Michael Katz, Urban Optimist

URBAN EVOLUTIONARY MODELING Yichun Xie Michael Batty

Cellular automata models have proved rather popular as frameworks for simulating the physical growth of cities. Yet their brief history has been marked by a lack of application to real policy contexts, notwithstanding their obvious relevance to topical problems such as urban sprawl. Traditional urban models which emphasize transportation and demography continue to prevail despite their limitati...

Portrait of an optimist

I come from a family of lawyers. When I was growing up, the only scientist in the family was my uncle, who was a physicist. But I was interested in science, and as a boy collected rocks and kept my “chemistry cabinet” in a spare room at my father’s law firm in Rome where I smelled up the place from time to time with failed experiments. When I finished high school at the Liceo Classico Torquato ...

Murphy Was an Optimist

Paul Katz

Paul S. Katz is a neurophysiologist known for his studies of neuromodulatory synapses in invertebrate neural circuits. Katz’s interest in neurobiology began as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. He did his graduate work at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he identified and studied serotonergic neurons in the stomatogastric ganglion of crabs. He was ...

The gaze of the optimist.

Two studies used eye tracking to investigate the attentional preferences of optimists and pessimists to negative emotional stimuli. In both studies, optimistic and pessimistic college students viewed three types of visual stimuli while having their eye movements tracked: skin cancer (melanoma) images, matched schematic line drawings, and neutral faces. In the first study, participants were aske...