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This paper introduces an approach to teaching ethics as design in a new course entitled Design Ethics, team-taught by a philosopher and an engineer/designer. The course follows a problem-based learning model in which groups of students work through the phases of the design process on a project for a local client, considering the design values and the ethical values in play in each decision along the way. Their acquisition of ethical thinking skills and moral imagination are assessed with a novel approach, which uses Latent Semantic Analysis to computationally analyze their responses to short answer ethical design questions before and after the course. Students also completed an ethical thinking survey and self-efficacy assessment. Results show statistically significant differences for a number of metrics, and promise for further research into teaching ethics as design.

Minimum parking requirements (MPRs) have been criticized for creating excess parking, degrading urban form, reducing housing affordability, and encouraging automobile dependency. As a result, many American cities have begun to reduce or remove parking minimums in some or all areas. However, existing research on the effects of these policy changes has focused only on the analysis of parking supply. We investigated the broader results of parking reform at a small university city in the Midwest that removed MPRs for downtown and university districts. Our quasi-experimental research found that onsite parking construction in the deregulated zones decreased dramatically, from 108% of the earlier requirement to only 46%, clearly indicating that MPRs had enforced oversupply of parking. Of the 43 new major developments built in the 7 years following the parking reform, 84% provided less parking than previous requirements, including eight developments with zero parking. The reduction in onsite parking led to more efficient use of existing parking stock, both public and private. Furthermore, the removal of MPRs, combined with other policies, helped improve urban form by increasing housing density, promoting active building frontages, and guiding a growing share of new developments to transit-rich and walkable districts. American cities stand to benefit greatly by relaxing or repealing parking requirements. Cities that expect resistance to parking reforms can take a targeted and incremental approach, first removing MPRs in denser areas such as downtowns, transit corridors, and other prime districts where an oversupply of parking is typically being reinforced by uniform MPRs. The case of Champaign (IL) demonstrates that a targeted district-scale reform is likely to encounter minimal opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9787.2007.00517.x Byline: Bumsoo Lee (1) Abstract: ABSTRACT. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of spatial trends in six U.S. metropolitan areas. The results show that generalized job dispersion was a more common spatial process than subcentering during the 1980s and 1990s when jobs continued to decentralize from the metropolitan core to the suburbs. Three distinctive patterns of spatial development were found. Job dispersion was predominant in Portland and Philadelphia, whereas the polycentricity of Los Angeles and San Francisco was further reinforced. New York and Boston with large and long-established CBDs were less prone to decentralization. Each metro seems to have developed a unique pattern of decentralization in light of their histories and circumstances, which has limited the growth of commuting times. Author Affiliation: (1)Postdoctoral Research Associate CREATE, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. E-mail:bumsoole@usc.edu Article History: Received: January 2006; accepted: March 2006.

This research aims to augment human cognition through the advancement and automation of mindmapping technologies, which could later support human creativity and virtual collaboration. Mindmapping is a visual brainstorming technique that allows problem solvers to utilize the human brain's ability to retrieve knowledge through similarity and association. While it is a powerful tool to generate concepts in any phase of s or design, the content of mindmaps is usually manually generated while listening or conversing and generating ideas, requiring a high cognitive load. This work introduces the development of a speech-driven automated mindmapping technology, called Speech2Mindmap. The specifics of the Speech2Mindmap algorithm are detailed, along with two case studies that serve to test its accuracy in comparison to human-generated mindmaps, using audio recorded speech data as input. In the first case study, the Speech2Mindmap algorithm was evaluated on how well it represents manually generated human mindmapping output. The second case study evaluated the reliability of the Speech2Mindmap algorithm and examined the best performing methods and conditions to achieve the greatest similarity to human-generated mindmaps. This research demonstrates that the Speech2Mindmap algorithm is capable of representing manually generated human mindmapping output and found the best performing methods and conditions to generate a mindmap that is 80% similar, on average, to human-generated mindmaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between light rail transit (LRT) stations and changes in neighborhood characteristics associated with gentrification using spatial regression analyses with longitudinal data across 14 US urbanized areas (UAs). Overall, we do not find evidence of prevalent gentrification in LRT station areas. An analysis of UA-specific impacts shows heterogeneous outcomes across different UAs, particularly: strong transit-oriented development (TOD) effects accompanied by gentrification in San Francisco and TOD with countergentrification in Portland. Our results highlight that different local and regional planning efforts can lead to different types of changes in transit station neighborhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]