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The term 'Bilbao effect' describes the potential of iconic architectural developments (IADs) designed by world famous architects to act as a catalyst for economic revitalization and transformation within neighbourhoods or regions. Despite the ubiquity of this term, its validity is still debated. Furthermore, research on the topic has relied almost exclusively on individual or small-N comparative case studies. This paper builds on this research by testing the Bilbao effect through a quantitative analysis of 142 IADs completed in Canada and the United States between 2000 and 2009. Using fixed effects modelling, a method that controls for selection bias, the analysis examines the effect of IADs on a set of outcome variables that measure neighbourhood-level economic and cultural changes during this period: population, rent, the number of local arts establishments and the number of cultural workers living in the area. The analysis demonstrates that neighbourhoods with IADs generally experienced more economic and cultural growth than non-IAD neighbourhoods during this time period. However, the paper also complicates these findings by examining differences in how this growth manifests itself within emerging versus established neighbourhoods. These differences are illustrated through a comparison of the Dallas Arts District and Lincoln Square, Manhattan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate a new problem of optimal placement of multiple finite-size rectangular facilities with known dimensions in the presence of existing rectangular facilities. This problem has applications in facility layout (re)design in manufacturing, distribution systems, services, and electronic circuit design. Three types of facility interactions are considered: between new facilities and existing facilities; between pairs of existing facilities; and between pairs of new facilities. All interactions are serviced through a finite number of input/output points located on the facility boundaries. Travel is assumed to occur according to the rectilinear (or Manhattan) metric and travel through facilities is prohibited. The objective is to find the simultaneous and non-overlapping placement of new facilities, which minimises the total weighted distance (Minisum objective) between the interacting facilities. To arrive at a solution, we divide the feasible region into sub-regions and prove that the candidates for optimal placement of the new facilities can be drawn from the sub-region boundaries. Being a continuous generalisation of the quadratic assignment problem, the solution complexity of this procedure is exponential in the number of new facilities. Our main contribution is the rigorous treatment of an important problem that unifies facility location and layout theories with minisum objective and rectilinear metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis practitioner paper describes an inquiry-based approach applying the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) framework to facilitate instruction of September 11, 2001 history, and its impact on post-9/11 society. An upper elementary level inquiry teaches the Boatlift Rescue from Manhattan Island, and a secondary level inquiry addresses the concepts of loss and persistence. Enduring issues are humanity and resiliency. The featured sources are children’s and youth literature related to 9/11 history and post-9/11 society. Children’s and youth trade books offer educators a valuable starting point to teach about 9/11 and post-9/11 history. For each inquiry instructional strategies are highlighted that encourage students to make their thinking visible when reading trade books and using primary sources from 9/11 repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haloperidol, the first butyrophenone neuroleptic, was created in Europe by Janssen Pharmaceuticals in 1958 and was introduced swiftly throughout the continent with great enthusiasm. On September 15, 1959, at Janssen's headquarters in Belgium, teams from around Europe praised the effectiveness of haloperidol. In the United States, on the contrary, its introduction was a tremendous failure, plagued by accusations of inefficacy and patent disputes. A clinical trial in Manhattan has been blamed for this commercial failure. The results of the Manhattan trial were seen as radically different from the results obtained in continental Europe. This divide would have considerable impact not only with regard to haloperidol's path on both sides of the Atlantic, but also possibly on the practical experience and theoretical construction of psychiatry. This article tries to reconstruct the story of that trial based mainly on published papers and interviews. Exploring how societal changes and issues of gender and race shaped this process, this investigation attempts to understand and contextualize different possible reasons for this Atlantic rift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in COVID-19 cases has not only generated anxiety and uncertainty but has also caused an upsurge in anti-Asian racism all over the world. The racially motivated attacks have forced us to rethink the concept of migration, integration, and racism in a global context. In this paper, I look back at Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music and relying on Arjun Appadurai's critical theory in Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger I investigate the dynamics that go into making the dominant culture hostile towards immigrants and ethnic populations. Drawing a connection between my reading of the novel and the COVID-fueled racism, I debunk the myth of assimilation as a means of integration and attest that race and ethnicity still play crucial role in the politics of power. That is, despite the ethnic protagonists' negotiation of their subjectivity, their ethnic body will continue to be victims of racial politics and used as scapegoats as long as white supremacy prevails and is considered normative. Revisiting Manhattan Music and rendering the connection between race, ethnicity and racism opens up avenues for critical rethinking and compels us to ever more consider the intersection of ethnic identity and race today in an era of global pandemic that has targeted Asian migrants in and beyond America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a drift rejection SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) method is proposed targeting indoor scenarios, where SLAM generates large drifts due to the lack of reliable features. To provide sufficient features, we leverage multiple feature primitives and geometric restraints (parallel or perpendicular) restraint in man-made environments. Under some satisfy Manhattan World (MW) assumption scene, such as corridors, we can get absolute and drift-free rotation estimation using a Gaussian sphere. By fully utilizing drift-free rotation estimation under MW assumption and the local stability of purely track restricted by point, line, and plane features, our drift rejection SLAM method becomes more accurate and robust. Additionally, by exploiting the constraint of planar motion on ground robot, we propose an ingenious strategy to reduce translation drift by eliminating vertical movement in the Manhattan world. Advantages of our method over other state-of-the-art algorithms are validated on public datasets and real-world experiments. The code is released at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines 3 of Carmen Martín Gaite’s texts that unfold in New York: her posthumously published collage notebookVisión de Nueva York(2005), the poem “Todo es un cuento roto en Nueva York” (1983) and the short novelCaperucita en Manhattan(1990). Through the critical lenses of Lefebvre, de Certeau, Baudrillard, Wilson and others, this paper explores how Martín Gaite depicts women’s spatial practice, as they make their way out of interior spaces to access urban space. By focusing on collages inVisión de Nueva Yorkthat contain windows or personal photographs, one can observe that, as time passes, the author’s assemblages communicate an increased sense of belonging after her initial anxiety about inhabiting a new city. Connections can be drawn among specific pages ofVisión de Nueva Yorkand the poem “Todo es un cuento roto en Nueva York”, where it is possible to see how the author develops ideas that she will later use inCaperucita en Manhattan. Scholars to date have paid little critical attention to Martín Gaite’s poetry, and this study attempts to fill in this gap by analyzing a poem that can be read as a precursor to her short novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we revisit the concept of Prospect-based User Equilibrium in a dynamic context. We consider a mesoscopic Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) traffic model to determine time-dependent route costs. We propose a solution algorithm to determine the network equilibria. Monte Carlo simulations are used to account for the travel time distributions. We analyze the dynamic Prospect-based User Equilibrium compared to the benchmarks Deterministic and Stochastic User Equilibrium, on a synthetic Manhattan network. We set four endogenous reference points. We show that the setting of the reference point plays a very important role in the route flow patterns and on the network performance at an aggregated level, i.e. in terms of vehicles mean speed as well as internal and outflow capacities. Our results also enhance that the Prospect-based User Equilibrium is more sensitive to a change in the reference point than in the calibration of the users' risk-aversion and risk-seeking parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates question whether assemblage urbanism provides an appropriate framework for addressing the housing question under late capitalism. On one side, proponents note the capacity of assemblage to reveal the complex emergence of events, places and processes, whereas critics argue assemblage accounts provide deep empirical detail but avoid engaging with political economy. This paper addresses such criticism through an assemblage account of local activism in the context of ownership changes that threatened the rent-regulated Stuyvesant Town neighbourhood in Manhattan. We adopt an assemblage methodology to examine this case of privileged tenant activism and find that it provides an additive lens for understanding the networks of relations that influenced the community during the mid-2000s. Noting that assemblage and the financial ecologies approach are similar in their attendance to relational thinking, we describe how these approaches can be used in conjunction to better understand the linkages between housing and financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a widely used multivariate method with applications in almost all scientific disciplines. Eigenvalues obtained in the analysis are usually reported in order to calculate the overall goodness-of-fit of the distance matrix. In this paper, we refine MDS goodness-of-fit calculations, proposing additional point and pairwise goodness-of-fit statistics that can be used to filter poorly represented observations in MDS maps. The proposed statistics are especially relevant for large data sets that contain outliers, with typically many poorly fitted observations, and are helpful for improving MDS output and emphasizing the most important features of the dataset. Several goodness-of-fit statistics are considered, and both Euclidean and non-Euclidean distance matrices are considered. Some examples with data from demographic, genetic and geographic studies are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The battery management system (BMS) of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) requires highly fidelity equivalent circuit model of battery to replicate its behavior in real-time applications. The estimation of parameters of battery model is a nonlinear, high-dimensional, and complex problem. In this paper, the determination of battery parameters is expressed as an optimization problem with an objective function defined as minimization of the Manhattan distance between catalog voltage and estimated voltage curve. The dependency of model parameters on C-rate and State of Charge (SOC) has also been accounted. Six different heuristic optimization approaches are implemented for minimizing the objective function, and their performances have been compared statistically using parametric and nonparametric tests and based on their convergence characteristics. The proposed method is tested on Energy Innovation Group (EIG) battery with nominal voltage 2.5 V and capacity 8 Ah. The battery parameters are also obtained using the pulse current charge–discharge test and used as a benchmark to compare the results of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) is the emerging research area in the field of medical image retrieval and analysis. The proposed CBMIR system includes two phases: feature extraction and feature matching. In the current decades, the feature matching approaches are developed well, but still the feature extraction algorithms are facing difficulties such as poor result in illuminance, lighting variations, etc. For addressing these concerns, Manhattan-distance based histogram of oriented gradients (M-HOG) was proposed in this research paper by assuming the different contributions of the training and testing samples from (Dicom medical image dataset for computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images). At first, the medical images were enhanced by using Gaussian filter. The respective pre-processed medical image features were extracted by applying M-HOG. Using a Euclidean distance measure, the similarity between the testing and training medical images was calculated and matched. In the experimental section, the proposed system improved the retrieval accuracy in CBMIR system up to 5–15% related to the existing methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a dearth of systematic information about the historical New York City housing market. We present a new sample containing rental price and characteristic data for 10,715 Manhattan units which was collected from historical newspapers for the period 1880–1910. These units were geolocated to the historical map of Manhattan Island to explore their geographic coverage, using Geographic Information System (GIS) software. We use this new sample to plot the evolution of the location and quality of available Manhattan housing units and the development of new neighborhoods. This complements existing research on the growth of New York City and the evolution of the ethnic composition of neighborhoods across Census years, as we show information at annual frequency during this time of high growth for the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented toxic release in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 created one of the worst environmental disasters in US history, followed by a contentious and ongoing battle over the existence, etiology, and legitimation of World Trade Center-related illness. In this paper, I explore the enactment of epistemic authority by a complex array of stakeholders-government officials, scientists, physicians, environmentalists, advocates, journalists, and politicians-who have woven medical-scientific knowledge into their competing agendas and platforms. Despite the scientific validation of environmental dangers, the clinical documentation of illness and the epidemiological substantiation of links between environmental exposure and illness onset, the political-economic interests of federal, state, and local bodies have often been privileged over the protection of public health. 9/11 illness is a 'contested illness' enmeshed in politically charged disputes regarding the relationship of environmental toxins to disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along East Broadway in Manhattan's Chinatown, many homes and businesses, once predominately those of Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong and South China, are being replaced by those of recent arrivals from the Fuzhou region of Fujian Province—a province on China's south-east coast just north of Guangdong. A local New York industry has arisen to cater to the ritual needs of the Fuzhou emigré population. Within a single block of East Broadway, four businesses, advertising themselves as ‘flower shops’ ( huapu or huadian ), compete with one another to provide ritual services, paraphernalia, and personnel for events of social significance. This paper explores ways in which the ‘flower shop’ industry creatively fashions new traditions and why the people to whom it caters—the Fuzhou people—find a greater need for traditionalist activity than do their neighbours, the Cantonese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate indoor 3D models are essential for building administration and applications in digital city construction and operation. Developing an automatic and accurate method to reconstruct an indoor model with semantics is a challenge in complex indoor environments. Our method focuses on the permanent structure based on a weak Manhattan world assumption, and we propose a pipeline to reconstruct indoor models. First, the proposed method extracts boundary primitives from semantic point clouds, such as floors, walls, ceilings, windows, and doors. The primitives of the building boundary are aligned to generate the boundaries of the indoor scene, which contains the structure of the horizontal plane and height change in the vertical direction. Then, an optimization algorithm is applied to optimize the geometric relationships among all features based on their categories after the classification process. The heights of feature points are captured and optimized according to their neighborhoods. Finally, a 3D wireframe model of the indoor scene is reconstructed based on the 3D feature information. Experiments on three different datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to effectively reconstruct 3D wireframe models of indoor scenes with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipalities relying on tax increment financing (TIF) to underwrite large-scale infrastructure and development projects assume that tax revenues from the increase in property values will be sufficient in the short run to cover capital expenses (i.e., that projects are self-financing). By examining a case of TIF in action, we move beyond expectations about how TIF should work in theory. Hudson Yards on the far West Side of Manhattan is one of the largest TIF projects in the United States in recent years and the first one implemented in New York City. We refined the conventional fiscal impact analysis approach by tracking costs and revenue flows of the project between 2005 and 2020 and comparing rents, assessed values, property tax appeals, abatements, and land prices across relevant submarkets. Through this exercise and critical reading of the literature, we developed a framework for analyzing TIF that treats property values as extrinsic and determined by the political arrangements and calculative negotiations that create, capture, and destroy them. Interactions between private property markets and governing bodies cause costs to fluctuate, responsibility for different expenditures and claims on new revenues to shift, and the location and magnitude of spillover effects to change over time. The flexibility of property values in Hudson Yards allowed the taxes to be used at cross-purposes, jeopardizing the payback streams and inflating risks shouldered by the public sector. Although our findings are limited by the single case study approach, the creation–capture–destruction heuristic we developed can help planners modify their expectations of the future and spend economic development dollars more effectively in the present. We suggest that municipalities claw back subsidies upon a property's sale through a local capital gains tax and restrict the use of appeals and abatements in TIF districts to limit the potential for value destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces a hybrid Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to excavate hidden crash patterns from the large-scale crash dataset. External semantic descriptions have been attached to raw GPS coordinates of crash events. The K-means clustering algorithm is first applied to determine land use characteristics of crash points by grouping surrounding Points of Interests (POIs). Then, each crash record is transformed into a formalized label consisting of land use, Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT), and time stamps, allowing the analysis of massive traffic crash data as document corpora. Finally, a data-driven modeling approach based on the LDA is conducted to discover hidden crash patterns from traffic crash records combining the external semantic information. The approach is verified using motor vehicle crash data in Manhattan County of New York City. The novel semantic analysis of crash records provides an effective method to investigate the hidden information in traffic crashes. Identifying spatial-temporal patterns on motor vehicle crashes would provide insights into underlying traffic behaviors for intelligent policy-making and resource allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the KGB and its successor SVR began a campaign to claim a large share of credit for the USSR's development of an atomic bomb. Memoirs by KGB officers celebrated their service's success in penetrating the American "Manhattan" project. As part of this campaign, in 1991, Vladimir Chikov, a serving KGB (later SVR) officer, published an article in Russian and English, followed by a full-length book in French (1996), German (1996), and Russian (1997) on the exploits of an atomic superspy code named "Perseus," said to still be alive and unknown to American security. "Perseus" was described as a senior physicist who was part of the Manhattan project from its origins, working first at the Chicago "Med" lab with Enrico Fermi and later at Los Alamos with Robert Oppenheimer. Veteran KGB officer Anatoly Yatskov, who had supervised several spies in the Manhattan project, added his endorsement of the "Perseus" story. For years, amateur and professional researchers used the clues in Chikov's writings to search for the identity of "Perseus," but no strong candidate emerged. With the opening of the Venona decryptions in 1995, most professional historians became convinced that "Perseus" was a KGB/SVR fiction, but "Perseus" lingers still with the wider public as a yet unidentified Soviet atomic spy. This article points to the internal contradictions and impossible assertions in Chikov's "Perseus" story, as well as how Venona shows that Chikov took elements of the story of a real Soviet spy, Theodor Hall, to construct the "Perseus" myth. Hall was a junior scientist without an advanced degree who worked at Los Alamos in 1944 and 1945 (never at Chicago), but Chikov moved Hall's story back to 1942 and elevated him from a junior figure to a senior scientist and associate of Fermi and Oppenheimer who, in Chikov's words, gave Stalin "the Manhattan project on a serving plate." Further, Chikov gave "Perseus" numerous attributes that precluded the still living Hall from ever being a candidate for the atomic spy "Perseus." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As urban regeneration projects of the late 1960s proceeded in an expanding Seoul, the Yeouido Apartments Project was in 1972 envisaged as the city's the first international high-rise housing complex. The project was a joint venture between a government-sponsored architectural organisation and a US firm, collaborating to realise the architecture of the American metropolis in Korea. To create diverse and user-specific living environments, the architects embraced participatory design. In response to local conditions, the architecture's structural, technological, and systematic ideas and details, views, mobilities and flows, and attention to future changes and growth were analysed and developed for emotive living environments. The Yeouido Apartments Project indexes a variety of contemporary architectural and urban concerns across time and place: from the international to the local, from the collective to the individual. Its narrative is one of internationalising the local by imagining a sustainable metropolitan apartment complex in the urban core of Seoul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second World War, American mathematician Paul Olum created two ciphers, labeled "Olum 1" and "Olum 2", as challenges for the renowned atomic physicist Richard Feynman. These ciphers eluded solution by Feynman and remained unsolved for over 75 years. This manuscript presents the first successful decoding of the Olum 1 cipher. It describes the methods used to solve Olum 1 as well as the historical context of the once-classified information it contains. It concludes with observations about the possible authorship of additional ciphers given to Richard Feynman and examines the possibility that they, too, were created by Paul Olum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of a shared on-demand transport system, we study the problem of selecting the stopping points from which passengers should walk to their exact destinations (or from their exact origins). We focus on the single-vehicle case that must follow a predefined order of requests, posing the mathematical program, showing that it can be solved in polynomial time and proposing a heuristic that runs faster. We compare the optimal algorithm, the heuristic, and the routes that visit the exact request points, and we show that avoiding detours can reduce total costs by almost one fifth and vehicle costs by more than one third. The heuristic yields competitive results. Simulations over the real street network from Manhattan show that the time reduction achieved by the heuristic might be crucial to enable the system to operate in real-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine is the third largest church structure in the world. It is located on the upper west side of Manhattan in New York City. A fire in December of 2001 badly damaged the stonework of the unfinished north transept and spread thick black smoke through the entire building. After the fire, a comprehensive investigation was undertaken to identify the unique characteristics of the fire soil and then to use that information to determine the extent to which these materials had deposited on surfaces in the building. A direct correlation was made between the materials of construction that burned during the fire and the particles present in samples of soiling removed from throughout the Cathedral. It was therefore possible to establish that the fire soil had penetrated to all areas of the Cathedral and that all surfaces required cleaning. This paper describes the techniques used to carry out the investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose/Aim: In the United States, high rates of vision impairment and eye disease disproportionately impact those who lack access to eye care, specifically vulnerable populations. The objective of our study was to test instruments, implement protocols, and collect preliminary data for a larger 5-year study, which aims to improve detection of eye diseases and follow-up eye care in vulnerable populations using community health workers (CHW) and patient navigators. In the study, trained CHWs conducted vision screening and patient navigators scheduled on-site eye exams and arranged appointments for those referred to ophthalmology to improve adherence to follow-up eye care. Materials and Methods: Eligible individuals age 40-and-older were recruited from the Riverstone Senior Center in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Participants underwent on-site vision screening (visual acuity with correction, intraocular pressure measurements, and fundus photography). Individuals who failed the vision screening were scheduled with an on-site optometrist for an eye exam; those with ocular pathologies were referred to an ophthalmologist. Participants were also administered the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire-8 (NEI-VFQ-8) and Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, and Injuries (STEADI) test by community health workers. Results:Participants (n = 42) were predominantly older adults, with a mean age of 70.0 ± 9.8, female (61.9%), and Hispanic (78.6%). Most individuals (78.6%, n = 33) failed vision screening. Of those who failed, 84.8% (n = 28) attended the on-site eye exam with the optometrist. Ocular diagnoses: refractive error 13/28 (46.4%), glaucoma/glaucoma suspect 9/28 (32.1%), cataract 7/28 (25.0%), retina abnormalities 6/28 (21.4%); 13 people required eyeglasses. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the feasibility of using CHWs and patient navigators for reducing barriers to vision screening and optometrist-based eye exams in vulnerable populations, ultimately improving early detection of eye disease and linking individuals to additional eye care appointments. The full five-year study aims to further examine these outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to a special issue celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuzzy geographically weighted clustering has been proposed as an approach for improving fuzzy c-means algorithm when applied to geodemographic analysis. This clustering method allows a spatial entity to belong to more than one cluster with varying degrees, namely, membership values. Although fuzzy geographically weighted clustering attempts to create geographically aware clusters, it partially fails to trace spatial dependence and heterogeneity because, as a global metric, the membership values are calculated across the entire set of spatial entities. Here we introduce the first local version of fuzzy geographically weighted clustering, 'local fuzzy geographically weighted clustering.' In local fuzzy geographically weighted clustering, the membership values of a spatial entity are updated only according to the membership values of the spatial entities within its neighborhood and not across the entire set of entities, as originally proposed by the global metric. Additionally, we apply particle swarm optimization meta-heuristic to overcome the random initialization problem regarding the fuzzy c-means algorithm. To evaluate our method we compare local fuzzy geographically weighted clustering to global fuzzy geographically weighted clustering using a cancer incident benchmark dataset for Manhattan, New York. The results show that local fuzzy geographically weighted clustering outperforms the global version in all experimental settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainability of bikesharing systems depends on the bicycle network connectivity and accessibility. However, studies of bike lane infrastructure investment impacts on bikesharing ridership have been limited to station-level ridership to support bikeshare operators' resource allocation decisions. City planning agencies also need to forecast and analyze bikeshare demand in order to make investment decisions of bike facilities over time. To measure the marginal effect of building bike lanes on bikeshare demand at a network-wide level over time, an autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model with autoregressive (AR) disturbance is proposed to capture system-wide bike ridership. The model is applied to investigate the relationship between bikeshare average daily trip counts and the total length of bike lanes in New York City (NYC) regardless of specific locations. Our results show that the installation of one additional mile of bike lanes in NYC led to an average increase of 102 bikesharing daily trips. Spatial heterogeneity is addressed through two market segments by borough (Manhattan vs. Non-Manhattan), which indicates that the improvement of bike lanes had a significant impact on bikesharing ridership in Manhattan, generating 285 more trips with one mile of bike lane built in Manhattan, but was not as effective outside of Manhattan. In addition, model results show that there were 135 and 13 more trips generated per day when one more bikesharing sharing station was added in Manhattan and Non-Manhattan, respectively. The marginal effect could vary due to the specific implemented location of a bike lane. We demonstrate that this model, as opposed to the previous studies in the literature developed at the station-level, can provide new insights into system-level causality and temporal lag characteristics. When considering whether a city agency should install a set of bike lanes immediately or to stage them over multiple weeks, the "discount rate" for ridership benefits is estimated via a proposed model for different types of investment. The results of investment scenario analysis show that there is a higher effective "discount rate" for ridership benefits from front-loading all of the investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little work examines the impact that charging decisions exert on sentencing. We investigate this issue by estimating the "distance traveled" in charge bargaining, or the expected change in the likelihood of incarceration associated with reductions in charges across different stages of prosecution. Using data from New York County, we examine how the probability of incarceration shifts as a result of charging decisions and how this potentially contributes to social inequalities in incarceration. Findings indicate that charge reductions are associated with sizeable decreases in the probability of incarceration, particularly at the plea bargaining stage. On average, the "distance traveled" is substantially greater for female than male defendants and for White compared to Latino and Black defendants, even after accounting for a host of relevant punishment factors. Findings are discussed as they relate to contemporary theoretical perspectives on prosecutorial decision-making and social inequality in punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several topics discussed at the first Protect New York conference in Manhattan, New York in January 2008 is presented. They include 59 presentations in 13 panels on topics extending from transportation security to radiological emergencies. The conference also provided a representation of fields and public and private universities in and outside of the state.

For 18 months in 2007 and 2008, the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the obstetrics clinic of a large, public hospital in Manhattan, New York. The large majority of patients who receive their prenatal care from this obstetrics clinic rely on the Medicaid-funded Prenatal Care Assistance Program to cover their medical expenses. As a condition of receipt of this aid, women are required to meet with a battery of professionals—namely social workers, health educators, nutritionists and financial officers—who are legally obliged to inquire into areas of women's lives that exceed the realm of the medical. The author finds that, in demanding patients to meet with a constellation of officials who inquire into women's personal lives, Medicaid mandates intrusion into women's private lives, and it produces pregnancy as an opportunity for state supervision, management, and regulation of poor, otherwise uninsured women. Thus, Medicaid may be understood as an occasion for the initiation of poor women into the state regulatory apparatus and a circumstance for creating disempowered legal subjects of poor women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As “No Impact Man,” writer Colin Beavan conducted a one-year experiment to determine whether he and his family could reduce their environmental impact to zero while living and working in Manhattan. This article examines the No Impact Man (NIM) experiment both as “alternative hedonism,” a reconceptualization of the “good life” that avoids unduly damaging the natural world, and also as a kind of “eco-stunt,” an attempt to garner significant media coverage about positive environmental behaviors. We use DeLuca's theorization of the “image event” to analyze the No Impact Man franchise—blog, book, and documentary film—though we modify that theory in order to explore how No Impact Man functions as multi-media and new-media spectacle. In particular, we explore the risky double-bind Beavan finds himself in when, through his choice to publicize the NIM eco-stunt, he is critiqued for opportunism, foolishness, and insincerity. We suggest that efforts to publicize eco-stunts, however well conceived, invariably invite backlash. As a result, we find that alternative hedonism theory and practice open a space of invitation to environmentally beneficial behaviors and attitudes that could have potential with some audiences, but their mass appeal is compromised by the limitations of the stunts that publicize them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 tested the government's communications capabilities and illustrated the flaws in available systems, equipment, and procedures. The attacks in lower Manhattan proved too much for current emergency response practices. Traditional communications methods were severely strained from a combination of overuse and structural damage. Resourceful emergency responders and local officials were forced to rely on less technical means of communication. Despite prior warnings of radio equipment limitations, officials carried outdated devices that lacked the ability for long distance communication or interoperability with other departments. Individuals turned to new means of sharing and acquiring information. Smart phones, text messaging and online media established themselves as vital lifelines in an emergency. The government has learned from these constraints and revised its emergency response and disaster preparedness procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the establishment of the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, New York and its roots in archaeology, ethnography and natural history. Its inaugural exhibition called NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America proclaimed that New York City had pioneered transformation is modern sexual mores that occurred everywhere in the U.S. during the 20th century.

Michel de Certeau's work provides a provocative means of distinguishing the concepts of space and place in relation to that of the just landscape, while at the same time challenging the common tendency to identify landscape with the rural rather than the urban. de Certeau's landscape analysis takes its point of departure in the contrast between the map-like view of Manhattan from the World Trade Center and the place-creating practices of the pedestrians below. Since that time, the World Trade Center has become ‘Ground Zero’ and it is theoretically challenging to look at what this transformation of a monumental mark in the landscape to an equally monumental zero means for de Certeau's analysis, particularly in relation to the epistemology of nothingness. The larger significance of de Certeau's decidedly urban approach to landscape emerges in the work of the anthropologist John Gray who has made novel use of de Certeau's theory to interpret the place identity of borderland Scottish sheepherders. Gray's analysis can be applied to other rural landscapes, such as the sæter landscapes of Norway. The depth of de Certeau's argument, however, can easily be missed due to terminological confusion in translating his French into English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the screening of cable access television programming in informal, public settings to showcase the work of community television producers and to promote the use of Manhattan's public access channels. On August 22, 1996 a handful of independent video producers and public access television enthusiasts gathered at the Downtown Community Television center on Lafayette Street in New York City's Chinatown. The occasion: "An Evening of Community Video." That evening's program was the last of a four-part summer screening series that visited neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, Chelsea and Washington Heights. Throughout the year, Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN): the non-profit organization responsible for administering public access television channels in the borough of Manhattan; screens cable access television programming in informal, public settings to showcase the work of community television producers and to promote the use of Manhattan's public access channels. The summer series featured programming made possible by MNN's Individual Production and Revolving Fund Grants.

Presents biography of Paul Sweezy focused on the economic contributions, projects and his influences in Manhattan. Contributions in writing about financial and organizational connections among the US ruling class; Influences of Paul through his writings his masterpiece; Effect of war on US capitalism.

Describes experiences of welfare reform in Manhattan, New York City. Examination of the effects of the welfare policy on work mandates and training programs; Failure of the welfare reforms to support people to attain long-term goals; Citation of the inadequate training which fails to provide permanent employment and a living wage; Design of the welfare legislation to compromise life chances and personal choices.