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Digital platforms such as Uber, Rappi or Airbnb impose a labor model where workers are not recognized as such and do not have minimum rights. They are part of platform capitalism, a form of capital that uses digital technologies to impose a precarious employment relationship. However, faced with this model, application workers are beginning to organize and demand rights. In this article, I examine the ideology that platforms promote and the resistances of app distributors. I argue that, in the face of the imagined individualism of digital platforms, delivery workers are recreating forms of community. They have not been passive or totally subaltern but are displaying different forms of antagonism and autonomy. This paper is based on qualitative research with interviews of key informants and analysis of the documents of collectives and groups of Mexican delivery workers, both in Mexico City and in New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spring 2020, the New York Army and Air National Guard (NYNG) rapidly deployed to New York City (NYC) to assist in the recovery, processing, and transport of COVID-19 decedents. This study reports on a survey conducted by NYNG service members three to six months post-mission (n = 177). Data showed that there was a dose–response relationship between mission stress exposure and decremented mental health, but certain activities were associated with better mental health outcomes. The paper also reviews resources provided by behavioral health personnel to support service members during the mission and lessons learned to inform future decedent recovery missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how habit and belonging are interconnected in boxing. Despite being an exclusionary sport – one that is steeped in myopic traditions and exploitation – boxing practices nevertheless have the potential to empower individuals through rituals and habits that lead to self-enquiry, community building and positive change. Habit formation is sought through repetitive patterns in boxing – arriving at the gym, wrapping hands, putting on gloves, performing drills, engaging in pad work, shadowboxing and sparring. These patterns form behaviours that inform – and are informed by – ritualistic practices capable of connecting participants to a rich (and complex) understanding of what it means to be a boxer and part of a boxing community. I explore the deeply meaningful connections to self and to others in boxing, wherein transformative relationships are formed through crucial links between habit and identity formation. Through the lens of two case studies – Trans Boxing (a co-authored art project based in New York and Los Angles) and 'Women's Boxing Wales: Past, Present and Future' (a community-orientated documentary project capturing female contributions to Welsh Boxing) – I argue that habit in boxing manifests experiences of transformation and belonging. For participants of Trans Boxing, the boxing spaces and practices they embody allow them to 'reject the myth of gender which polices self-expression [and] feel liberated' albeit momentarily 'in the role of the boxer' (Hanson and Easterling). For individuals and communities contributing to Women's Boxing Wales, a particular heritage is formed and better understood, and the cultural identity of the 'Welsh boxer' is (re)negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation of large utility companies such as Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. (Con Edison) typically rely on large quantities of regulation documents from external institutions which inform the company of upcoming or ongoing policy changes or new requirements the company might need to comply with if deemed applicable. As a concrete example, if a recent regulatory publication mentions that the timeframe for the Company to respond to a reported system emergency in its service territory changes from within X time to within Y time—then the affected operating groups will be notified, and internal Company operating procedures may need to be reviewed and updated accordingly to comply with the new regulatory requirement. Each such regulation document needs to be reviewed manually by an expert to determine if the document is relevant to the company and, if so, which department it is relevant to. In order to help enterprises improve the efficiency of their operation, we propose an automatic document classification pipeline that determines whether a document is important for the company or not, and if deemed important it forwards those documents to the departments within the company for further review. Binary classification task of determining the importance of a document is done via ensembling the Naive Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and artificial neural network (ANN) together for the final prediction, whereas the multi-label classification problem of identifying the relevant departments for a document is executed by the transformer-based DocBERT model. We apply our pipeline to a large corpus of tens of thousands of text data provided by Con Edison and achieve an accuracy score over 80 % . Compared with existing solutions for document classification which rely on a single classifier, our paper i) ensemble multiple classifiers for better accuracy results and escaping from the problem of overfitting, ii) utilize pretrained transformer-based DocBERT model to achieve ideal performance for multi-label classification task and iii) introduce a bi-level structure to improve the performance of the whole pipeline where the binary classification module works as a rough filter before finally distributing the text to corresponding departments through the multi-label classification module. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construct: The construct being assessed is readiness-for-residency of graduating medical students, as measured through two assessment frameworks. Background: Readiness-for-residency of near-graduate medical students should be but is not consistently assessed. To address this, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in 2014, identified and described 13 core Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs), which are tasks that all residents should be able to perform unsupervised upon entering residency. However, the AAMC did not initially provide measurement guidelines or propose standardized assessments. We designed Night-onCall (NOC), an immersive simulation for our near-graduating medical students to assess and address their readiness-for-residency, framed around tasks suggested by the AAMC's core EPAs. In adopting this EPA assessment framework, we began by building upon an established program of competency-based clinical skills assessments, repurposing competency-based checklists to measure components of the EPAs where possible, and designing new checklists, when necessary. This resulted in a blended suite of 14 checklists, which theoretically provide substantive assessment of all 13 core EPAs. In this paper, we describe the consensus-based mapping process conducted to ensure we understood the relationship between competency and EPA-based assessment lenses and could therefore report meaningful feedback on both to transitioning students in the NOC exercise. Approach: Between January-November 2017, five clinician and two non-clinician health professions educators at NYU Grossman School of Medicine conducted a rigorous consensus-based mapping process, which included each rater mapping each of the 310 NOC competency-based checklist items to lists of entrustable behaviors expected of learners according to the AAMC 13 core EPAs. Findings: All EPAs were captured to varying degrees by the 14 NOC checklists (overall Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) = 0.77). Consensus meetings resolved discrepancies and improved ICC values for three (EPA-9, EPA-10, EPA-12) of the four EPAs that initially showed poor reliability. Conclusions: Findings suggest that with some limitations (e.g., EPA-7 "form clinical questions/retrieve evidence") established competency-based assessments can be repurposed to measure readiness-for-residency through an EPA lens and both can be reported to learners and faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key to generating tailored suggestions in the scenic location recommendation scene is how to model the diverse tourism environments in order to correctly acquire visitor preferences and scenic spot tourism features. However, most existing recommendation algorithms focus on the spatiotemporal background modeling of historical tourism trajectories. Only tourists' preferences are understood, and the rich heterogeneous tourism information such as tourists' personal tourism constraints and scenic spots' tourism attributes are ignored. In this paper, we proposed a multiple neural collaborative filtering attraction recommendation architecture (MNCF‐AR). To begin, we learn the tourism feature representation of tourists by modeling diverse tourism contexts, and then we create the tourism trajectory background of tourists using a large number of actual tourism logs to achieve the entire feature representation of tourists. Second, to learn the feature vector of scenic spots in the context, the tourism heterogeneous network map is used to build the scenic spot attribute background, the self‐attention network to learn the scenic spot sequence learning, and a neural network to project each scenic spot into a unified potential feature space. Finally, the multi‐neural collaborative filtering method is utilized to forecast the difference in scores between visitors and scenic sites so that tailored scenic spots may be recommended. Extensive experiments on mainstream datasets, such as MaFengwo, New York, Tokyo and Xi'an, show that the proposed method can effectively and accurately recommend attractions for users. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the discourses surrounding an ambitious high-school transformation project in a large Canadian city that sought to reimagine education for 21st century learning. It was grounded in a broad review of the latest educational research. While an initial eight schools signed on, by the end of the second year all had left the project. Drawing upon Gee's ([2005]. An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York, NY: Routledge; [2014]. How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York, NY: Routledge) tools for analyzing 'Knowledge Building' discourses, we explore how the project's communications produced tensions and contradictions, which reflect similar ones within the global research discourses on educational change. Key elements include strong branding, inconsistent messaging over objectives and ownership, centralized control and external sources of authority, a 'start fresh' ethos, and unfamiliar educational values from systems and design thinking. Ultimately, neoliberal assumptions about the means and ends of schooling embedded in the 21st century change discourses undermined the collaborative and teacher driven stated aims of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bike-sharing systems, the inventory level is defined as the daily number of bicycles required to optimally meet the demand. Estimating these values is a major challenge for bike-sharing operators, as biased inventory levels lead to a reduced quality of service at best and a loss of customers and system failure at worst. This paper focuses on using machine learning (ML) classifiers, most notably random forest and gradient tree boosting, for estimating the inventory level from available features including historical data. However, while similar approaches adopted in the context of bike sharing assume the data to be well-balanced, this assumption is not met in the case of the inventory problem. Indeed, as the demand for bike sharing is sparse, datasets become biased toward low demand values, and systematic errors emerge. Thus, we propose to include a new iterative resampling procedure in the classification problem to deal with imbalanced datasets. The proposed model, tested on the real-world data of the Citi Bike operator in New York, allows to (i) provide upper-bound and lower-bound values for the bike-sharing inventory problem, accurately predicting both predominant and rare demand values; (ii) capture the main features that characterize the different demand classes; and (iii) work in a day-to-day framework. Finally, successful bike-sharing systems grow rapidly, opening new stations every year. In addition to changes in the mobility demand, an additional problem is that we cannot use historical information to predict inventory levels for new stations. Therefore, we test the capability of our model to predict inventory levels when historical data is not available, with a specific focus on stations that were not available for training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I'm honored to be here with Jessica Benjamin, one of the most sophisticated and profound thinkers in psychoanalysis. Jessica and I started working together nearly twenty years ago, right after I moved to New York. She was one of my first supervisors. Jessica taught me analytic freedom, analytic discipline and what brilliant thinking looks like. One might say that I grew up next to her, but in so many ways she raised me. Throughout the years our relationship developed to become a deep friendship and a professional collaboration. We wrote a paper together that was published at the IJP titled The Too Muchness of Excitement: Sexuality in Light of Excess, Attachment and Affect Regulation. Different versions of that paper are chapters in my first book "The Enigma of Desire" and in Jessica's last book "Beyond Doer and Done to." Today I would like to talk with Jessica about her important contributions to psychoanalysis: her psychoanalytic work on intersubjectivity, early development and the mother infant-bond, her ideas of the Third, Doer and Done to and more. I would like to integrate the personal and the professional, theory and practice and look at the ways her feminist work, her philosophical thinking as well as her social activism are all organized around the theory of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution from residential wood heating poses a significant public health risk and is a primary cause of PM nonattainment in some areas of the United States. Those emissions also play a role in regional haze and climate change. While regulatory programs have focused on emissions reductions from large facilities, the residential heating sector has received limited attention. The failure to develop effective programs to address this emission source hampers the ability of state and local air quality programs to meet clean air goals. An updated New Source Performance Standard (NSPS) for Residential Wood Heaters was promulgated in 2015, which includes more stringent emissions standards for wood stoves and broadens its scope to regulate additional types of wood heating appliances. However, weaknesses in the test methods and programs used to certify compliance with the NSPS limits hamper the efficacy of those requirements. Current emissions certification tests measure stove performance under defined laboratory conditions that (1) do not adequately reflect operation and performance of appliances in homes, (2) are not sufficiently repeatable to allow for comparison of emissions of different appliances, and (3) allow manufacturers leeway to modify critical test fueling and operating parameters which can significantly impact performance outcomes. These foundational regulatory issues present substantial challenges to promoting the cleanest and most efficient wood heating systems. This paper provides an overview of the air quality and public health impacts of residential wood heating and discusses the weaknesses in the current emission certification approaches and work by the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to develop improved testing methods. Other articles in this issue discuss the development and testing of those methods in detail. Implications: Air pollution from residential wood heating poses a significant public health risk and is a primary cause of PM nonattainment in some areas of the United States. Those emissions also play a role in regional haze and climate change. While regulatory programs have focused on emissions reductions from large facilities, the residential heating sector has received limited attention. The failure to develop effective programs to address this emission source hampers the ability of state and local air quality programs to meet clean air goals. This paper provides an overview of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Mapping Possibility: Finding Purpose and Hope in Community Planning" by Leonie Sandercock is an autobiographical review of Sandercock's intellectual life and its intersection with her personal experiences. The book includes papers and book chapters from different stages of her academic career, as well as new material based on her recent work with the Haida Gwai community in western Canada. Sandercock emphasizes the importance of narratives and storytelling in planning, and encourages practitioners to engage with their hearts as well as their minds. She also explores the concept of "deep difference" and the experiences of marginalized communities, advocating for a transformation of dominant western cultures and a more holistic understanding of the world. The book serves as a reminder of Sandercock's inspiring work and offers valuable insights for those studying and practicing community planning. [Extracted from the article]

Periodic boundary conditions are natural in many scientific problems, and often lead to particular symmetries. Working with datasets that express periodicity properties requires special approaches when analyzing these phenomena. Periodic boundary conditions often help to solve or describe the problem in a much simpler way. The angular rotational symmetry is an example of periodic boundary conditions. This symmetry implies angular momentum conservation. On the other hand, clustering is one of the first and most basic methods used in data analysis. It is often a starting point when new data are acquired and understood. K-means clustering is one of the most commonly used clustering methods. It can be applied to many different situations with reasonably good results. Unfortunately, the original k-means approach does not cope well with the periodic properties of the data. For example, the original k-means algorithm treats a zero angle as very far from an angle that is 359 degrees. Periodic boundary conditions often change the classical distance measure and introduce an error in k-means clustering. In the paper, we discuss the problem of periodicity in the dataset and present a periodic k-means algorithm that modifies the original approach. Considering that many data scientists prefer on-the-shelf solutions, such as libraries available in Python, we present how easily they can incorporate periodicity into existing k-means implementation in the PyClustering library. It allows anyone to integrate periodic conditions without significant additional costs. The paper evaluates the described method using three different datasets: the artificial dataset, wind direction measurement, and the New York taxi service dataset. The proposed periodic k-means provides better results when the dataset manifests some periodic properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on algorithmic bias has shown that understanding the values embedded in technology design processes is important for avoiding social harm. This paper explores the attitudes construed in whitepapers of blockchain technology start-ups. Blockchain technology is a relatively new phenomenon that has informed discourses about the future of governance and economics in relation to the internet. This study aims to understand the values discursively construed in the whitepapers of four blockchain start-ups: Steemit, Creativechain, Democracy Earth, and Bitnation. It adopts a corpus linguistics approach, and uses the Appraisal framework (Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan) to analyse the evaluative meanings expressed in the whitepaper dataset. This analysis reveals that the blockchain start-ups manifest shared values around the concepts of decentralisation, trust in algorithms, and trust in individuals over institutions. The start-ups enact different political orientations, expressing ideals related to the digital commons, cyber-libertarianism, and capitalism. The corpus-based linguistic analysis used in this study offers a method that may be applicable to other areas of technology discourse where whitepapers and design documents tend to embed covert political and ideological positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence involving firearms in the USA is a very important problem. As a consequence, a large number of crimes of this type are recorded every year. However, the solutions proposed have not managed to reduce the number of this type of crime. One of the cities with a large number of violent crimes is New York City. The number of crimes is not homogeneous and depends on the district where they occur. This paper proposes to study the information about the crimes in which firearms are involved with the aim of characterizing the factors on which the occurrence of this type of crime depends, such as the levels of poverty and culture. Since the districts are not homogeneous, the information has been analyzed at the district level. For this, data from the open data portal of the city of New York have been used and machine-learning techniques have been used. The results have shown that the variables on which they depend are different in each district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about how portrayals of American unity (i.e. "we're all in this together") have been received by essential workers on the front lines of the COVID risk divide, and how the pandemic may have contributed to perceptions of class inequality among lower-income workers. In this paper, we draw upon 192 in-depth interviews with precarious and gig-based workers in New York City. We find that during the height of the first wave of the pandemic, precarious workers often expressed frustration over class-based inequalities and antagonism toward elites. Many respondents expressed significant skepticism toward messages that the pandemic has brought Americans together. Instead, workers identified two distinct, class-based realities in New York: elite Americans are able to socially-distance in "mansions," or on "yachts," while precarious workers struggled to weather the storm in "dinghies." Likewise, workers felt "abandoned" by wealthy owners and managers, who fled the city to socially-distanced homes in beach communities and surrounding suburbs. Our findings suggest that low-wage, high-risk workers articulate complex conceptualizations of inequality and convey grievances toward elites during the pandemic. This study contributes to broader literature on perceived inequality, the rise of noxious work, and the social consequences of COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On June 7th, 2019, Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, a transgender woman from New York, died at Rikers Island while in solitary confinement. According to officials from the Department of Corrections, Layleen's death was a result of a series of interrelated health problems.. Trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people, especially youth of colour and Black trans women, face heightened rates of homelessness, violent victimisation, barriers to housing, employment, and healthcare. These social conditions are tied to heightened engagement in survival sex work, over-policing, and surveillance of their communities. As a result, Trans and queer people are disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration, and must contend with the nexus of a system that functions on racist and colonial legal construction of gender, making carceral spaces sites of (in)visibility and death. The death of Trans people within these carceral spaces are followed by multiple discursive deaths, including the use of dead names in media, misgendering, and transphobic political debate. This paper aims to highlight and explore carceral settings as sites of death and (in)visbility for Trans and queer people and how reframing allows us to identify how (neo)liberal reforms meant to protect Trans people only entrench mass incarceration in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from an ethnography, this paper evaluates the motivations of Black American and Black immigrant parents when selecting high schools for their millennial teenage children in a segregated city and suburbs of New York. Black middle class parents encounter racial exclusion in the areas of work and residence. However, more research is needed to understand how they negotiate segregated schools. Analysis of interviews with 60 Black middle class parents suggests that choosing schools reveals parents' strategies of intergenerational mobility for their Black children. Urban parents believed that contact with a racially diverse student body was a key indicator of school quality. Black American suburban parents who chose their local school exhibited faith in the curricular diversity of public schools, while immigrant parents believed in the superiority of a private school education. This pattern exacerbated the economic vulnerability of immigrant families who pay high tuition costs in an already high tax suburbs. These findings demonstrate how racial inequity, class precarity, culture and space shape how Black families navigate the moving target of educating their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores ideas about the role of the school principal embedded in New York State education policy. Many public schools across the state fail to deliver equitable opportunities and outcomes for an increasingly diverse student population and improving school leadership offers the potential for substantial returns. Drawing on concepts of role identity, organisational coherence, and leadership for equity, I use an interpretive approach to examine how conflicting and ambiguous expectations for principal behaviour in New York's Every Student Succeeds Act Plan, its Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework, and its approach to principal evaluations might endanger realisation of a principal's moral commitment to educational and social justice. I conclude with recommendations for state policy and future research with the aim of supporting principals to navigate the complexity of their role and lead to organisational coherence around equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While health care-associated financial burdens among uninsured individuals are well described, few studies have systematically characterized the array of financial and logistical complications faced by insured individuals with low household incomes. In this mixed methods paper, we conducted 6 focus groups with a total of 55 residents and analyzed programmatic administrative records to characterize the specific financial and logistic barriers faced by residents living in public housing in East and Central Harlem, New York City (NYC). Participants included individuals who enrolled in a municipal community health worker (CHW) program designed to close equity gaps in health and social outcomes. Dedicated health advocates (HAs) were explicitly paired with CHWs to provide health insurance and health care navigational assistance. We describe the needs of 150 residents with reported financial barriers to care, as well as the navigational and advocacy strategies taken by HAs to address them. Finally, we outline state-level policy recommendations to help ameliorate the problems experienced by participants. The model of paired CHW–HAs may be helpful in addressing financial barriers for insured populations with low household income and reducing health disparities in other communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agency of interpreters has been kept out of view in human geography. This paper corrects this by focusing on embodied interpretation: bodies, freighted with their own relations, expectations, and experiences in the context of "emotionscapes," settings for emotional communication. Conceptually, "emotionscapes" enable the exploration of the potentiality of an emotion in its spatial setting. Emotionally expressive behaviour is a process of the emotion; a potentiality to be realised. Emotions are distinctively connected to specific sites and spaces. This potentiality shifts the analytical focus away from what emotion is to what emotion can do to the alteration or reproduction of relations. I argue that this is vitally important to understanding geopolitical exchange, that is, how global politics is made and remade. However, the potentiality of emotions is made more complicated when interpretive bodies are involved in geopolitical exchange. They are intrinsic to the relational fluxes, currents, and flows of emotion – its potentialities – they identify and relay emotionally laden language of others for others in geopolitical communication. They observe, relay, and mutate emotional potentiality in "emotionscapes." In doing so, they wrestle with more than just words. They seek to capture emotions and geopolitics between real‐life people in real places. Understanding their endeavour should challenge us therefore to [re]consider geopolitical exchange in "emotionscapes" and the mediatory and performative roles played by interpretive bodies in these spaces of geopolitical knowledge production. This is my key purpose in this paper. Underpinning the paper's conceptual ideas are qualitative data on the role of interpretive bodies in realising emotional potentialities in the "emotionscape" of the UN Security Council in New York, arguably the most high‐profile geopolitical institution. This paper provides a study of emotions and their capture in the UN Security Council through the new conceptual lens of "emotionscapes." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting the bike demand can help rebalance the bikes and improve the service quality of a bike-sharing system. A lot of works focus on predicting the bike demand for all the stations, which is unnecessary as the travel cost of rebalance operations increases sharply as the number of stations increases. In this paper, we propose a framework for predicting the hourly bike demand based on the central stations we define. Firstly, we propose Two-Stage Station Clustering Algorithm to assign central stations and common stations into each cluster. Secondly, we propose a hierarchical prediction model to predict the hourly bike demand for every cluster and each central station progressively. Thirdly, we use a well-studied queuing model to determine the target initial inventory for each central station. The most innovative contribution of this paper is proposing the concept of central station, the use of a novel algorithm to cluster the central stations and present a hierarchical model, containing the Time and Weather Similarity Weighted K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm and a linear model to predict the bike demand for central stations. The experimental results on the New York citi bike system demonstrate that our proposed method is more accurate than other methods in solving existing problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is devoted to coverings by translative homothets and illuminations of convex bodies. For a given positive number \alpha and a convex body B, g_{\alpha }(B) is the infimum of \alpha-powers of finitely many homothety coefficients less than 1 such that there is a covering of B by translative homothets with these coefficients. h_{\alpha }(B) is the minimal number of directions such that the boundary of B can be illuminated by this number of directions except for a subset whose Hausdorff dimension is less than \alpha. In this paper, we prove that g_{\alpha }(B)\leq h_{\alpha }(B), find upper and lower bounds for both numbers, and discuss several general conjectures. In particular, we show that h_{\alpha } (B) > 2^{d-\alpha } for almost all \alpha and d when B is the d-dimensional cube, thus disproving the conjecture from Brass, Moser, and Pach [ Research problems in discrete geometry , Springer, New York, 2005]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2020, IAAO President Amy Rasmussen created the Artificial Intelligence Task Force with the goal of developing a white paper describing the impact and uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in government valuation offices. The COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 forced government valuation offices to adapt overnight. Many jurisdictions rapidly virtualized tasks and duties, which accelerated ongoing efforts to utilize office automation and implement intelligent software solutions. More and more, workflows incorporating digital information and multiple sources of data are processed and analyzed using software and integrated applications. The fully integrated workflows facilitate the increased usage of AI in operations, assessment, and valuation. This white paper delivers an introduction and overview of AI through case and pilot studies and review of relevant analytic methods while touching on possible organizational impacts. The paper looks at the changing role of valuers and assessment administrators and the evolution of valuation offices where AI will be used to improve operations, value estimates, and administration. It provides illustrative examples of AI use in the conduct of tax assessment, including the administrative aspects not directly involved in valuation. While there is substantial fanfare around valuation with AI, many of the benefits to be realized from the technology are in areas of administration, validation, and oversight. This is reflected in the case studies included, with more than half involving AI applications outside of the explicit valuation function. The introduction provides a definition and brief history of AI. It also helps disentangle the raft of AI methods with how they are used and provides a concrete list of which assessment activities may benefit from those general classes of algorithms. More importantly, the first section helps put into context why AI is becoming more widespread and what that means for organizations from both staffing and administration standpoints. After the introduction's overview of what AI is, why it has captured professional imagination, and the organizational changes it portends, we provide examples of current uses by assessing organizations and their partners. The first case study is about the Property Valuation Services Corporation's (PVSC) foray as the first organization in Canada to publish a tax assessment roll using AI-based valuations. This case study highlights the multiyear process leading the organization to that accomplishment and the lessons it learned along the way. The second use case is a pilot study by PVSC. The section discusses the success of AI, particularly machine-learning methods, for the valuation of residential properties in the Netherlands. The third use case is from BC Assessment (BCA) and describes how valuations of manufactured homes were conducted using AI methods. For successful adoption of AI in an assessment office, this case study highlights the importance of communication and feedback from appraisers and integration of AI-modeled values with the computerassisted mass appraisal (CAMA) system. The fourth case study comes from the City of New York and showcases applications using AI to better manage form intake and processing. Using optical character recognition (OCR), it is possible to process the volumes of senior exemption applications and condominium declaration forms received in paper and PDF formats. As with the other case examples, the results still require human oversight but provide a significant improvement over the existing process. The fifth use case also comes from the City of New York. This section discusses how geospatial data and AI methods are being integrated and leveraged to determine land use, detect building changes, and extract parcel data from images and may be used to automate data collection. This section also gives background on the geospatial data required to leverage land use and building change detection applications, which are growing increasingly familiar and important to tax assessment organizations. The sixth application involves integrating AI-powered valuation as a feature within CAMA. To illustrate the potential of AI to automate sales-based valuation models, this study examines Tyler Technologies' experience trying to provide an AI-powered valuation option for its users. It also clarifies the technology's perceived limitations, which create headwinds for widespread adoption. This section ends with a discussion of international adoption of AI in property assessment offices in four African nations: Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia. The full digitalization of their records and workflows using imagery and modern technology allows them to modernize their systems without going through and updating legacy records and operational processes found in more established assessment jurisdictions. Following the case studies, the reader will find a section delving deeper into the core machine learning (ML) and AI methods underpinning these applications. ML is covered in the first part of this section. Other methods discussed cover key concepts in artificial neural networks and search and optimization, which underpin virtually every AI application. Finally, the paper closes with recommendations. Key takeaways are that some tax assessment organizations and their partners are already cautiously adopting AI. The technology's adoption will grow more widespread and touch every tax assessment organization. As such, familiarity with how it is being used, a basic understanding of what is driving these changes, and what they mean for your organization are important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse a corpus of 137 texts published between 1888 and 1899. These texts are included in one of the most successful Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century: Las Novedades (New York, 1876-1918). In the analysis I will determine the linguistic ideologies and the discursive strategies used for the promotion of Hispanism and Spanish language in a sociopolitical context in which the Spanish hegemony was losing all its power at an international level. Thus, the ideologies found are divided in two different categories: the linguistic ideologies that give the language a cultural value and the linguistic ideologies that make reference to the economic and commercial value of the language. The results obtained from this analysis will contribute to understand the role of Spanish language in the United States. Furthermore, this paper presents an unpublished corpus of clear historiographic interest that contributes to clarify the panorama of Hispanism in a country like the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the arrival of the digital age and technology, creation of art and its replication reached a whole new pinnacle. Increasingly, conservators find themselves dealing with editions, copies, and replicas as part of their job. Indeed, the replication of a work of art, be it paper or a 3D printed sculpture, is becoming one of many conservation measures that may serve as a preventive conservation technique, protecting the art from excess levels of light, travel, or handling, or as a tool to better understand the art. Replication of a digitally existing master for each new display may be the artist's intent, or enable simultaneous multiple displays of the same work as per the artist's directive. This article describes the making of an Exhibition Copy of the American artist Mike Kelley's The Wages of Sin, a pile of partly melted wax candles atop a readymade, commercially sourced table. Owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the highly complex three-dimensionality and materiality of this iconic work of art posed significant challenges to replicate. The following description illuminates the conceptual aspects considered, why and how the replica was made, and decision-making processes throughout its fabrication, exploring materiality and technical issues. The role of the Whitney's Replication Committee in this project is discussed, including participation of its curators, archivists, and other museum professionals, along with an explanation of the Committee's choice of the term 'Exhibition Copy' to describe the replica. The account of the collaboration and coordination of the project with the Mike Kelley Foundation and external fabricators is central to this comprehensive project. Ramifications for future use of the Exhibition Copy within the museum management, documentation, loans, and wall labels, and its legal and publication consequences conclude this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, communities invested in transformative food politics in the United States have seen the framework food justice become widely accepted as a core framework for anti-racist practice. Critical food scholars often recognize food justice in practices that: underwrite coalitions and solidarities across difference, tend to collective and historical trauma, and expand land-based political imaginations. This paper argues that abolitionist thought can position these elements within in a relational, historical framework that enables organizers to name the underlying racial capitalist logics of food apartheid—including the destruction of Black, Indigenous, and poor peoples' senses of place, and white supremacy culture's dehumanization of people who fall outside the norms of liberal individualism—in order build strategic alliances with those who struggle against other manifestations of the same logics, including mass incarceration. Citing work at the intersection of food and carceral justice in New York's Hudson Valley, this paper humbly affirms what abolitionist organizers already know: that life is possible and is already flourishing well outside of racial capitalism and settler colonialism's death dealing logics. Abolitionist thought may be an essential tool for strengthening our relationships to and analyses of food and food justice, such that we may organize more effectively to end food apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. In the distributed all-pairs shortest paths problem, every node in the weighted undirected distributed network (the CONGEST model) needs to know the distance from every other node using least number of communication rounds (typically called time complexity). The problem admits a (1 + (1))-approximation 9(n)-time algorithm and a nearly tight 12(n) lower bound [D. Nanongkai, STOC'14, ACM, New York, 2014, pp. 565-573; C. Lenzen and B. Patt-Shamir, PODC'15, ACM, New York, 2015, pp. 153-162]. (9, 0 and n hide polylogarithmic factors. Note that the lower bounds also hold even in the unweighted case and in the weighted case with polynomial approximation ratios (C. Lenzen and D. Peleg, PODC, ACM, New York, 2013, pp. 375-382; S. Holzer and R. Wattenofer, PODC, ACM, New York, 2012, pp. 355-364; D. Peleg, L. Roditty, and E. Tal, ICALP, Springer, Berlin, 2012, pp. 660-672; D. Nanongkai, STOC, ACM, New York, 2014, pp. 565-573-672). For the exact case, Elkin [STOC'17, ACM, New York, 2017, pp. 757-790] presented an 0(n5/3 log2/3 n) time bound, which was later improved to O(n5/4) [C.-C. Huang, D. Nanongkai, T. Saranurak, FOCS'17, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 2017, pp. 168-179]. It was shown that any superlinear lower bound (in n) requires a new technique [K. Censor-Hillel, S. Khoury, A. Paz, DISC'17, LIPIcs Leibniz Int. Proc. Inform., Vol. 91, Schloss-Dagstuhl, Wadern, Germany, 2017, 10], but otherwise it remained widely open whether there exists a O(n)-time algorithm for the exact case, which would match the best possible approximation algorithm. This paper resolves this question positively: we present a randomized (Las Vegas) 0(n)-time algorithm, matching the lower bound up to polylogarithmic factors. Like the previous 0(n5/4) bound, our result works for directed graphs with zero (and even negative) edge weights. In addition to the improved running time, our algorithm works in a more general setting than that required by the previous 0(n5/4) bound; in our setting (i) the communication is only along edge directions (as opposed to bidirectional), and (ii) edge weights are arbitrary (as opposed to integers in {1, 2, ..., poly(n)}). As far as we know, ours is the first o(n²) algorithm that only requires unidirectional communication. For arbitrary weights, the previous state-of-the-art required 0(n4/3) time [U. Agarwal and V. Ramachandran, IPDPS 2019, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 2019, and SPAA 2020, ACM, New York, 2020, pp. 11-21]. Our algorithm is extremely simple and relies on a new technique called random filtered broadcast. Given any sets of nodes A, B C V and assuming that every b E B knows all distances from nodes in A, and every node v E V knows all distances from nodes in B, we want every v E V to know DistThroughB (a, v) = minbEB dist(a, b) + dist(b, v) for every a E A. Previous works typically solve this problem by broadcasting all knowledge of every b E B, causing superlinear edge congestion and time. We show a randomized algorithm that can reduce edge congestions and thus solve this problem in 0(n) expected time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 7 November, 2020, legendary New York queer nightlife DJ duo The Carry Nation held a virtual dance party on Twitch, the interactive live-streaming service that emerged during the pandemic as an important venue for live performance. The party was called 'WORK from Home', and the flyer is telling: a yellow piece of paper with a stock image of a white woman wearing a headset, smiling into a webcam — presumably having a meeting. As Twitch became a major platform for live performance globally alongside early lockdown measures, in the New York queer underground The Carry Nation was among the first to embrace virtual parties. The crux of these virtual parties, however, was the 'Zoom Room' where the real party took place. The Zoom Room: a series of constantly rotating squares, and in them people in various states of undress are dancing, making dinner, talking, vibing, getting tattooed, performing, drinking, having sex, applying makeup, chilling in their living room, on the sofa, in their beds, sometimes with friends or partners, sometimes alone, dancing on stripper poles, stripping on camera, making cocktails and hanging out while the music plays. 'WORK! From Home: Queer Nightlife on Zoom' explores this queering of the Zoom link as noted by the queer dance and sex parties that emerged during the pandemic, from The Carry Nation to Scruff. How did Zoom, a corporate conference meeting tool used in part as a way to weed out candidates for academic positions, become a primary source of queer worldmaking, cruising and connectivity? Is a Zoom party a 'party' or is it something else? In the essay, I show that the speed at which queer nightlife moved from Bushwick, Hackney and Friedrichshain to Zoom highlights the significance of queer dance floors and the pursuit of pleasure as acts of queer worldmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1960's New York State's Urban Development Corporation (UDC), now operating as the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), has been leveraged by New York City government to pursue large-scale projects. This paper examines two cases from New York City in which the city borrowed a state-controlled public authority's power to accomplish projects initiated at the local level: the case of Queens West, a development in western Queens, proposed in the early 1980s, and the case of Columbia - Manhattanville, an expansion of the Columbia University campus into Harlem, announced in 2003. These cases highlight how cities might, at times, embrace state involvement rather than lament its restrictions or rue its indifference. The study concludes by suggesting a theoretical path for incorporating such a city-state dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from the synchronic trend dominant in social semiotics research, this study examines the diachronic interplay between semiotic cues governing power relations, and global political power dynamics. It examines thirty years of photographic coverage given to Iran in Time Magazine, focusing specifically on diachronic interaction analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge). The significance of these discourses is examined with an interdisciplinary conceptual lens comprising of social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge) and critical theory (Butler 1993, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge). The analysis reveals the even amongst a routinely "othered" national community, some actors are rendered more "valuable" by the camera. Specifically, the interactive cues of gaze, camera angle and social distance accord more power to male dissidents, and female trailblazers, discursive choices serving as an indictment of Iran's socio-political systems. Furthermore, this paper extends van Leeuwen's (2008, "Representing Social Actors." In Discourse and Practice, edited by T. van Leeuwen. New York: Routledge) work on visual "othering," and suggests three new categories for examining how visual cues create "valuable bodies": adjacency, subjectivation, and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a reflection on the rights of minors after the New York Convention of 1989 and its entry into force. The international legal system, as well as the European one, recognizes important rights of minors, guaranteeing them an increasing autonomy in accordance with their ability to evolve. The primary aspect of the Convention is constituted by the superior principle of the child, which must be taken into account first and foremost in any situation involving minors, and not only in proceedings concerning them. After a reflective argumentation, the paper concludes with the hope that new educational policies will be devised among EU states that would be able to develop strategies so that every minor, without exceptions, can exercise their right to citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drinking water utilities are vulnerable to both human-caused and natural disasters that can impact the system infrastructure and the delivery of potable water to consumers. Analyzing system performance and resilience can help utilities identify areas of high risk or concern, understand the impacts on consumers, and evaluate response actions during disasters. In this case study, the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) was used to investigate the performance and resilience of a drinking water system in New York during increased demands due to firefighting, pipe damage, and loss of the source water emergencies. This case study introduced a new combined performance index (CPI) resilience metric, which served to quantify system resilience as a ratio of system performance during an emergency to normal operations. The results revealed that this drinking water system was able to maintain service to most of the consumers during these emergencies due to high redundancy within the system, and conservation efforts extended water service for an additional 20 h. The analysis in this paper can be used by other drinking water utilities to understand their vulnerabilities and evaluate resilience-improving actions in similar disaster scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) and the abortive November Uprising in Poland (1830–1831) were two major developments in nineteenth-century European history, and both became central to foundational narratives of European modernity. These events have, however, received scant attention by American immigration historians. Despite this neglect, both were integral to how the New York Truth Teller, the leading Irish Catholic newspaper in New York in the years before the Famine, attempted to consolidate an Irish Catholic ethnic identity in the United States. The Truth Teller's contributors interpreted the Greek and Polish conflicts through reference to a specific narrative of Irish history as one of unparalleled suffering. In doing so, the paper kept American Irish Catholics informed about contemporary events in Europe. In comparing Irish Catholic history to the contemporary struggles of Greece and Poland, the Truth Teller insisted that neither Greece nor Poland had experienced suffering comparable to the persecution of Protestant Ascendency Ireland. This article is a corrective to scholarship that has underemphasized the importance of the Truth Teller to Irish Catholic identity in the United States before the Famine and undervalued the relevance of European events for the construction of American Irish Catholic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze Angie Cruz's novel Dominicana from a multicultural and gender perspective focusing on how Cruz introduces the female body as a metaphor for the immigrant experience lived by Dominican Women during the 1960s in the United States. Also, this paper studies how the female body becomes a metaphorical border in the diasporic experience for the central character as a way to depict an essentially female in-between-space. Thus, Cruz rewrites and recreates from the female body the diasporic experience of Dominican women immigrants in New York from an intersectional perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an in-person and digital ethnography of people in New York State who use drugs and seek treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) using phone or video connection to receive healthcare (telecare) including interviews prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article leverages a Feminist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to elucidate how the framing of the opioid crisis shapes the interconnections that are discernable, providing a heuristic to understand the increased rates of deaths due to drug overdose during the pandemic. The narratives of people seeking treatment are analyzed through the theoretical lenses of Nelly Oudshoorn's concept of the technogeography of care, Nancy Campbell's concept of technologies of suspicion, and Nancy Fraser's analysis of the US juridical-administrative-therapeutic in/justice system. This paper traces and problematizes how telecare contributes to redefining the experience of familiar places, such as home, into spaces of both care and surveillance, and how the technology of telecare presents both affordances and foreclosures to accessing care as people struggle to conform with its requirements in order to receive care. Key findings are, (1) the significance of hugs and tactile connection that is sorely missed by people using telecare for group therapy, (2) the critical importance of proximity to in-person services even while using telecare, (3) the resistance strategies of telecare users to surveillance mechanisms, and (4) the continued stigmatization of drug use and treatment acts as a key barrier to people who are striving to produce the identity of a patient who is clinically stable for take-home medication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction introduced by Gross, Hacking and Keel in (Several Complex Variables (Springer, New York, NY, 1976))allows one to construct a formal mirror family to a pair (S,D) where S is a smooth rational projective surface and D a certain type of Weil divisor supporting an ample or anti-ample class. In that paper, they proved two convergence results when the intersection matrix of D is not negative semi-definite and when the matrix is negative definite. In the original version of that paper, they claimed that if the intersection matrix were negative semi-definite, then family extends over an analytic neighbourhood of the origin but gave an incorrect proof. In this paper, we correct this error. We reduce the construction of the mirror to such a surface to calculating certain log Gromov--Witten invariants. We then relate these invariants to the invariants of a new space where we can find explicit formulae for the invariants. From this we deduce analytic convergence of the mirror family, at least when the original surface has an I4 fibre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]