The Impact of Single-family Mortgage Foreclosures on Neighborhood Crime

Foreclosures of single-family mortgages have increased dramatically in many parts of the US in recent years. Much of this has been tied to the rise of higher-risk subprime mortgage lending. Debates concerning mortgage regulation, as well as around other residential finance policies and practices, hinge critically on the social as well as personal costs of loan default and foreclosure. This paper examines the impact of foreclosures of single-family mortgages on levels of violent and property crime at the neighborhood level. Using data on foreclosures, neighborhood characteristics, and crime, the study found that higher foreclosure levels do contribute to higher levels of violent crime. The results for property crime are not statistically significant. A standard deviation increase in the foreclosure rate (about 2.8 foreclosures for every 100 owner-occupied properties in one year) corresponds to an increase in neighborhood violent crime of approximately 6.7 per cent. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

Accelerated Fabrication: A Catalytic Agent within a Community of Caring

Accelerated Fabrication is an ongoing project in the Building Institute, a design-build program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in which team members designed a master plan for a homeless shelter, then immediately fast-tracked the deployment of several modest but instrumental fabrications on site. As a deliberate tactic, acceleration generated project momentum and stimulated an improvisational design process.     

ACHIEVING FLEXIBLE AUTONOMY IN MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS USING CONSTRAINTS

Organizations influence many aspects of our lives. They exist for one reason: they can accomplish things that individuals cannot. While recent work in high-autonomy systems has shown that autonomy is a critical issue in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, these systems must also be able to cooperate with and rely on one another to deal with complex problems. The autonomy of such systems must be flexible, in order that agents may solve problems on their own as well as in groups. We have developed a model of distributed problem solving in which coordination of problem-solving agents is viewed as a multiagent constraint-satisfaction planning problem. This paper describes the experimental testbed that we are currently developing to facilitate the investigation of various constraint-based strategies for addressing the coordination issues inherent in cooperative distributed problem-solving domains.     

Rethinking the Unthinkable

Single-use plastics were out of favor for a while, but the pandemic and health concerns changed that—at least for now     

阈值设定法对钢包眼面积的快速影像分析

在钢的二次精炼过程中,通过惰性气体(Ar)底吹法搅拌钢包里的钢水是一种常规手段,其目的是确保钢液的均匀性,并促进炉渣和金属相之间的化学反应。钢包眼区(Ladle eye)的面积大小对于空气(O₂, N₂)的吸收,以及钢渣的形成有着重要的影响,而钢渣的成分及形态决定了钢液及产品的质量。对钢包眼区域的在线分析有助于帮助操作工人掌握添加各种造渣剂的种类和数量以及对通气量(压力或流量)的控制。实验阐述了一种基于钢包顶部数码影像的快速分析技术,通过冷态模型实验和工业钢炉的实际测试,有效地计算出钢包眼区的面积,且计算速度快于0.1 s/frame,能够基本满足实时测量的要求。