Search

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]

Copyright of Journal of Planning Education & Research is the property of Sage Publications Inc. 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.)

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 investigates neighborhood scale net migration of young adults in the top 20 urbanized areas (UAs) in the United States between 1980 and 2010. Both descriptive and regression analyses show that Generation Xers and Millennials were more likely to net migrate into central locations and less aversive to high density at their young ages than late boomers were in the 1980s. Consumption amenities are a critical factor that distinguishes the net migration patterns between young and old adult groups and became a more important location factor for young adults in the 2000s (late Gen Xers and older Millennials) than in the 1990s (early Gen Xers). There exists a considerable degree of heterogeneity across UAs and neighborhoods even within the same UAs. [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the performance of a cooperative multi-hop network with an incremental hop selection (IHS) scheme. Generally, multiple-relay networks based on half-duplex-mode relays undergo spectral efficiency loss due to the use of multiple time phases. The IHS scheme can prevent this problem because it increases the number of hops only when the currently selected path cannot support the target performance. Moreover, we apply an adaptive modulation technique to the IHS scheme to determine the additional spectral efficiency gain while maintaining the target performance. We evaluate the average spectral efficiency and the outage probability performances over the Nakagami- $m$ fading channel. Also, the diversity and coding gains are derived through the asymptotic outage probability in the high transmit SNR region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an analysis of magnetic resonance coupling effects that can be considered for realizing a wireless power transfer (WPT) system. In this study, numerical analysis is applied to investigate the power transfer characteristics affected by coil inductance and placement. The simulations and experiments, using various coils and positions, are conducted to find the optimum power transfer condition. The experiment shows that the frequency bandwidth of the wireless power transfer at the optimum coupling condition is enlarged to 0.73 MHz and the transfer efficiency is maintained at over 80%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Problem, research strategy, and findings: A shift toward more sustainable transportation requires both adequate pricing of externalities from driving and supportive land use policies. However, proponents of each approach often under-estimate the complementarity and potential synergy between them. This study investigates the interaction effects between gasoline prices and land use (policy) variables using a panel dataset of transit ridership in 67 urbanized areas between 2002 and 2010. We found that while doubling the average gasoline price would increase transit ridership by 8.4% in an urbanized area with mean density and no regional containment policy, in areas with slightly higher density and a regional containment policy, the impact of higher gasoline prices would rise to 21%. In communities that had adopted a package of smart growth land use options, the impact of higher gasoline prices on transit use is even greater. Takeaway for practice: Pricing schemes will be more effective where alternatives to automobility and supportive land use policies exist. The impacts of urban form on travel behavior are also strengthened when driving externalities are correctly priced. Planners and policymakers should take advantage of the complementarity between pricing and land use planning approaches by implementing policies in combined and well-coordinated ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter proposes an incremental hop selection (IHS) scheme which improves network coverage while preventing spectral efficiency loss in half-duplex amplify-and-forward (HD-AF) protocol based multi-hop networks (MHNs). In contrast to the fixed N-hop networks, the proposed IHS scheme increases the number of hops only when the current selected path cannot support a performance threshold. Since the proposed scheme uses minimal time phases to satisfy the constraint, the spectral efficiency can be improved. Furthermore, we evaluate the outage probability and average spectral efficiency performance over Nakagami-m fading channel. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing multiple relay schemes and the derived evaluations are valid. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

\boldmath This paper analyzes the performance of an amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol based cooperative multi-hop relay networks (CMHNs), where signals from the multi-hop relay network (MHN) and the direct path are considered in the detection, over the flat Nakagami-m fading channels. The analysis is accomplished by using the Beaulieu series that obtains a cumulative distributed function (CDF) through a characteristic function (CHF). Since the received SNR of MHN is mainly affected by the weakest channel in the network, we propose a hop selection scheme that prevents the performance degradation of the MHNs. We expand the CDF analysis to the networks employing proposed scheme by a tight bound of the received SNR. Also, in order to evaluate the diversity and coding gains of the proposed hop selection scheme, an asymptotic outage probability at high SNR region is derived. We show that the simulation results are closely matched to the analyzed results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on nonmetropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 nonmetropolitan communities in the United States from 2000 to 2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to nonmetropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities' influence: nearest city only, inverse-distance, and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse-distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agricultural sector is highly vulnerable to bioterrorism attacks with the potential for severe economic consequences. This article presents estimates of state-by-state total economic impacts of a hypothetical agroterrorism attack that uses foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) pathogens, which is one of the most contagious animal diseases and can be easily weaponized. The authors estimate the economic impacts across the U.S. states by applying the National Interstate Economic Model (NIEMO), a multiregional input output (MRIO) model. Total economic impacts range from $23 billion to $34 billion. The overwhelming sources of the losses are due to domestic and international demand cuts. The results of this research highlight the point that the economic impacts are nationwide, regardless of the location of the attack because of large-scale export losses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article attempts to explain the increase in commuting times in the 1990s after decades of stability. Although traditional explanations, for example both demographic variables (population growth and densities) and transportation variables (e.g. road capacity and transit use), pass the statistical significance tests, their overall impact was small. Instead, the article argues for the importance of strong income growth in the late 1990s, not least because it was associated with an increase in non-work vehicle miles traveled; these affect commuting times because many nonwork trips take place in peak hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a bottom-up approach that focuses on behavioral responses in estimating the total economic impacts of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center (WTC) attacks. The estimation includes several new features. First, is the collection of data on the relocation of firms displaced by the attack, the major source of resilience in muting the direct impacts of the event. Second, is a new estimate of the major source of impacts off-site -- the ensuing decline of air travel and related tourism in the U.S. due to the social amplification of the fear of terrorism. Third, the estimation is performed for the first time using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) analysis, including a new approach to reflecting the direct effects of external shocks. This modeling framework has many advantages in this application, such as the ability to include behavioral responses of individual businesses and households, to incorporate features of inherent and adaptive resilience at the level of the individual decision maker and the market, and to gauge quantity and price interaction effects across sectors of the regional and national economies. We find that the total business interruption losses from the WTC attacks on the U.S. economy were only slightly over $100 billion, or less than 1.0% of Gross Domestic Product. The impacts were only a loss of $14 billion of Gross Regional Product for the New York Metropolitan Area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we suggest an analytical framework to study the full economic impacts of hypothetical bio-terrorist attacks on various targets. We particularly emphasize the importance of estimating economic impacts that occur through systems and behavior linkages beyond direct losses. Second, we provide a case study that analyzes the economic impacts of an attack on a major league sports stadium. The estimated loss from the stadium attack ranges from $62 billion to $73 billion. The largest loss comes from the loss of lives, followed by the reduced demand for sports stadium visits. We demonstrate that available off-the-shelf impact models (in this case IMPLAN) can be utilized, via the development of detailed but plausible scenarios grounded in available data and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the power allocation problem in a wireless relay network employing differential modulation technique and Alamouti distributed space-time code, where signals from both the direct and relay paths are taken into account in the detection process. We propose a sub-optimal power allocation scheme based on the maximization of an approximate receive covariance expression. The proposed scheme jointly allocates the transmit power of both the source and relay nodes under a total transmit power and per-node transmit power constraints. We can increase the effectiveness of the proposed power allocation algorithm by grouping the relays with respect to their individual covariances. Numerical experiments show that the proposed covariance maximization algorithm combined with the relay grouping algorithm offers a respectable BER performance improvement, compared to the conventional schemes. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme requires only a small number of iterations to achieve convergence, making it attractive to practical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]