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This thesis is an exercise in responsibility regarding my actions as an architect. It is based upon the belief that architecture is a product conveying culture. While architecture can convey culture, it also has the potential to shape and facilitate change q in culture. Therefore, one can view the architect as more than a technician, making architecture stand and work properly, or an artist, concerned with the aesthetic/architectonic qualities of architecture, but rather as an active entity who can both convey and change cultural values through the built environment. The struggle in this thesis regarding responsibility has been to make my role more than an active entity in culture, but a consciously active entity in culture. Since I have long viewed culture as a political product and one's existence in culture as a political act, then one’s responsibility as an architect could be to make architecture as the conscious embodiment of a political ideology. For me, feminism is the political ideology, and Liberative Architecture is the conscious embodiment. / Master of Architecture

This study examines the impact of white ethnic concentration on robbery and homicide in Chicago and New York City. As one of the first to disaggregate white ethnic populations, this study has the expectation that Italian-American concentration will have a stronger influence on robbery and homicide than any other white ethnic concentrations. This study is founded on prior qualitative research suggesting that the reputation of Italian-Americans influences the behavior of outsiders in their communities. The data show there is a significant and negative relationship between Italian-American concentration and the violent crimes robbery and homicide. This relationship only exists for white ethnic concentration with robbery. These patterns occur across both cities at three different aggregate levels. The results indicate that there may be particular characteristics about Italian-American ethnic concentrations which have dampening effects on the frequency of homicide and robbery in their communities; it is speculated that a reputation for Mafia involvement is one of the protective factors.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Richard Alan Daynard. / Ph.D.

Every late autumn and winter, lake-effect snow (LES) disrupts the livelihoods of those who reside in the lee of the Great Lakes. This phenomenon often generates significant localized snowfalls that can cripple one section of a community while the remainder is spared. Detrimental impacts on travel from snowfall rates of 1 inch hour-1 or greater are not uncommon. Storm-total snowfall gradients of 6 to 8 inches mile-1 have also been documented. Twenty four-hour snowfall measurements taken by National Weather Service (NWS) observers during Lake Ontario LES events were collected. Utilizing a geographic information system, snowfall was interpolated from spotter reports with the kriging method. Then, the area of warning-criteria snowfall was compared to the area of the corresponding county-based LES warning for calculation of percent of false alarm. This warning performance evaluator identified the proportion of a county-based LES warning that received sub-warning-criteria snowfall and was therefore unnecessary. A total of thirteen events from the 2009-2010 through 2011-2012 LES seasons were analyzed. The average percent of false alarm was approximately 90%. This suggests the NWS should consider smaller warning polygons. Limited-size warnings would enable meteorologists to provide greater specificity regarding the location of anticipated significant snowfall, while simultaneously reducing the number of people who are unnecessarily warned. / Department of Geography

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published_or_final_version / Geography / Master / Master of Philosophy

Hydraulic fracturing has become increasingly popular in the United States during the last ten years. It is a process that is used for the majority of new oil and gas wells, and is used to access the abundance of natural gas in the US. The largest shale bed is the Marcellus Shale which spans the area underneath many states in the Northeast, primarily New York and Pennsylvania. Policy and science have failed to keep up with the boom in fracking that has occurred across the US, which has led the process to be regulated at varying levels of stringency and a lack of understanding of the potential risks associated with fracking. New York decided that the potential adverse effects of fracking outweighed the economic benefits of job creation and increased tax revenue. New York was the 2nd state in the US that banned fracking, and the decision can be attributed to the unique environmental and political factors present. There were six major environmental reasons that New York decided to ban fracking: decreased respiratory health, drinking water contamination, soil contamination, seismic activity, climate change, and boomtown economic effects. Drinking water contamination is especially important in New York because New York’s reservoirs provide water for over 17 million people. These six environmental factors are not unique to New York, but their impact would be more widely felt than in many other states where fracking occurs. The political factors in New York are also critical to understand. New York is a blue state that is being governed by Governor Cuomo who after his re-election desperately needed to re-align with the left wing of New York’s democratic party. The analysis completed in this paper demonstrates that New York is unique in many ways and the decision to ban hydraulic fracturing there may not be easily replicable in other states.

As the New York Public Library entered the post-war era in the late 1940s, its operations fell under the zealous scrutiny of self-styled ‘redhunters’ intent upon rooting out library materials and staffers deemed un-American and politically subversive. The high point of attacks upon the New York Public Library came during the years 1947-1954, a period that witnessed the Soviet atomic bomb, the Berlin airlift, and the Korean War. This article charts the narrow and carefully wrought trail blazed by the library’s leadership during that period. Through a reading of materials in the library archives, we see how political pressures were perceived and handled by library management and staff. We witness remarkable examples of brave defense of intellectual freedom alongside episodes of prudent equivocation. At the heart of the library’s situation stood the contradictions between the principled commitments of individual library leaders and the practical political considerations underlying the library’s viability. As a general rule, the New York Public Library did not hesitate to acquire materials considered subversive by pressure groups, but the library frequently struck a course that sought to avoid controversy when possible.

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