Digital Commons Network^™

Deciphering Public Transit Ridership In Baton Rouge: Spatial Disaggregation Approaches, Xuan Kuai

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Surveys across the U.S. reveal that commuters driving personal vehicles spend a significant amount of time in traffic, while public transit, as an efficient commuting mode, has been largely underutilized.

Purpose: What causes a low public transit ridership? How could public transit ridership be explained by demographic, socio-economic and spatial characteristics of neighborhood? This study answers these questions by deciphering the relationships between public transit ridership and various factors in a medium-size city in southern U.S. – Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Methods: Non-spatial and spatial data in a larger areal unit (e.g., block group) are used to infer demographic, socio-economic …

The Baltics And Ukraine: Geopolitical Hotspots, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides detailed historical overview and contemporary analysis on why the Baltics and Ukraine are historical and remain contemporary geopolitical hotspots. Provides analysis of cultural economic, environmental, and security factors influencing long-standing contentiousness over these regions. Places emphasis on how Russian behavior and policies influence this contentiousness. Concludes by noting that differences between the U.S. and its allies and conflicts within the U.S. Government may limit the ability of the U.S. to effectively respond to events in these disputed regions.

Las Vegas And Reno, Nevada Renter Migration, Peter Grema, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Demography

This Fact Sheet summarizes and expands upon the findings of Apartment List’s Renter Migration Report. The data presented herein focuses on renter search inquiries (both inbound and outbound) regarding Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada.

Exploring Informal Caregivers’ Roles In Medical Tourism Through Qualitative Data Triangulation, Rebecca Whitmore, Valorie A. Crooks, Jeremy Snyder

The Qualitative Report

When Canadian medical tourists go abroad, they are often accompanied by friends and family, referred to as caregiver-companions, who provide informal care. These individuals play a role in patient decision-making and are stakeholders in medical tourism, yet little is known about their participation in this consumer health practice. To examine the roles that Canadian caregiver-companions play while accompanying medical tourists abroad, and to identify how multi-perspective qualitative data can augment our understanding of these roles, primary and secondary analysis was undertaken on datasets generated from multiple qualitative studies: semi-structured interviews with medical tourists, caregiver-companions, and international patient coordinators, and a …

No.05: Food Security And The Changing Landscape Of Food Retailing In Nanjing, China, Zhenzhong Si, Jonathan Crush

Hungry Cities Partnership

■ The expansion of supermarkets and online food markets are changing the complexion of food retailing in Nanjing. At the same time, traditional forms of retail display considerable resilience.

■ Nanjing has low levels of food insecurity overall as measured by the HFIAS and HDDS. The one in five households who are food insecure are primarily low-income and female-centred.

■ Concerns over food safety are a major characteristic of all consumers in Nanjing irrespective of income and food security status.

■ Policy implications include ensuring food access for households with higher levels of food insecurity, promoting trustworthy food sources in …

Racial Segregation In U.S. Areas, Yanneli Llamas, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Demography

This Fact Sheet highlights racial segregation in some of the Mountain West’s largest metros: Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV; Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA; and Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ, otherwise known as the Southwest Megapolitan Triangle. The Tables that follow illustrate residential segregation in these three major metropolitan areas.

No.04: Enabling Informal Food Vending In Urban South Africa, Godfrey Tawodzera, Jonathan Crush

Hungry Cities Partnership

■ Food vending is an important component of the South African economy, where it provides employment, income, livelihoods and contributes to the food security of poorer households.

■ Policies towards the informal food sector in most South African cities are restrictive and often punitive, and undermine the critical contributions of informal food vending.

■ To maximize their impacts, informal food vendors need an enabling policy environment with less red tape, better infrastructure, greater financial and other supports, and public recognition of their positive role in the urban food system.

The Effects Of Geography And Proximity On Board Of Directors: An Exponential Random Graphs Approach, Panagiotis Giannakis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims at exploring how physical proximity, among other geographical elements, affects the synthesis of boards of directors, the decisions executives make, and, in general, organizations. Drawing on the rich literature in economic geography, these studies focus on re-evaluating the effects of geography on board of directors in the contemporary context characterized by significant technological advancements which is expected to minimize the effects of distance.

The first paper evaluates the geographic proximity effects on the likelihood of board interlock ties creation, while controlling for endogenous network processes. Additionally, all proposed network specifications are simulated in order to assess the …

Drug Trafficking, State Capacity, And The Post-Soviet Condition In The Kyrgyz Republic, Christopher George Cowan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent states of Central Asia faced numerous challenges. These included cultivating new national identities and state capacity, managing new borders, and addressing issues of conflict and political violence. Converging with these challenges – a booming trade in opium and heroin originating in neighboring Afghanistan. Central Asia quickly became a key route for opiates originating in Afghanistan and transiting to Russia and Europe. The Kyrgyz Republic lies at the southeastern corner of this region, along one of the world’s busiest drug trafficking routes.

This thesis examines state and societal responses to narcotics …

Born And Raised - Native Nevadans, Madison Frazee-Bench, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Demography

This Fact Sheet highlights population shifts and investigates the adult population of Nevada counties. Data from a 2017 GOVERNING report details Nevada’s counties and their populations.

Dynamics Of Land Use, Environment, And Social Organization In The Sasanian Landscape Of Eastern Iraq—Western Iran, Mitra Panahipour

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding human-environment interactions has been one of the main challenges in archaeological studies over recent years. Past research on the Near Eastern territorial empires in general, and the Sasanian Empire in particular, primarily emphasized the dominant role of human on landscape transformation. In addition, politically centralized schemes such as agricultural intensification and expansion of water supply systems have been at the center of most of the discussions and remained the main hypothesis of the Sasanian land use practices.

This dissertation investigates population’s diverse responses to environmental variability during the Sasanian period (224-651 CE) across a landscape in eastern Iraq—western Iran. …

The War On Winter: How Americans Put Down Roots On The Northern Plains, 1854-1949, Daniel J. Fischer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a study of how the United States was able to expand onto the Northern Great Plains, consisting of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana, between 1854 and 1949 despite the threat to property, comfort, and survival posed by the region’s harsh winters, which brought intense cold, large snowdrifts, and blinding blizzards. This dissertation argues that five tools – government programs, rapidly changing technology, imagination, strong local communities, and toughness – allowed native-born Americans and European immigrants to survive and become increasingly secure in the region. But it also argues that severe gaps …

Understanding Cumulative Hazards In A Rustbelt City: Integrating Gis, Archaeology, And Spatial History, Daniel Trepal, Don Lafreniere

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

We combine the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) concept developed within spatial history with elements of archaeological predictive modeling to demonstrate a novel GIS-based landscape model for identifying the persistence of historically-generated industrial hazards in postindustrial cities. This historical big data approach draws on over a century of both historical and modern spatial big data to project the presence of specific persistent historical hazards across a city. This research improves on previous attempts to understand the origins and persistence of historical pollution hazards, and our final model augments traditional archaeological approaches to site prospection and analysis. This study also demonstrates …

Age Of Concrete : Housing And The Shape Of Aspiration In The Capital Of Mozambique, David Morton

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious.

Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age …

Rafi & Patra, Rafi, Patra, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Rafi and his family have been stuck on the border between Greece and Macedonia for almost four months. They made their way from Afghanistan, received certificates in Greece to help them on their journey, but were then stopped at the border of Macedonia. The Macedonians said that they were no longer allowing Afghans into their country. Now all they can do is wait and hope. In Afghanistan,Rafi was a military man. As a young man, he was a part of the Revolution army, but later was made a soldier for the Government Security of Kabul. During that time, he was …

Development Of A Karst Tourism Management Index To Assess Tourism-Driven Degradation Of Protected Karst Sites, Keith R. Semler

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The intent of this research was to create and evaluate a karst tourism management index (KTMI). This index is intended to be a new management tool designed to quantify environmental disturbances caused specifically by tourism activities in karst regions, particularly show caves and springs. In an effort to assess the effectiveness of the index as a management tool in karst terrains, after development, the index was applied to six case study sites. A review of the management policies at each study site was conducted with the use of standard policy critique methods and semistructured interviews with managers at the study …

Governance In A Globalised World, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

Discussions surrounding the sources of power and authority that govern the social world have taken place since ancient times. Finally, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it appeared that this debate had been decisively resolved in favour of the view that governance was the preserve of governments. This was a consequence of the ascendance in the social sciences of methodologies that presupposed human activities to correspond to the territorial boundaries of sovereign states. The privileging of sovereign territoriality did not reflect a poverty of scholarly thinking but was a by-product of their social world. (Taylor, 1996). By the …

Assessing The Rock Island Community Garden Program, Christian Elliott, Hunter Ridley, Robert Burke, Alexander Disabato, Abby Huffman, Dr. Christopher Strunk

Celebration of Learning

As part of Sustainable Working Landscapes Initiative with Augustana College’s Upper Mississippi Center, students in Urban Design and Environmental Justice (Geography 325) conducted research on Rock Island’s community garden program this fall. The City of Rock Island currently has 21 vacant-lot community gardens and plans to expand the program to 24 gardens in 2019. The purpose of this project was to develop an initial assessment of the community garden program and provide general information about the benefits of urban gardens. Students worked with Dr. Strunk to conduct a survey with current garden program participants and tested soil from 14 gardens …

Cartographies Of Debt: Auto Title Loans And Spatial Inequality, Michihiro C. Sugata

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

Despite being a decade removed from the 2008 Financial Crisis, an alarming number of Americans are turning to alternative finance service providers (AFSP) for “short term” loans. These loans typically carry triple digit interest rates and can contribute to exacerbating the financial precarity of the borrowers. This article investigates the relationship between the spatial distribution of the AFSP industry and considers the impacts of this saturated presence on the individuals who live in these neighborhoods. Using the Phoenix metropolitan area as a site of exploration, I examine where the industry has pooled and look at the descriptive characteristics of those …

Agent-Based Models In Supporting Pedestrian Transportation Planning And Design, Nicholas A. Perdue

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

Agent-based models offer a new approach to understanding human-urban interactions in transportation systems, allowing individual entities within a system to be characterized with cognitive and behavioral properties. This paper discussed the role of agent-based representations of pedestrian transportation systems, detailing the underlying assumptions and techniques behind different types of pedestrian models and illustrating the differences between aggregate and individual agent representations. It then turns attention to the case study and the development of a cognitive pedestrian model as a way to illustrate the spectrum of potential spatial behaviors that are enabled by material changes to the transportation network. The paper …

Marta, Marta, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Marta is a member of the support community for Central American refugees arriving in the southwest US. In this interview, Marta shares her own story of crossing the border at a young age with her daughter and her life in the US. Marta was self-employed for many years and later went on to serve in the US Army in Iraq. For the last 9 months, she and her husband Israel and son Josue have worked tirelessly to help make sure the current refugees arriving are cared for after they are released from detention centers and begin their lives in the …

Aesthetic Perception Of Urban Spaces: New York, Timur Pozhidaev

Theses and Dissertations

Aesthetic perception is an important field of interest in many aspects of everyday human life. It affects individual and social unconscious behavior and is strongly related to the decision-making processes in the human mind. The current study can serve as an important prototype for planning purposes and social and environmental justice among the regional units of New York City. With the current scientific sphere lacking a comprehensive methodology for assessing social superstructure, an aesthetic framework has the potential for success in evaluating the aspects of sustainable and resilient urban development.

Gentrification In Upper Manhattan? Demographic And Socioeconomic Transformations In Washington Heights/Inwood, 1990-2015, Lawrence Cappello

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report examines the impact and extent of gentrification in the Washington Heights/Inwood area – traditionally one of Manhattan’s most quintessential Latino neighborhoods.

Methods: This report uses the American Community Survey PUMS (Public Use Microdata Series) data for all years released by the Census Bureau and reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa, (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/index.shtml).

Results: The Latino community of Washington Heights/Inwood is not being displaced in any meaningful way. While there has certainly been an increase in the number of wealthy non-Hispanic Whites over the last decade, as of 2015 Latinos maintained the …

A New Long Island: Demographic, Economic, And Social Transformations In New York City's Historic Suburbs, 1990 - 2016 (Revised), Lawrence Cappello

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report examines key socioeconomic and demographic trends in New York City and Long Island from 1990 to 2016.

Methods: The findings reported here are based on data collected by the Census Bureau IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series), available at http://www.usa.ipums.org for the corresponding years and the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Results: The Long Island suburbs have grown significantly more diverse in the early twenty-first century. The total number of non-Hispanic Whites in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties is in steady decline, as is their share of Long Island’s total population. Latinos and Asians, on the …

"Oh, Those Horsemen!" Regulatory Change And Cultural Peculiarity In Finland, Pauliina Raento

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

Abstract

Finland's three gambling monopoly operators merged into one state-owned entity in 2017. A particular challenge to the process came from its smallest constituent, the tote company Fintoto, its owner, the national Trotting and Horse Breeding Association, and the equine industry’s cultural peculiarity.

The process is examined from the perspective of the equine industry, which had to choose between joining or not joining the merger. The exchanges between 'horse people' and state regulators, the equine industry’s resistance and decision to participate in the merger, and concerns about impact are traced from Finland's leading equine newspaper, in 2015–2017. The articles are …

A Smartphone App Survey To Encourage Sustainable And Healthy Travel Mode Choices, Paul Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Can access to carbon footprint and health [calorie and fat burn] information influence transportation behavior? Survey methods are used in conjunction with a smartphone GPS mobile app to measure transportation tendencies in weekdays – weekends, and willingness to undertake modal shift based on app experience over one week.

Repurposed Spaces In Berlin And Johannesburg, Rebecca Kukla

Theses and Dissertations

Berlin and Johannesburg are repurposed cities, which were spatially designed to enforce a defunct social order, and which now must be used in new ways by new residents. Through a reading of several sites in each city, I examine how repurposed urban spaces and their inhabitants shape one another.

On The Nature Of Transportation, Ofir J. Klein

Theses and Dissertations

Just as cities have changes, so too have the conversations regarding them. To understand complex phenomena, often one breaks them down into elemental parts. The city is no different. By taking note of these buildings blocks, one is then led into higher order concerns. As the literature shows, these higher order, first order, concerns are denominated by the categorical "labor concerns," and even "housing concerns." In order for scholars to highlight and further their dialogue within their discipline, they draw upon different methods, methodologies, and studies more generally to make a case for the first order concern. This expands the …

Inheritances Of Injustice/Transference Of Freedom: An Intimate Project On Black Women's Intergenerational Relationships And The Consequences Of The Punishment System, Whitney Richards-Calathes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project centers the multi-generational familial relationships between system-impacted Black women, mapping and uncovering the ways in which incarceration and practices of punishment impact, shape, hurt, and displace Black femme lineages. Through a qualitative lens and a specific focus on the current social and political landscape of Los Angeles, this dissertation examines the ways Black women are impacted by carceral ideology; from punitive definitions of Black womanhood, to the surveillance on Black femme familial intimacy and the rupture of Black women’s sense of home and place. Understandings of mass incarceration are frequently male-centered and most analyses of Black women’s system …

Spreadsheets-In-Space: A Quantitative Exploration Of Movement, Currency Creation, And Conflict Within Eve Online, Christopher Alan Pryor

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

EVE Online is a massively-multiplayer online game with complex interactions between players and their unique, virtual environment. These relationships are the ongoing results of a conflict-driven economy, but they vary both in duration and by location.

This study attempts to quantify the direct effects of movement and indirect effects of conflict upon economic activity in the form of currency creation and delineate how successfully these relationships can be quantified by narrower time-spans and areas. Results of the mediation models used in this exploration indicate the changing relationship between movement (Ship Jumps), conflict (Ship Kills), and currency creation (Faction Kills) is …