Motorized transportation systems in the urban areas witnessed huge developments in the infrastructures thanks to the advances in various aspects of technology. This urbanization revolution has its own pros and cons. The resulting dominance of vehicles has limited the presence of people in public places and their participation in social activities, threatening the human based lifestyle of the ci...

Stress assignment to polysyllabic words is the only aspect of the pronunciation of written Italian that cannot be predicted by rule. It could be a function of stress dominance in the language or of stress neighborhood (i.e., the number of words sharing an ending and a stress pattern). In two experiments, we investigated stress assignment in Italian adult and, most importantly, young readers. Wo...

-The avian community of a mature residential area was studied and compared with an undisturbed climax beech-maple forest. Urbanization was presumed to be responsible for decreasing species richness and diversity, increasing biomass and density, and favoring dominance by a few species. Foraging guilds shifted from forest insectivores that were canopy foliage gleaners or bark drillers to urban gr...

We investigate spatial patterns of residential and nonresidential land use for 257 U.S. metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far the largest changes in our land use metrics occurred in the realm of employment, w...

This paper presents and studies models for multi-criterion budget allocation problems under uncertainty. The proposed models incorporate uncertainties in decision maker’s weights using a robust weighted sum approach. The risk averseness of the decision maker in satisfying random risk related constraints is ensured by using stochastic dominance. A sample average approximation approach together w...

Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...