Walking Titanic\u27s Charity Trail in New York City: Part One, Gramercy Park and Madison Square Park

This article combines insights form travel writing, history, and urban studies to explore the social welfare milieu of early twentieth century New York City and its connection to disaster relief efforts for Titanic survivors in 1912

The Traveler\u27s Aid Society: Moral Reform and Social Work in New York City, 1907-1916

The prominent philanthropist, Grace Hoadley Dodge, founded the Travelers\u27 Aid Society as a response to the moral and sexual dangers that she believed confronted single women (immigrant and native-born) as they entered American cities in search of work and leisure. Moral reformers like Dodge assumed that traveling women who were adrift from their family and community existed on the “border line of tragedy,” where the slightest misstep could result in a downward spiral that culminated in white slavery, the coerced prostitution of white women. To prevent the tragedy of white slavery, the Travelers\u27 Aid Society provided social work to at-risk travelers at New York City’s train stations and piers. This paper explores the society\u27s early years (1907-1916) in New York and uses theories of discipline and empowerment to assess its work

Carpathia\u27s Care for Titanic\u27s Survivors

When Captain Rostron of the ocean liner Carpathia learned that the Titanic had struck an iceberg, he immediately ordered his ship to come to its rescue. This paper profiles Rostron\u27s leadership that night and how his crew and medical staff responded. It also examines the central role that Carpathia\u27s passengers played in the relief efforts once the survivors were on-board, and concludes with a look at the survivors\u27 committee that Margaret Brown formed as the ship headed for New York City

Safeguarding the Innocent: Traveler\u27s Aid at the Panama-California Exposition, 1915

In January 1914, the editorial page of The San Diego Union promised that the upcoming Panama-California Exposition would usher in a “new era” in the city’s history. San Diego would “emerge from its semi-isolation…and take on the dignity of a metropolis, a great seaport, and a commercial center.” There was a dark side, however, to this anticipated transformation as the newspaper reported that the city would soon be overwhelmed with “thousands of strangers and to these will be added thousands of immigrants who will make this port their landing place.” Among the newcomers would be many inexperienced young women who faced the threat of exploitation by criminals active in sex trafficking, known as the white-slave trade. This “army of vice” abducted women and forced them into prostitution; it was blamed for myriad disappearances at world fairs in Chicago and St. Louis. As San Diego prepared to host the Panama-California Exposition, the Union urged the city’s leading women to be aggressive in countering white slavery and safeguarding feminine virtue

A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage

A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow, and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task. With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity. Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics. Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study, we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin

Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data

Positioning data offer a remarkable source of information to analyze crowds urban dynamics. However, discovering urban activity patterns from the emergent behavior of crowds involves complex system modeling. An alternative approach is to adopt computational techniques belonging to the emergent paradigm, which enables self-organization of data and allows adaptive analysis. Specifically, our approach is based on stigmergy. By using stigmergy each sample position is associated with a digital pheromone deposit, which progressively evaporates and aggregates with other deposits according to their spatiotemporal proximity. Based on this principle, we exploit positioning data to identify high density areas (hotspots) and characterize their activity over time. This characterization allows the comparison of dynamics occurring in different days, providing a similarity measure exploitable by clustering techniques. Thus, we cluster days according to their activity behavior, discovering unexpected urban activity patterns. As a case study, we analyze taxi traces in New York City during 2015