The New York City Housing Receivership and Community Management Programs

Each year New York City landlords abandon buildings containing an estimated 10,000 apartments, forcing tenants to leave as the ownerless buildings plunge into decay. At least half of these buildings are structurally solid and might last several more decades if not abandoned. Most are found in areas where problem buildings- buildings which have a potential for abandonment- will most likely be found. New York City has instituted a number of programs for dealing with buildings which are headed toward abandonment. They include code-enforcement, emergency repair and receivership programs, foreclosure for nonpayment of property taxes, and rehabilitation programs involving municipal loans, housing-repair contracts, and the conversion of buildings to tenant-owned cooperatives. This Note will trace the history, development, and operation of the New York City Housing Receivership Program, placing special emphasis on recent developments and innovations in the area of community group involvement

Dynamics of Black Hole Pairs I: Periodic Tables

Although the orbits of comparable mass, spinning black holes seem to defy simple decoding, we find a means to decipher all such orbits. The dynamics is complicated by extreme perihelion precession compounded by spin-induced precession. We are able to quantitatively define and describe the fully three dimensional motion of comparable mass binaries with one black hole spinning and expose an underlying simplicity. To do so, we untangle the dynamics by capturing the motion in the orbital plane. Our results are twofold: (1) We derive highly simplified equations of motion in a non-orthogonal orbital basis, and (2) we define a complete taxonomy for fully three-dimensional orbits. More than just a naming system, the taxonomy provides unambiguous and quantitative descriptions of the orbits, including a determination of the zoom-whirliness of any given orbit. Through a correspondence with the rationals, we are able to show that zoom-whirl behavior is prevalent in comparable mass binaries in the strong-field regime. A first significant conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis is that all generic orbits in the final stages of inspiral under gravitational radiation losses are characterized by precessing clovers with few leaves and that no orbit will behave like the tightly precessing ellipse of Mercury. The gravitational waveform produced by these low-leaf clovers will reflect the natural harmonics of the orbital basis -- harmonics that, importantly, depend only on radius. The significance for gravitational wave astronomy will depend on the number of windings the pair executes in the strong-field regime and could be more conspicuous for intermediate mass pairs than for stellar mass pairs.Comment: 19 pages, lots of figure

Activating Latino Millennial Civic Power: A Report of the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Convening - Unlocking Latino Millennial Civic Potential

The report highlights the ideas and conversations that came from a June 2016 convening of 26 bright minds who developed five inspirational and impactful projects designed to increase Latino Millennial civic engagement

Beyond the standard model with B and K physics

In the first part of the talk the flavor physics input to models beyond the Standard Model is described. One specific example of such a new physics model is given: a model with bulk fermions in one non-factorizable extra dimension. In the second part of the talk we discuss several observables that are sensitive to new physics. We explain what type of new physics can produce deviations from the Standard Model predictions in each of these observables.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Invited talk presented at the 21st International Symposium On Lepton And Photon Interactions At High Energies (LP03) 11-16 Aug 2003, Batavia, Illinois. Version to appear in the proceeding edited by Harry W. K. Cheung and Tracey Prat

Forked Temperley-Lieb Algebras and Intermediate Subfactors

We consider noncommuting pairs P,Q of intermediate subfactors of an irreducible, finite-index inclusion N in M of II_1 factors such that P and Q are supertransitive with Jones index less than 4 over N. We show that up to isomorphism of the standard invariant, there is a unique such pair corresponding to each even value [P:N]=4cos^2(pi/2n) but none for the odd values [P:N]=4cos^2 (pi/(2n+1)). We also classify the angle values which occur between pairs of intermediate subfactors with small index over their intersection: if [P:N] < 4, then the unique nontrivial angle value is always cos^-1 (1/([P:N]-1)).Comment: 19 pages. Stylistic revisions and reference added to Evans-Gould 1994 in which forked TL algebras appea

Gender dynamics in Polish drama after 2000

When discussing Polish theatre scene, critics and scholars often lament the decline of ‘high art’ and the disappearance of ambitious Romantic repertoire from Polish theatres after 1989. Yet, strangely enough none of these ongoing debates identifies such problems as lack of gender equality; devastating effects of anti-abortion law; insufficient network of support for victimised and unemployed women; exceptionally high tolerance for sexist, homophobic and misogynist attitudes in both public and private spheres of activities; as well as the general dominant patriarchal structure of power. This is even more surprising when one reads plays written by female and male writers published (and/or performed) after 2000 as their dramatic worlds address many feminist and gender-related concerns. This study (focusing on gender dynamics) reveals that the gap between the voice of critical and scholarly inquiry and the ‘voice’ of the plays themselves has been widening rather than narrowing. The article addresses this concern with reference to selected plays by Krystyna Kofta, Monika Powalisz, Magdalena Fertacz, Dana Łukasińska as well as Marek Pruchniewski, Krzysztof Bizio, Przemysław Wojcieszek and Robert Bolesto

Introduction to flavor physics

This set of lectures covers the very basics of flavor physics and are aimed to be an entry point to the subject. A lot of problems are provided in the hope of making the manuscript a self study guide.Comment: 45 pages. Lectures given at the "2009 European School of High-Energy Physics," Bautzen, Germany, June 14-27, 2009, and at the "Flavianet School on Flavor Physics," Karlsruhe, Germany, September 7-18, 200