Planning for Density in a Driverless World

Automobile-centered, low-density development was the defining feature of population growth in the United States for decades. This development pattern displaced wildlife, destroyed habitat, and contributed to a national loss of biodiversity. It also meant, eventually, that commutes and air quality worsened, a sense of local character was lost in many places, and the negative consequences of sprawl impacted an increasing percentage of the population. Those impacts led to something of a shift in the national attitude toward sprawl. More people than ever are fluent in concepts of “smart growth,” “new urbanism,” and “green building,” and with these tools and others, municipalities across the country are working to redevelop a central core, rethink failing transit systems, and promote pockets of density. Changing technology may disrupt this trend. Self-driving vehicles are expected to be widespread within the next several decades. Those vehicles will likely reduce congestion, air pollution, and deaths, and free up huge amounts of productive time in the car. These benefits may also eliminate much of the conventional motivation and rationale behind sprawl reduction. As the time-cost of driving falls, driverless cars have the potential to incentivize human development of land that, by virtue of its distance from settled metropolitan areas, had been previously untouched. From the broader ecological perspective, each human surge into undeveloped land results in habitat destruction and fragmentation, and additional loss of biological diversity. New automobile technology may therefore usher in better air quality, increased safety, and a significant threat to ecosystem health. Our urban and suburban environments have been molded for centuries to the needs of various forms of transportation. The same result appears likely to occur in response to autonomous vehicles, if proactive steps are not taken to address their likely impacts. Currently, little planning is being done to prepare for driverless technology. Actors at multiple levels, however, have tools at their disposal to help ensure that new technology does not come at the expense of the nation’s remaining natural habitats. This Article advocates for a shift in paradigm from policies that are merely anti-car to those that are pro-density, and provides suggestions for both cities and suburban areas for how harness the positive aspects of driverless cars while trying to stem the negative. Planning for density regardless of technology will help to ensure that, for the world of the future, there is actually a world

The Unsuccessful Inquisition in Tudor England

The Spanish Inquisition was tasked with finding heretics and either returning them to their faith or punishing them for their unfaithfulness. This institution lasted for hundreds of years and prosecuted thousands of cases across the Iberian Peninsula. When Mary Tudor took the throne, she instituted her own, smaller inquisition in her attempts to return her people to the Catholic faith. Yet while the Spanish Inquisition was a secretive organization, the trials and arrests in England were far more public and accessible. Much of the methodology and questioning processes were similar, yet Mary’s Inquisition met great resistance and died with her after only a few years. Martyrs were created from the “poor souls” trapped and killed by Bloody Mary and Bloody Bishop Bonner. Secrecy was the Spanish Inquisition’s main weapon and advantage, and Mary’s Inquisition could not and did not succeed without it

Multipole moments of bumpy black holes

General relativity predicts the existence of black holes, compact objects whose spacetimes depend on only their mass, spin, and charge in vacuum (the "no hair" theorem). As various observations probe deeper into the strong fields of black hole candidates, it is becoming possible to test this prediction. Previous work suggested that such tests can be performed by measuring whether the multipolar structure of black hole candidates has the form that general relativity demands, and introduced a family of "bumpy black hole" spacetimes to be used for making these measurements. These spacetimes have generalized multipoles, where the deviation from the Kerr metric depends on the spacetime's "bumpiness." In this paper, we show how to compute the Geroch-Hansen moments of a bumpy black hole, demonstrating that there is a clean mapping between the deviations used in the bumpy black hole formalism and the Geroch-Hansen moments. We also extend our previous results to define bumpy black holes whose {\it current} moments, analogous to magnetic moments of electrodynamics, deviate from the canonical Kerr value.Comment: 15 page

‘From Badness to Sickness’ and Back Again: The Use of Medication in the U.S. School and Foster Care Systems

This article explores the over- and under-prescription of psychotropic medication to youth of color both in public schools and the foster care system. Under the umbrella of the schools-to-prison pipeline, there is a wide array of literature addressing the under-use of medication for treatment of children of color in the public school system when treating learning or behavioral disabilities. There is also, however, a great deal of literature in a totally different realm surrounding the under-use of medication in treating mental health disorders in the foster care system. This article aims to put these two pieces of discourse in conversation with each other. In examining the use of medication in both of these institutions and the disproportionate rate of black and brown children in the foster care system, I analyze how race, class, and gender play a role in the prescription—or lack thereof—of medication for children of color. These contradicting approaches to treatment and medication illustrate the assumptions that are attached to children of color, and how these institutions ultimately were not made for children of color to survive or thrive. To better serve the needs of children in our country, these two institutions must be considered as co-actors in the system of perpetual social control exerted of youth of color