angeles, CA: Netflix), The Staircase (de Lestrade, 2014), Southwest of Salem: the story of the San Antonio four (Esquenazi, Deborah. 2016. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four. New York: Investigation Discovery), and The Night in Question (Theroux, Louis. 2019. The Night in Question. BBC), and their use of emotion, dialogue and footage, and the necessary transparency concerning these choices as well as production choices, to encourage audiences to understand true-crime documentaries as a subjective performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the topographical and socio-cultural developments during the Golden Age in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, three Beat Generation epicenters, which determined the deconstruction of traditional norms. Modifications at both city and society levels were represented by the emergence of countercultures, such as the Beat. The visibility received by urban problems, due to the increase in social demonstrations and activism, fostered the formation of a unified front that demanded equality and encouraged social and political movements, such as the Civil Rights and the Second Wave Feminism. The socio-political challenges which the American society was confronted with from the 1950s to the 1970s in these three cities, also reveal a few problems regarding the status of the Beats as well as of minorities in metropolises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The timely transportation of goods to customers is an essential component of economic activities. However, heavy-duty diesel trucks used for goods delivery significantly contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within many large metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. To reduce GHG emissions by facilitating freight electrification, this paper proposes Joint Routing and Charging (JRC) scheduling for electric trucks. The objective of the associated optimization problem is to minimize the cost of transportation, charging, and tardiness. A large number of possible combinations of road segments as well as a large number of combinations of charging decisions and charging durations leads to a combinatorial explosion in the possible decisions electric trucks can make. The resulting mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem is thus extremely challenging because of the combinatorial complexity even in the deterministic case. Therefore, a Surrogate Level-Based Lagrangian Relaxation (SLBLR) method is employed to decompose the overall problem into significantly less complex truck subproblems. In the coordination aspect, each truck subproblem is solved independently of other subproblems based on the values of Lagrangian multipliers. In addition to serving as a means of guiding and coordinating trucks, multipliers can also serve as a basis for transparent and explanatory decision-making by trucks. Testing results demonstrate that even small instances cannot be solved using the off-the-shelf solver CPLEX after several days of solving. The SLBLR method, on the other hand, can obtain near-optimal solutions within a few minutes for small cases, and within 30 min for large ones. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that as battery capacity increases, the total cost decreases significantly; moreover, as the charging power increases, the number of trucks required decreases as well. • Present a formulation of a joint heavy-duty vehicle fleet routing & charging problem. • Use surrogate level-based Lagrangian relaxation approach to solve the problem. • The proposed method obtains near-optimal solutions for realistic testing cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Examine the concentration in gun violence shootings before and during the pandemic in three cities. • Examine how the increase in shooting hot spots impacted racial disparities in victimization rates. • Examine how the surge in gun violence during the pandemic increased disparities by place and race. • Between 36% and 55% of the increase in shootings occurred in the top decile of census block groups. • The spatial concentration of gun violence victimization by race-ethnicity was compounded during the pandemic. Gun violence rates increased in U.S. cities in 2020 and into 2021. Gun violence rates in U.S. cities is typically concentrated in racially segregated neighborhoods with higher poverty levels. However, poverty levels and demographics alone do not explain the high concentration of violence or its relative change over time. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the increase in shooting victimization in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles during the 2020–2021 pandemic was concentrated in gun violence hot spots, and how the increase impacted race and ethnic disparities in shooting victimization rates. We find that 36% (Philadelphia), 47% (New York), and 55% (Los Angeles) of the increase in shootings observed during the period 2020–2021 occurred in the top decile of census block groups, by aggregate number of shootings, and that the race/ethnicity of victims in these gun violence hot spots were disproportionately Black and Hispanic. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to racial disparities in victimization and place-based efforts to reduce gun violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical framework to estimate commute accessibility and adoption of various ridehailing service concepts across the US by synthesizing individual commute trips using national Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) data. Focusing on potential improvements in cost and time that could be enabled by vehicle automation, we use this modeling framework to simulate a lower-price autonomous service (e.g., 50% or 75% lower) with variable wait times and implementation levels (solo, pooled, and first/last mile transit connections services, alone or in combination) to determine how they might affect adoption rates. These results are compared across metrics of accessibility and trip density, as well as socioeconomic factors such as household income. We find – unsurprisingly – that major cities (e.g. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) support the highest adoption rates for ridehailing services. Decreases in price tend to increase market share and accessibility. The effect of a decrease in price is more drastic for lower income groups. The proposed method for synthesizing trips using the LODES contributes to current travel demand forecasting methods and the proposed analytic framework can be flexibly implemented with any other mode choice model, extended to non-commute trips, or applied to different levels of geographic aggregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-wage Latina/o workers are subject to an array of workplace abuses. This study focuses on whether educational attainment may moderate inequality in knowledge or claims-making across individuals with different legal statuses. This question is motivated by research which, while highlighting the role of education in promoting civic and political engagement, has not examined the interaction between education and legal status for worker claims-making. We draw from the 2008 Unregulated Work Survey, which is representative of the 1.64 million low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, three of the largest immigrant destinations in the United States. Using the Latina/o subsample, we test whether education impacts workers' procedural knowledge of the claims process, as well as their actual claims-making behavior, across four categories of workers: U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, documented noncitizens, and undocumented noncitizens. Our findings reveal that all noncitizens have lower levels of procedural knowledge about how to file a complaint with the government, compared to citizens, across educational levels. However, when it comes to claims-making, we find that education has significant positive impacts for noncitizen workers, especially the undocumented. Our results suggest that education may improve the workplace agency of even the most marginalized workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor conditions of domestic workers in the epicenter of the United States. We focus our analysis on the symbolic categorization of domestic work as "essential labor." While domestic workers are lauded as heroes in public discourse, we argue that this symbolic recognition does not extend to material remuneration. Instead, we find that labor conditions better fit their categorization as expendable essential workers, meaning those whose essential labor is magnified during the pandemic but whose work remains materially undervalued. Data used in this article draw from observations of more than 30 hours of virtual town hall meetings on the pandemic hosted by migrant domestic worker advocacy groups in Los Angeles and New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent proposals to "defund the police" using a perspective informed by literature on agency termination and political accountability. These concepts allow us to build a framework for categorizing such proposals based on the assignment of functions to organizations. These proposals operate in the context of a federal system which can shape the character of each category, make some choices more or less feasible, influence where functions may be assigned, and create political incentives out of the complex geography of conflict. We use examples from Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle to illustrate our framework. We conclude by offering a preliminary analysis of why these cities tend towards adopting one of the alternatives we outline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodations have grown exponentially, it is critical to understand motivations for guests to choose a P2P accommodation instead of a hotel. The current study seeks to understand these motivations by using mixed-methods approach to compare online reviews for P2P accommodations and hotels. Through quantitative analysis, thematic analysis, and text mining, this study provides analysis of 800 reviews from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. The results consistently show that guests in P2P emphasize relationships with hosts, whilst hotel guests place more values on room attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political campaigns have long been financed by people with well above average incomes, but the balance has tilted dramatically since the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. A number of jurisdictions have been looking to rebalance the incentives through new (or updated) public financing programs. Much of the discussion about their potential effects, however, has been sweepingly generic. But we know that these programs do differ from each other and have good reason to expect that "success" or "failure" will depend both on their goals and the programs' details. This article focuses on one type of program that has become a model in recent years. Until recently New York City was the only jurisdiction with a multiple matching system explicitly designed to increase the role of small donors. Previous studies noted apparent successes, but it has been difficult to feel comfortable with only one jurisdiction to test. After Los Angeles revised its system in 2013, serious comparisons became possible. This article finds that New York City's campaign finance matching fund program increased the number, proportional role, and diversity of small donors in city council elections but that the Los Angeles program was substantially less effective. The findings were confirmed through a difference-in-differences procedure that tested each city council over time against state legislative districts representing the same geographical space. A series of explanations relating to the programs' details were tested, leading us to conclude that the policy details were affecting the results. The results were also different in both cities for mayoral and city council candidates. This suggests alterations may be needed if one were to consider the model for offices with larger constituencies, such as Governor or the US Congress. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of major arguments for and against increasing small donor participation as a goal for public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented global event that has been challenging governments, health systems, and communities worldwide. Available data from the first months indicated varying patterns of the spread of COVID-19 within American cities, when the spread was faster in high-density and walkable cities such as New York than in low-density and car-oriented cities such as Los Angeles. Subsequent containment efforts, underlying population characteristics, variants, and other factors likely affected the spread significantly. However, this work investigates the hypothesis that urban configuration and associated spatial use patterns directly impact how the disease spreads and infects a population. It follows work that has shown how the spatial configuration of urban spaces impacts the social behavior of people moving through those spaces. It addresses the first 60 days of contagion (before containment measures were widely adopted and had time to affect spread) in 93 urban counties in the United States, considering population size, population density, walkability, here evaluated through walkscore, an indicator that measures the density of amenities, and, therefore, opportunities for population mixing, and the number of confirmed cases and deaths. Our findings indicate correlations between walkability, population density, and COVID-19 spreading patterns but no clear correlation between population size and the number of cases or deaths per 100 k habitants. Although virus spread beyond these initial cases may provide additional data for analysis, this study is an initial step in understanding the relationship between COVID-19 and urban configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]