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The paper turns to interdisciplinary museum and ruin studies with the objective to think about space, politics and the political. Situated in a post-foundational understanding of political difference, which roughly distinguishes between 'politics' as the realm of standardized, normalized positions and procedures of power, and 'the political' as the irreducible antagonistic dimension of political life, we explore the mutual interpenetrations as well as political divergences between ruins and museums. For this purpose, we consider 'museumification' as a socio-spatial process that tends to inscribe an order of 'politics', whereas we view 'ruination' as a potentiality to create socio-material voids, which may (re)activate moments of 'the political'. In this framework, the museum signifies an attempt to conserve, exhibit and transmit selected narratives of the past, potentially evoking a topographical notion of space, whereas the ruin dislocates, ambiguates and dismantles orders of the past, possibly leading to a topological understanding of space. After revisiting accounts of the museumification of ruins, we argue that the latter can be understood as a process which disambiguates, commodifies and thus depoliticizes ruins as polyvalent matters. We introduce the 'ruination of museums' as a material, discursive and affective process, bringing attention to the interrelated and conflicting modes of absence and presence in time and space. In 'ruined museums', museums and ruins coalesce into spatio-temporal tropes that attend to complex and complicated narratives of time, space and history. In 'ruined museums', the ossified politics of place(s) become mobilized via 'the political'. To illustrate this conceptual proposition of the 'ruined museum', we engage with the 9/11 memorial museum Reflecting Absence in New York City. Through this empirical case, we hope to advance a postfoundational understanding of space that acknowledges (urban) public places as inhabited and politicized by the agency, materiality and spatiality of ghostly presences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of middle-class African American parents who have enrolled their children in a central-city public school district and the factors that inform and contribute to their school enrollment decisions. Data come from nineteen in-depth interviews with middle-class African American parents in Albany, New York. The paper uses the conceptual framework of empowerment and agency to explore and analyze the findings. Findings suggest that middle-class African American parents possess some measure of empowerment based on their human capital and positive childhood experiences in public schools. The latter denotes the salience of emotions in intergenerational education transmission. Parents' empowerment, however, does not fully extend to agency. Most parents' school choices have been structured and narrowed by racial segregation in residence and by the real and perceived racial exclusion in private school settings. Therefore, even for highly-educated, middle-income African Americans, anxieties over racial exclusion act as a strong social constraint on parents' community and school choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper juxtaposes existing public policies and different planning paradigms with evidence from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City (NYC). Zip code tabulation area (ZCTA) data for NYC are used to address four main questions: (1) How do urban density and crowding affect infection rates? (2) How does the commuting environment relate to pandemic resilience? (3) How does the allocation of points of interest within a city impact the infection rate? (4) How do evident inequalities in a city influence vulnerability during a pandemic? The presented evidence is used to demonstrate that compact, well-mixed, and decentralized cities can increase pandemic resilience due to advantageous features such as short commute times and well-distributed points of interest. At the architectural level, more resilient apartment building typologies need to be developed to mitigate the ramifications of overcrowding. This analysis also reveals significant spatial disparities and how they disproportionally affect the pandemic risk of the vulnerable communities. These findings warrant a broader discussion on how urban design and planning can mitigate inequalities and transform cities into a resilient, inclusive, and sustainable urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arboriculture & Urban Forestry is the property of International Society of Arboriculture and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2019, New York State passed aggressive new climate legislation to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and laid out major changes for how emissions are reported. One change is the inclusion of emissions from outside of the boundaries of the State if they are associated with energy use within NY; the traditional inventory considered emissions only within the State. The new legislation also mandated that methane emissions be compared with carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame rather than the 100-year time frame previously used by NY and still used by virtually all other governments globally. This reflected the desire of NY's policymakers for a tool that evaluates emissions from the standpoint of energy consumption and that more heavily weighs the role of methane as an agent of warming over the next few decades. This paper compares emissions based on the new approach for GHG reporting with the traditional inventory. The traditional inventory is driven almost entirely by carbon dioxide emissions. As of 2015, these carbon dioxide emissions had declined by 15% since 1990 due to an 88% decrease in coal consumption and a 27% decrease in consumption of petroleum products, although consumption of natural gas had increased by 57%. Methane emissions increased by almost 30% between 1990 and 2015, largely due to the increased consumption of natural gas. According to the new GHG reporting rules, methane contributed 28% of all fossil-fuel emissions in 1990 and 37% in 2015. Total GHG emissions remained virtually unchanged from 1990 to 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examines the factors that influence successful African American commuter college students engagement in educational practices associated with high levels of learning and development on the City University of New York (CUNY) campuses in an attempt to improve student engagement and, learning. The authors state that students benefit from memberships in Greek letter organizations. They mention that students also benefit from their interaction with faculty which allows faculty to become role models, mentors, and guides for continuous life-long learning. Furthermore, students also enhance their levels of engagement and social integration through participating in co-curricular activities.

This paper is motivated by experiments in which time series of tracer particles in viscoelastic liquids are recorded using advanced microscopy. The experiments seek to infer either viscoelastic properties of the sample [Mason and Weitz, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 1250–1253 (1995)] or diffusive properties of the specific tracer particle in the host medium [Suh et al., Adv. Drug Delivery Rev. 57, 63–78 (2005); Matsui et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103, 18131–18136 (2006); Lai et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104, 1482–1487 (2007); Fricks et al., SIAM J. Appl. Math. 69, 1277–1308 (2009)]. Our focus is the latter. Experimentalists often fit data to transient anomalous diffusion: a sub-diffusive power law scaling (tν, with 0<ν<1) of mean-squared displacement (MSD) over a finite time interval, with longtime viscous scaling (t1). The time scales of sub-diffusion and exponents ν are observed to vary with particle size, particle surface chemistry, and viscoelastic properties of the host material. Until now, explicit models for transient sub-diffusive MSD scaling behavior [Doi and Edwards, The Theory of Polymer Physics (Oxford University Press, New York, 1986); Kremer and Grest, J. Chem. Phys. 92, 5057–5086 (1990); Rubinstein and Colby, Polymer Physics (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003)] are limited to precisely three exponents: monomer diffusion in Rouse chain melts (t1/2), in Zimm chain solutions (t2/3), and in reptating chains (t1/4). In this paper, we present an explicit parametrized family of stochastic processes (generalized Langevin equations with prescribed memory kernels) and derive their closed-form solutions which (1) span the complete range of transient sub-diffusive behavior and (2) possess the flexibility to tune both the time window of sub-diffusive scaling and the power law exponent ν. These results establish a robust family of sub-diffusive models, for which the inverse problem of parameter inference from experimental data [Fricks et al., SIAM J. Appl. Math. 69, 1277–1308 (2009)] remains to be developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the differences in presentations regarding the issues of equity and social justice in music education on the two conferences held at University of Toronto, Ontario in January 2008, and at Columbia University's Teachers College, New York City (NYC) in October 2006. The author mentions that the differences he provoked is in the research presentation on social justice issue orientation and in music education. He notes that they also differs in quotes on justice as the NYC conference projects positive meaning by employing better social order, while the Toronto conference declares justice in negative by stating that it is not a charity. He cites that his arguments were based on collective action that involves disagreement, dissensus, and multiplicity.

Providing intelligent algorithms to manage the ever-increasing flow of air traffic is critical to the efficiency and economic viability of air transportation systems. Yet, current automated solutions leave existing human controllers "out of the loop" rendering the potential solutions both technically dangerous (e.g. inability to react to suddenly developing conditions) and politically charged (e.g. role of air traffic controllers in a fully automated system). Instead, this paper outlines a distributed agent-based solution where agents provide suggestions to human controllers. Though conceptually pleasing, this approach introduces two critical research issues. First, the agent actions are now filtered through interactions with other agents, human controllers and the environment before leading to a system state. This indirect action-to-effect process creates a complex learning problem. Second, even in the best case, not all air traffic controllers will be willing or able to follow the agents' suggestions. This partial participation effect will require the system to be robust to the number of controllers that follow the agent suggestions. In this paper, we present an agent reward structure that allows agents to learn good actions in this indirect environment, and explore the ability of those suggestion agents to achieve good system level performance. We present a series of experiments based on real historical air traffic data combined with simulation of air traffic flow around the New York city area. Results show that the agents can improve system-wide performance by up to 20% over that of human controllers alone, and that these results degrade gracefully when the number of human controllers that follow the agents' suggestions declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contracting-out of government services is an important issue facing government entities in the twenty-first century. This paper is a case study that examines this issue in New York City after major revisions were enacted to the City's Charter in 1989 to improve governance, deter corruption and promote efficiency in contracting. The paper examines who controls the contracting process; is this function solely under the purview of the chief executive or the function is shared with other elected officials, including the legislature; do checks and balances in the procurement system exist and how control of the contracting process affects the potential for corruption. Efficiency in the contracting process is reflected in the details of the policy and practices that determine the effectiveness of contracting. The most important of these practices are: standardization of contracting rules, timeliness in awarding contracts, promotion of competition, use of technology, training and professionalism of government staff. The overall success or failure of these efforts is significantly affected by the leadership of the chief executive and the administrators of the agencies of government. The paper shows that major change in public organizations is an extremely complex issue involving the chief executive, government administrators and other elected officials in the political process. Improvements in New York City's contracting process occurred in the Mayoral administrations of David Dinkins, Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. However, if the new efforts to simplify the contracting process on the part of the Bloomberg administration do not result in significant reductions in processing times, then only incremental change has taken place in the contracting process in New York City. Major changes in the contracting process have eluded both the mayors and government administrators. The authors conclude by discussing lessons learned to assist other government entities in their change efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is responsible for a global pandemic that has significantly affected New York City. There is limited data about COVID-19 infection in pregnancy, especially in critically ill patients. Case. A 30-year-old female who presented at 26 weeks gestation with acute severe respiratory distress that required intubation and intensive care unit (ICU) admission. We had a high suspicion of COVID-19 disease despite repeated negative SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing, with eventual positive COVID IgG antibody testing. Through an integration of obstetrical knowledge, critical care, and comparing outcomes from similar cases in the literature, we decided to expectantly manage her pregnancy and did not recommend administration of antenatal steroids. She was extubated after 23 days of mechanical ventilation and recovered from her respiratory illness. She had a full-term spontaneous vaginal delivery of a baby boy at 39 weeks gestation with excellent maternal and fetal outcomes at delivery. Conclusion. In the face of COVID-19, a new disease with unclear maternal and fetal outcomes to date, a collaboration of care teams is essential to navigate through the challenging decisions made, including timing of delivery, treatment options, and administration of steroids. Our paper is unique as there is no other published case report of a critically ill pregnant patient with COVID-19 in which delivery was deferred, and a full recovery was observed, with a vaginal delivery at term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a new approach for the recovery of missing data from phasor measurement units (PMUs). The approach is based on the application of tensor decomposition to PMU data organized as three-dimensional tensors with respect to time, location and type of variables. The organization of the PMU data is in the form of a bus-oriented data structure and a branch-oriented data structure. Two versions of the approach are introduced. The first version uses polyadic tensor decomposition and the second version uses Tucker tensor decomposition. Several case studies are conducted validating the proposed approaches including measured PMU data in the New York transmission system. Comparison with existing approaches is performed to demonstrate the improvement in missing data recovery accuracy achieved by the new approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to contrast whether cognitive memory and emotional recall related to a tragic event and exposure to advertisements that evoke such an experience generates a negative emotional change in the target. We performed an experiment that analyzes emotional changes derived from advertisements featured in the national press ten years after terrorist attacks. We chose the attacks: September 11, 2001, in New York City, and March 11, 2004, in Madrid and analyze the cognitive recall in a set of Spanish and United States focus groups. The results show a significant emotional change in the respondents after the advertisement visualization that is more strongly linked to the recall of a negative event than to the advertisement creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aeronautical community is currently researching technology that might lead to commercial hypersonic aircraft that would cruise at Mach 5–8 in the middle or upper stratosphere and would transfer passengers from London to New York or from Los Angeles to Tokyo in just a couple of hours. Depending on the engine technology to be adopted, these aircraft will potentially release substantial amounts of water vapor and nitrogen oxides around 30–40 km altitude. We show here that the operation of a large fleet of such aircraft could potentially deplete considerable amounts of ozone in the stratosphere, which would lead to a substantial increase in biologically damaging ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth's surface. The calculations are based on a specific emission scenario, which carries large uncertainties but can easily be scaled to account for the type of aircraft engine to be eventually adopted, improved technology to be expected, and the size and operation conditions of the future aircraft fleet. Plain Language Summary: Commercial hypersonic aircraft, if developed in the future, will be flying at Mach 5 to 8 in the middle to upper stratosphere (30 to 40 km altitude) to carry passengers in a couple of hours from London to New York or from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Depending on the adopted technology and fleet size, the powerful engines of such airplanes may release substantial amounts of water and nitrogen oxides in the stratosphere, which could potentially damage the protecting ozone layer and hence increase the level of biologically damaging ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth surface. The paper uses an advanced global atmospheric model to assess the impact of a potential fleet of hypersonic aircraft. Key Points: Hypersonic transport (HST) releasing nitrogen oxides and water vapor have the potential to reduce the stratospheric ozone abundancePer Tg injection of nitrogen oxides, the calculated ozone depletion is larger for aircraft flying at 30 km than 40 km altitudeOzone decrease near the HST flight altitude is reduced by about a third when temperature and dynamical feedbacks are taken into account [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New York State Mesonet (NYSM) is a network of 126 standard environmental monitoring stations deployed statewide with an average spacing of 27 km. The primary goal of theNYSMis to provide high-quality weather data at high spatial and temporal scales to improve atmospheric monitoring and prediction, especially for extreme weather events. As compared with other statewide networks, the NYSM faced considerable deployment obstacles with New York's complex terrain, forests, and very rural and urban areas; its wide range of weather extremes; and its harsh winter conditions. To overcome these challenges, the NYSM adopted a number of innovations unique among statewide monitoring systems, including 1) strict adherence to international siting standards and metadata documentation; 2) a hardened system design to facilitate continued operations during extreme, high-impact weather; 3) a station design optimized to monitor winter weather conditions; and 4) a camera installed at every site to aid situational awareness. The network was completed in spring of 2018 and provides data and products to a variety of sectors including weather monitoring and forecasting, emergency management, agriculture, transportation, utilities, and education. This paper focuses on the standard network of the NYSM and reviews the network siting, site configuration, sensors, site communications and power, network operations and maintenance, data quality control, and dissemination. A few example analyses are shown that highlight the benefits of the NYSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aqueous chemical processing within cloud and fog water is thought to be a key process in the production and transformation of secondary organic aerosol mass, found abundantly and ubiquitously throughout the troposphere. Yet, significant uncertainty remains regarding the organic chemical reactions taking place within clouds and the conditions under which those reactions occur, owing to the wide variety of organic compounds and their evolution under highly variable conditions when cycled through clouds. Continuous observations from a fixed remote site like Whiteface Mountain (WFM) in New York State and other mountaintop sites have been used to unravel complex multiphase interactions in the past, particularly the conversion of gas-phase emissions of SO2 to sulfuric acid within cloud droplets in the presence of sunlight. These scientific insights led to successful control strategies that reduced aerosol sulfate and cloud water acidity substantially over the following decades. This paper provides an overview of observations obtained during a pilot study that took place at WFM in August 2017 aimed at obtaining a better understanding of Chemical Processing of Organic Compounds within Clouds (CPOC). During the CPOC pilot study, aerosol cloud activation efficiency, particle size distribution, and chemical composition measurements were obtained below-cloud for comparison to routine observations at WFM, including cloud water composition and reactive trace gases. Additional instruments deployed for the CPOC pilot study included a Doppler lidar, sun photometer, and radiosondes to assist in evaluating the meteorological context for the below-cloud and summit observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The virus does not see race, caste, class, gender, region, religion, language, and border." This is a ubiquitous saying, but pandemics hit the vulnerable sections of the society the hardest, which has been proved many times in history. Today, this fact is verified again. Covid-19 attacks the poor and the marginalized sections of the community severely; these groups have had more infected and lost more lives than others. Why do diseases impact the poor and marginal sections of the community more than other groups? The template answer says that this-- because of their ghettoized living conditions, lack of hygienic foods, and poor health conditions and medical facilities. This article tries to assess why the poor and working-class suffers more from such pandemics from a sociological lens. Various quantitative information and qualitative understandings have been apprised in the article to assess why the poor and working-class suffers more in such pandemics. Various newspaper articles and research work were reviewed to analyze facts and situations. This article reflected the situation of minorities amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic situation. The discussion and conclusion derived in the paper may not be generalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Przeglad Sejmowy is the property of Kancelaria Sejmu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines the administrative and accounting reforms coordinated by Herman A. Metz around the turn of the 20th century in New York City. Reform efforts were motivated by deficiencies in administering New York City's finances, including a lack of internal control over monetary resources and operational activities, and opaque financial reports. The activities of Comptroller Metz, who collaborated with institutions such as the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, were paramount in initiating and implementing the administrative and accounting reforms in the city, which contributed to reform efforts across the country. Metz promoted the adoption of functional cost classifications for city departments, developed flowcharts for improved transaction processing, strengthened internal controls, and published the 1909 Manual of Accounting and Business Procedure of the City of New York, which laid the groundwork for transparent financial reports capable of providing vital information about the city's activities and subsidiary units. JEL Classifications: H72, M41, N91. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine whether oil price risk is a significant determinant of stock returns. Design/methodology/approach: Using monthly data on a sample of Islamic stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchanges and National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations System (NASDAQ) over the period from January 1990 to December 2017, the study examines whether oil price risk is a significant determinant of stock returns using Fama–French–Carhart's four-factor asset pricing model amplified with Brent oil price factor. Findings: The results from the cross-sectional regression analysis indicate that the extent of the exposure is significantly positive using a full sample period. Moreover, results from size and momentum factors are highly significant whereas book-to-market has no significant impact on Islamic stock returns. Research limitations/implications: The results support the concept for diversification in equity investment and are thus important for investors, analysts and policymakers. Originality/value: This study is the first of its kind to establish whether oil price risk is a factor that can determine returns of Islamic listed stocks using the most developed stock market in the world (New York Stock Exchanges and NASDAQ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the tenant revolts that happened in Virginia and New York during the American Revolution. The paper examines the action of tenants in Hudson Valley, New York and Loudoun County, Virginia, during the Revolutionary War in an attempt to uncover what grievances did tenants in both parts of the country hope to change during the Revolution. It also analyzes their relationship with the British army, explain how landlords and Revolutionaries reacted to the revolt, and measure their levels of success.

Obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (OARSMT) construction is an essential part of routing. Recently, IC routing and related researches have been extended from Manhattan architecture (λ2-geometry) to Y-/X-architecture (λ3-/λ4-geometry) to improve the chip performance. This paper presents an O(n log n) heuristic, λ-OAT, for obstacle-avoiding Steiner minimal tree construction in the A-geometry plane (λ-OASMT). In this paper, based on obstacle-avoiding constrained Delaunay triangulation, a full connected tree is constructed and then embedded into λ-OASMT by zonal combination. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing the λ-OASMT problem. Compared with most recent works on OARSMT problem, A-OAT obtains up to 30-Kx speedup with quality solution. We have tested randomly generated cases with up to 10 K terminals and 10-K rectilinear obstacles within 4 seconds on a Sun V880 workstation (755-MHz CPU and 4-GB memory). The high efficiency and accuracy of λ-OAT make it extremely practical and useful in the routing phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines how many adults live in a house? How do people divide themselves up among households? Average household sizes vary substantially, both over time and in the cross-section. In this paper, we describe how a variety of government policies affect living arrangements, intentionally or not. Using data from a survey of households in New York City, we find that these incentives appear to have an impact. Specifically, households receiving these housing and income subsidies are smaller on average (measured by number of adults). The impacts appear to be considerably larger than those that would occur if the programs were lump-sum transfers. Small average household size can be extremely expensive in terms of physical and environmental resources, higher rents, and possibly homelessness. Thus, we encourage policymakers to pay greater heed to the provisions built into various social policies that favor smaller households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the goal of OR/MS is to aid decision makers, implementation of published models occurs less frequently than one might hope. However, one area that has been significantly impacted by management science is emergency response systems. Dozens of papers on emergency service management appeared in the OR/MS literature in the 1970s alone, many of which were published in Management Science. Three of these papers won major prizes. More importantly, many of these papers led to the implementation of substantially new policies and practices, particularly in policing and firefighting. Much of this work originated in New York City, though many other cities subsequently adopted the resulting models and strategies. In this paper, we look at the context, content, and nature of the research and the factors that led to these early implementation successes. We then track the extent to which these original models are still affecting decision making in emergency response systems. We also examine the pace of development of new OR/MS models and applications in the area. Finally, we look at issues in emergency responsiveness that have emerged recently as a result of the national focus on terrorism and discuss the potential for future OR/MS modeling and application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new software interface to elicit belief distributions of any shape: Click-and-Drag. The interface was tested against the state of the art in the experimental literature--a text-based interface and multiple sliders--and in the online forecasting industry--a distribution-manipulation interface similar to the one used by the most popular crowd-forecasting website. By means of a pre-registered experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk, quantitative data on the accuracy of reported beliefs in a series of induced-value scenarios varying by granularity, shape, and time constraints, as well as subjective data on user experience were collected. Clickand-Drag outperformed all other interfaces by accuracy and speed, and was self-reported as being more intuitive and less frustrating, confirming the pre-registered hypothesis. Aside of the pre-registered results, Click-and-Drag generated the least drop-out rate from the task, and scored best in a sentiment analysis of an open-ended general question. Further, the interface was used to collect homegrown predictions on temperature in New York City in 2022 and 2042. Click-and-Drag elicited distributions were smoother with less idiosyncratic spikes. Free and open source, ready to use oTree, Qualtrics and Limesurvey plugins for Click-and-Drag, and all other tested interfaces are available at https://beliefelicitation.github.io/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]