Abstract:San Diego, California, is the eighth largest city in the United States and one of the least affordable cities in the world. Many people in San Diego experience significant ramifications from competition for space. Currently, the southern side of downtown San Diego is the hottest area for development in San Diego county. This article examines the redevelopment of Barrio Logan, a small Latino community that borders downtown San Diego. Barrio Logan is a part of San Diego's third oldest community. The (...) study interviewed ten planning board members who participated in redevelopment and rezoning processes and provided thematic data. In addition, ten U-T San Diego newspaper articles also provided data on a referendum initiated by the marine industry to repeal adopted zoning ordinances. The data are used to discuss the construction of personal, group, and institutional social reality that influenced the outcome of the redevelopment and rezoning processes. The successful Barrio Logan Redevelopment Project Area process was about both the restoration and the sociopolitical empowerment of the community. Due to that redevelopment process, Barrio Logan has begun to emerge as a vibrant, exciting community. A subsequent redevelopment effort, the Barrio Logan Community Plan Update (BLCPU), focused on instituting new zoning ordinances to address the incompatible land uses and toxins in Barrio Logan. Industry in the community has resisted these types of changes to the zoning ordinances for decades. This resistance culminated with a referendum that repealed the BLCPU, which had been passed by the San Diego City Council. The marine industry's central selling vision of jobs influenced a majority of San Diego City voters outside of Barrio Logan to reject the Plan 1A version of the BLCPU. The reasons for and ramifications of the rejection of Plan 1A are discussed and steps Barrio Logan and the other San Diego redevelopment districts could take to improve their chances of winning a future referendum election are recommended. (shrink)

According to the Spatial Quantity Association of Response Codes (SQUARC), people hold a mental association between horizontal position and quantity (lower quantities left, higher quantities right). While a large body of research has explored this effect for response speed and judgment accuracy, the affective downstream consequences of the SQUARC remain unexplored. Aiming to address this gap, the present two experiments (pre-registered, total N = 521) investigated whether stimulus arrangements that are compatible with the SQUARC for luminance are affectively preferred to (...) stimulus arrangements that are incompatible. SQUARC-compatible square arrangements (dark-left, bright-right) were preferred over SQUARC-incompatible square arrangements (dark-right, bright-left). The preference for SQUARC compatibility was not moderated by the horizontal orientation of the response scale. Our results confirm the direction of the spatial-luminance association and provide initial support that the cognitive processing of SQUARC compatibility is hedonically marked and appears sufficient to impact affective evaluations. (shrink)

Multi-Task Learning tries to improve the learning process of different tasks by solving them simultaneously. A popular Multi-Task Learning formulation for SVM is to combine common and task-specific parts. Other approaches rely on using a Graph Laplacian regularizer. Here we propose a combination of these two approaches that can be applied to L1, L2 and LS-SVMs. We also propose an algorithm to iteratively learn the graph adjacency matrix used in the Laplacian regularization. We test our proposal with synthetic and real (...) problems, both in regression and classification settings. When the task structure is present, we show that our model is able to detect it, which leads to better results, and we also show it to be competitive even when this structure is not present. (shrink)

The national ethical guidelines relevant to assisted reproductive technology have recently been reviewed by the National Health and Medical Research Council. The review process paid particular attention to the issue of non-medical sex selection, although ultimately, the updated ethical guidelines maintain the pre-consultation position of a prohibition on non-medical sex selection. Whilst this recent review process provided a public forum for debate and discussion of this ethically contentious issue, the Victorian case of JS and LS v Patient Review Panel [2011] (...) VCAT 856 provides a rare instance where the prohibition on non-medical sex selection has been explored by a court or tribunal in Australia. This paper analyses the reasoning in that decision, focusing specifically on how the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal applied the statutory framework relevant to ART and its comparison to other uses of embryo selection technologies. The Tribunal relied heavily upon the welfare-of-the-child principle under the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008. The Tribunal also compared non-medical sex selection with saviour sibling selection. Our analysis leads us to conclude that the Tribunal’s reasoning fails to adequately justify the denial of the applicants’ request to utilize ART services to select the sex of their prospective child. (shrink)