The Changing Face of Creativity in New York: Sustaining NYC's Immigrant Arts Ecosystem Through Crisis and Beyond

Each new decade brings a fresh wave of concern that New York City risks losing some of its cultural spark. Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, New York's soaring cost of living and the lure of cities from Baltimore to Berlin had threatened the city's position at the apex of global culture. At the same time, a powerful, growing force of cultural vibrancy has reenergized the city in recent years and sharpened New York's creative edge: immigrant artists.Foreign-born artists have long been here, birthing world-altering movements from abstract expressionism to hip-hop. More than any previous era, however, immigrants have become pivotal to the success of the arts in New York.But now the livelihoods of countless immigrant artists—and the survival of the cultural organizations that champion their work—are facing major threats. Without the benefit of endowments or large donor bases to help cushion the blow, many immigrant-led and immigrant-serving arts organizations are facing fiscal catastrophe, reporting revenue losses amounting to 50 percent or more of their annual budgets. Meanwhile, many immigrant artists have struggled to access government relief, even as income from exhibitions, performances, and side jobs has all dried up.While city support for immigrant arts had increased in recent years, that funding is now in jeopardy: the city's 2021 budget cuts more than $23 million from the Department of Cultural Affairs and slashes funding for Council discretionary initiatives by$79 million—funding that many immigrant-serving arts organizations rely on.This report provides a new level of detail on the landscape of immigrant arts in New York City— and what's needed to sustain immigrant arts communities across the five boroughs

Push-Pull Block Puzzles are Hard

This paper proves that push-pull block puzzles in 3D are PSPACE-complete to solve, and push-pull block puzzles in 2D with thin walls are NP-hard to solve, settling an open question by Zubaran and Ritt. Push-pull block puzzles are a type of recreational motion planning problem, similar to Sokoban, that involve moving a `robot' on a square grid with $1 \times 1$ obstacles. The obstacles cannot be traversed by the robot, but some can be pushed and pulled by the robot into adjacent squares. Thin walls prevent movement between two adjacent squares. This work follows in a long line of algorithms and complexity work on similar problems. The 2D push-pull block puzzle shows up in the video games Pukoban as well as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, giving another proof of hardness for the latter. This variant of block-pushing puzzles is of particular interest because of its connections to reversibility, since any action (e.g., push or pull) can be inverted by another valid action (e.g., pull or push).Comment: Full version of CIAC 2017 paper. 17 page

On inverse deterministic pushdown transductions

AbstractClasses of source languages which can be mapped by a deterministic pushdown (DPDA) transduction into a given object language (while their complement is mapped into the complement of the object language) are studied. Such classes of source languages are inverse DPDA transductions of the given object language. Similarly for classes of object languages. The inverse DPDA transductions of the Dyck sets are studied in greater detail: they can be recognized in deterministic storage (log n)' but do not comprise all context free languages; their emptiness problem is unsolvable and their closure under homomorphism constitutes the r.e. sets. For each object language L we can exhibit a storage hardest language for the class of inverse DPDA transductions of L; similarly for the classes of regular, deterministic context free, and context free object languages. Last, we classify the classes of inverse DPDA transductions of the regular, deterministic context free, context free and deterministic context sensitive languages

The complexity of linear-time temporal logic over the class of ordinals

We consider the temporal logic with since and until modalities. This temporal logic is expressively equivalent over the class of ordinals to first-order logic by Kamp's theorem. We show that it has a PSPACE-complete satisfiability problem over the class of ordinals. Among the consequences of our proof, we show that given the code of some countable ordinal alpha and a formula, we can decide in PSPACE whether the formula has a model over alpha. In order to show these results, we introduce a class of simple ordinal automata, as expressive as B\"uchi ordinal automata. The PSPACE upper bound for the satisfiability problem of the temporal logic is obtained through a reduction to the nonemptiness problem for the simple ordinal automata.Comment: Accepted for publication in LMC

Complexity of checking whether two automata are synchronized by the same language

A deterministic finite automaton is said to be synchronizing if it has a reset word, i.e. a word that brings all states of the automaton to a particular one. We prove that it is a PSPACE-complete problem to check whether the language of reset words for a given automaton coincides with the language of reset words for some particular automaton.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Open Lecture : Urban Development in a Global Era

This discussion is focused on urban development in advanced industrial nations over the past thirty years. Ten cities are selected and these include New York, Detroit, Houston, Toronto, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Marseilles, Milan and Naples. The cities were chosen because they represent prosperous and distressed cities within each of five nations (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France and Italy). The cities portray a wide range of urban policy responses and these resoponses are used to analyze successes and failures. Propositions are advanced that 1) cities have undergone very different changes and taken different development paths 2) globalization has profoundly affected cities and shaped their development strategies 3) certain characteristics and strategies enable cities to better cope with global transformation. After reviewing these characteristics an observation is made that there is an inherent tension between effective development strategies and socially redistributive policies. The discussion is concluded with recommendations for the most effective development strategies in an era of globalization. The recommendations are intended to apply to Tokyo as well as other advanced cities

Blogging with dementia: writing about the lived experience of dementia in the public domain

Public narratives around dementia have historically been negative, and have not been shaped by people with dementia themselves, but stories of living with dementia are becoming more common in the public domain. This qualitative study explored the motivations and experiences of bloggers by conducting interviews with six bloggers with dementia in the UK. Thematic analysis suggested that the asynchronous nature of blogging offered a valuable, personalised space for people with dementia to tell their own stories in their own way. Blogging as a format posed some practical challenges, but bloggers developed strategies to overcome these. Motivations for blogging were on three levels: the personal (as a journal, and as a ‘room of one’s own’); community (as solidarity for other people with dementia, and as comfort for families and friends); and society (as an educational and campaigning tool). While the study is small, and there are many voices of people with dementia missing from the blogging community, this research demonstrates the potential for blogging by people with dementia to change public narratives and perceptions of dementia

Balancing Bounded Treewidth Circuits

Algorithmic tools for graphs of small treewidth are used to address questions in complexity theory. For both arithmetic and Boolean circuits, it is shown that any circuit of size $n^{O(1)}$ and treewidth $O(\log^i n)$ can be simulated by a circuit of width $O(\log^{i+1} n)$ and size $n^c$, where $c = O(1)$, if $i=0$, and $c=O(\log \log n)$ otherwise. For our main construction, we prove that multiplicatively disjoint arithmetic circuits of size $n^{O(1)}$ and treewidth $k$ can be simulated by bounded fan-in arithmetic formulas of depth $O(k^2\log n)$. From this we derive the analogous statement for syntactically multilinear arithmetic circuits, which strengthens a theorem of Mahajan and Rao. As another application, we derive that constant width arithmetic circuits of size $n^{O(1)}$ can be balanced to depth $O(\log n)$, provided certain restrictions are made on the use of iterated multiplication. Also from our main construction, we derive that Boolean bounded fan-in circuits of size $n^{O(1)}$ and treewidth $k$ can be simulated by bounded fan-in formulas of depth $O(k^2\log n)$. This strengthens in the non-uniform setting the known inclusion that $SC^0 \subseteq NC^1$. Finally, we apply our construction to show that {\sc reachability} for directed graphs of bounded treewidth is in $LogDCFL$

Computing with and without arbitrary large numbers

In the study of random access machines (RAMs) it has been shown that the availability of an extra input integer, having no special properties other than being sufficiently large, is enough to reduce the computational complexity of some problems. However, this has only been shown so far for specific problems. We provide a characterization of the power of such extra inputs for general problems. To do so, we first correct a classical result by Simon and Szegedy (1992) as well as one by Simon (1981). In the former we show mistakes in the proof and correct these by an entirely new construction, with no great change to the results. In the latter, the original proof direction stands with only minor modifications, but the new results are far stronger than those of Simon (1981). In both cases, the new constructions provide the theoretical tools required to characterize the power of arbitrary large numbers.Comment: 12 pages (main text) + 30 pages (appendices), 1 figure. Extended abstract. The full paper was presented at TAMC 2013. (Reference given is for the paper version, as it appears in the proceedings.

From job security to skills security: a mixed methods case study design to evaluate a state-funded job training program at a community college in southern California

Includes bibliographical references (pages 170-179)The following mixed methods case study design evaluated the effectiveness of a California Employment Training Panel-funded incumbent worker training program at a community college in Southern California. The specialized program was created in response to specific local business needs and provides training services for workers in local businesses. This study measured the effectiveness of a specific Employment Training Panel 2011/2012 contract program term at Creek Side Community College to the extent possible with the available documents, personal interviews, and survey of trainees. Four specific training interventions were evaluated to inform the college leadership and provide recommendations to improve future program evaluations. Materials developed in this study can be used as a resource for other incumbent worker training programs in that the evaluation method and instruments can be adapted to other settings. Within the limited available data this study provides indicators of whether the college???s program achieved the learning objectives and of the program???s overall effectiveness. Finally, it provides a review of the literature pertaining to federal and state workforce programs and community college economic development efforts. Research provides evidence that trainees are using what they learned in training on the job. The training appeared successful in allowing trainees to gain the skills needed to improve productivity at their worksites. Most respondents felt positively about the quality of instruction, felt the learning objectives were met and trainees emerged more positive feelings about their employees. This study provides recommendations for the California Employment Training Panel program, and practitioners, such as community colleges and participating businesses