Transportation policy formation in Detroit 1945-1985

The thesis traces the development of transportation policy formation at regional and local levels of government in the Detroit region since 1945. Three postwar transportation policy climates are identified. The first, to the early sixties, was marked by a reasonable degree of regional consensus on freeways as the basis of regional transportation policy. The second, covering the period to the 1970's, saw this consensus begin to break down. The subsequent period to the present has been marked by an almost total collapse in regional consensus on transportation policy. Within the maintenance of a sensitivity to the dangers inherent in structuralist Marxist theorizing, the hypothesis is explored that class relationships have been of primary influence in accounting for this "macro dynamic" of transportation policy formation. The role of physical planners and implications for planning theory is a particular focus of study. The research concludes that, at a time when "grand" Marxist theorizing is coming under criticism, the primacy of class relationships as an explanatory variable can be sustained in the case of Detroit but in terms of the development of a more adequate theory of planning the research points to the need for supplemental theory construction on the discretion and influence of planners within the class pattern (as opposed to determination) of events

Transportation policy formation in Detroit 1945-1985

The thesis traces the development of transportation policy formation at regional and local levels of government in the Detroit region since 1945. Three postwar transportation policy climates are identified. The first, to the early sixties, was marked by a reasonable degree of regional consensus on freeways as the basis of regional transportation policy. The second, covering the period to the 1970's, saw this consensus begin to break down. The subsequent period to the present has been marked by an almost total collapse in regional consensus on transportation policy. Within the maintenance of a sensitivity to the dangers inherent in structuralist Marxist theorizing, the hypothesis is explored that class relationships have been of primary influence in accounting for this "macro dynamic" of transportation policy formation. The role of physical planners and implications for planning theory is a particular focus of study. The research concludes that, at a time when "grand" Marxist theorizing is coming under criticism, the primacy of class relationships as an explanatory variable can be sustained in the case of Detroit but in terms of the development of a more adequate theory of planning the research points to the need for supplemental theory construction on the discretion and influence of planners within the class pattern (as opposed to determination) of events

Game Change: What Have We Learned? Pt. 1

Who We Are, What We Do, Where Are We Going Brookings Mountain West is a partnership between UNLV and the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution. Goals and Objectives Create high-quality, independent, impactful programs, publications, and activities that address issues of critical importance to greater Las Vegas and the Intermountain West region. Serve as a platform to bring ideas and expertise together and facilitate local, metropolitan, and state discussions about the West’s future. Enhance local, regional, and state research and public policy discussions

Leggett-Garg inequality violations with a large ensemble of qubits

We investigate how discrete internal degrees of freedom in a quasimacroscopic system affect the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality, a test of macroscopic realism based on temporal correlation functions. As a specific example, we focus on an ensemble of qubits subject to collective and individual noise. This generic model can describe a range of physical systems, including atoms in cavities, electron or nuclear spins in nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, erbium in Y2SiO5, bismuth impurities in silicon, or arrays of superconducting circuits, to indicate but a few. Such large ensembles are potentially more macroscopic than other systems that have been used so far for testing the Leggett-Garg inequality and open a route toward probing the boundaries of quantum mechanics at macroscopic scales. We find that, because of the nontrivial internal structure of such an ensemble, the behavior of different measurement schemes, under the influence of noise, can be surprising. We discuss which measurement schemes are optimal for flux qubits and NV centers, and some of the technological constraints and difficulties for observing such violations with present-day experiments

Quantifying defence cascade responses as indicators of pig affect and welfare using computer vision methods

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The Beta Problem: A Study of Abell 262

We present an investigation of the dynamical state of the cluster A262. Existing optical line of sight velocities for select cluster galaxies have been augmented by new data obtained with the Automated Multi-Object Spectrograph at Lick Observatory. We find evidence for a virialized early-type population distinct from a late-type population infalling from the Pisces-Perseus supercluster ridge. We also report on a tertiary population of low luminosity galaxies whose velocity dispersion distinguishes them from both the early and late-type galaxies. We supplement our investigation with an analysis of archival X-ray data. A temperature is determined using ASCA GIS data and a gas profile is derived from ROSAT HRI data. The increased statistics of our sample results in a picture of A262 with significant differences from earlier work. A previously proposed solution to the "beta-problem" in A262 in which the gas temperature is significantly higher than the galaxy temperature is shown to result from using too low a velocity dispersion for the early-type galaxies. Our data present a consistent picture of A262 in which there is no "beta-problem", and the gas and galaxy temperature are roughly comparable. There is no longer any requirement for extensive galaxy-gas feedback to drastically overheat the gas with respect to the galaxies. We also demonstrate that entropy-floor models can explain the recent discovery that the beta values determined by cluster gas and the cluster core radii are correlated.Comment: 31 pages, 14 figures, AAS LaTeX v5.0, Encapsulated Postscript figures, to be published in The Astrophysical Journa

Increasing biomass in Amazonian forest plots

A previous study by Phillips et al. of changes in the biomass of permanent sample plots in Amazonian forests was used to infer the presence of a regional carbon sink. However, these results generated a vigorous debate about sampling and methodological issues. Therefore we present a new analysis of biomass change in old-growth Amazonian forest plots using updated inventory data. We find that across 59 sites, the above-ground dry biomass in trees that are more than 10 cm in diameter (AGB) has increased since plot establishment by 1.22 ± 0.43 Mg per hectare per year (ha-1 yr-1), where 1 ha = 104 m2), or 0.98 ± 0.38 Mg ha-1 yr-1 if individual plot values are weighted by the number of hectare years of monitoring. This significant increase is neither confounded by spatial or temporal variation in wood specific gravity, nor dependent on the allometric equation used to estimate AGB. The conclusion is also robust to uncertainty about diameter measurements for problematic trees: for 34 plots in western Amazon forests a significant increase in AGB is found even with a conservative assumption of zero growth for all trees where diameter measurements were made using optical methods and/or growth rates needed to be estimated following fieldwork. Overall, our results suggest a slightly greater rate of net stand-level change than was reported by Phillips et al. Considering the spatial and temporal scale of sampling and associated studies showing increases in forest growth and stem turnover, the results presented here suggest that the total biomass of these plots has on average increased and that there has been a regional-scale carbon sink in old-growth Amazonian forests during the previous two decades

A 9-Month Hubble Space Telescope Near-UV Survey of M87. I. Light and Color Curves of 94 Novae, and a Re-determination of the Nova Rate

M87 has been monitored with a cadence of 5 days over a 9 month-long span through the near-ultraviolet (NUV:F275W) and optical (F606W) filters of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) of the $\textit{Hubble Space Telescope}$. This unprecedented dataset yields the NUV and optical light and color curves of 94 M87 novae, characterizing the outburst and decline properties of the largest extragalactic nova dataset in the literature (after M31 and M81). We test and confirm nova modelers' prediction that recurrent novae cannot erupt more frequently that once every 45 days; show that there are zero rapidly recurring novae in the central $\sim$ 1/3 of M87 with recurrence times $<$ 130 days; demonstrate that novae closely follow the K-band light of M87 to within a few arcsec of the galaxy nucleus; show that nova NUV light curves are as heterogeneous as their optical counterparts, and usually peak 5 to 30 days after visible light maximum; determine our observations' annual detection completeness to be 71 - 77\%; and measure the rate Rnova of nova eruptions in M87 as $352_{-37}^{+37}$/yr. The corresponding luminosity-specific classical nova rate for this galaxy is $7.91_{-1.20}^{+1.20}/yr/10^{10}L_\odot,_{K}$. These rates confirm that ground-based observations of extragalactic novae miss most faint, fast novae and those near the centers of galaxies. An annual M87 nova rate of 300 or more seems inescapable. A luminosity-specific nova rate of $\sim$ $7 - 10/yr/10^{10}L_\odot,_{K}$ in ${\it all}$ types of galaxies is indicated by the data available in 2023.Comment: Accepted/In Press in ApJS; 3 Tables, 108 Figures, 180 page