Cycling into the Future: Implementation of Enhanced Bikeways Along San Fernando Street in Downtown San Jose

In 2012, the City of San Jose acquired funding from the Transportation for Livable Communities Grant Program and began installing “green striped” enhanced bicycle lanes on a 1.5 mile stretch San Fernando Street between Diridon Station and 10th Street connecting San Jose’s Downtown Train Station to San Jose State University. According to city documents, these enhanced bikeways are intended to “enhance the visibility and safety of this route as a primary bikeway.” An important element of the project was the installation of LED streetlights to improve nighttime visibility. This specific project undertaken by the city falls under the umbrella of its Bike Plan 2020, intended to transform San Jose into “a city where bicycling is safe, convenient, and commonplace.” One of the Bike Plan’s primary goals is to reduce bicycle collision rates by 50% before the year 2020. The San Fernando Street Improvement Project and others like it will be validated by “reach[ing] a Gold-level Bicycle Friendly Community status by 2020.” The purpose of this research is to determine whether this project has successfully reduced rates of injuries and fatalities

Connecting Collections with Equitable, Diverse, and Inclusive Metadata

Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives are becoming commonplace as a strategy to address bias, racism, discrimination, oppression, and privilege in the historic record and improve discovery and access to rare and unique materials. SAA’s Statement on Diversity and Inclusion and Core Values of Archivists reflect the importance of these initiatives. This presentation will explore some of the practices archives employ to improve EDI in digital collections metadata, which may be the key to connecting related materials of underrepresented groups across disparate collections. Attendees will then learn about an in-progress quantitative research study that will evaluate academic archives’ practices aimed at creating equitable, diverse, and inclusive metadata, and measure the impact of institutional policies (library or university) on those practices. This research will fill a gap in the literature in which an exhaustive list of EDI metadata practices has not been quantified, and the impact of institutional policies on those practices has not been analyzed. The goal of this research is to present a clearer path for how archivists can engage their digital collections metadata with EDI practices and institutional policies, and promote data-informed metadata decisions to move toward more connected, accessible, equitable, and inclusive digital collections

Forever Free: The Dakota People\u27s Civil War

As I mentioned last week, I left Fort Snelling after our tour as part of the National Association for Interpretation annual conference unfulfilled. The potential for high-drama and deeply meaningful connections was palpable on that landscape. The audience, a crowd of interpreters, were begging for meanings. One African American woman in the group, after the site administrator mentioned in passing Dred and Harriet Scott being held at the site, asked about the nature of the labor used to build the fort. I was sitting in the row behind her. I could not see her face. But from the inflection in her voice, I could tell exactly what the unstated question behind her spoken one was: Were slaves used to build Fort Snelling? [excerpt

The reinvention of the ready-made

In this paper the history of a particular type of product design is analyzed, compared and\ud structured. The analyzed products are all of the type where existing objects are used or even incorporated\ud into the design. This principle is known in the art world as the ready-made. In this research\ud transformational- and composed ready-mades and several variations are described. The design principle\ud of using existing objects in designs is then compared with the relation between novelty and typicality as\ud predictors of aesthetic preference, as researched by Hekkert et al. From there it is argued that the readymade\ud principle could possibly contribute to designing pleasurable products because the resulting objects\ud incorporate both novelty and typicality in their presenc

The use of and responses to a letter writing process to increase communicative competence in ESL learners : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Second Language Teaching at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

This thesis is a study of how a teacher can help learners to increase communicative competence through an interactive letter writing process. The study was triggered in response to a specific group of immigrants' apparent improvement in not only their written English, but also in their ability to communicate more confidently with native speakers after using the letter writing process as the consistent medium of instruction. The research seeks to describe and ascertain the effectiveness of the letter writing process to enable the learners to become more communicatively competent. In order to do this, it explores some of the inherent underlying conditions to which improvement in communicative competence is attributed, and how these are incorporated into the letter writing process. The research identifies the areas to which the learners attribute their improvement in their communicative language ability. It also outlines the conditions needed to set up this process, the strategies used, and the ways in which the letter writing is extended into an oral activity. The research is in the action research tradition with a qualitative orientation. The researcher focuses on letters written weekly by the teacher to the learners over a one-year language course. The following strategies were explored in relation to the learners' perception of their improvement in communicative competence and their actual improvement in their writing ability: the self disclosure of the teacher in the letter, the introduction of language used in everyday conversation in New Zealand, and the interaction with native English speaking conversation assistants. The results of the research suggest that the instructional material, the weekly letter, provided the authenticity, relevance, interest and enjoyment to enable learners to maintain high levels of motivation and increase the level of output and accuracy of their writing. Through analysis of the learners' letters, there is a significant increase in not only the length of the letters, but also an increase in sentence length, the use of idioms and colloquial language, and a decrease in tense error. Through an analysis of written questionnaires and taped interviews, learners clearly identify the letters as significantly contributing to not only an increase in their linguistic performance, but also to their increased cultural awareness and confidence with native English speakers. The research highlights the potency of teacher/learner interaction and invites further research into the influence of the teacher's personality and teaching style, as well as the effectiveness of the letter writing process in the hands of other teachers

A Stitch in Time: Changing Cultural Constructions of Craft and Mending

Over the course of the twentieth century, the availability of cheap, mass-produced fashion has contributed to a decline in everyday domestic mending skills. Indeed, as mass-manufactured goods have become cheaper for the global population it has become normative consumer behaviour to dispose of any item that is less than per-fect, even when the damage is entirely superficial, leading Clark to claim that: ‘mending has died out’ (2008: 435). However, in recent years there has been an apparent revival in domestic mending, aided and evidenced by the emergence of sewing and mending groups in the UK, mainland Europe and North America. This has coincided with a growing interest in more sustainable material goods (McDonough & Braungart 2002; Fletcher 2008), and a small body of academic work around the notion of craftsmanship (e.g. Sennett 2008; Crawford 2009). Of particular interest here is the history of mending of clothing and household goods, as well as recent incarnations of mending as both an individual and group activity. In the past year, researchers from diverse theoretical backgrounds have also highlighted the role of mending in everyday material goods providing further insights into the subject (Laitala & Boks 2012; Middleton 2012; Portwood-Stacer 2012). An examination of mending reveals a complex picture in which gender, class, aesthetics and social motivations interweave with the imperatives of consumer culture. Whilst historically it is generally constructed as a feminine activity, and carried connotations of material deprivation, contemporary mending is often motivated by environmental concerns and a desire to reduce consumption. Ultimately, mending is demonstrated to be an under-researched subject loaded with cultural meaning, and ultimately, is shown to be anything but a trivial activity

Generalized Langevin Equation Formulation for Anomalous Polymer Dynamics

For reproducing the anomalous -- i.e., sub- or super-diffusive -- behavior in some stochastic dynamical systems, the Generalized Langevin Equation (GLE) has gained considerable popularity in recent years. Motivated by the question whether or not a system with anomalous dynamics can have the GLE formulation, here I consider polymer physics, where sub-diffusive behavior is commonplace. I provide an exact derivation of the GLE for phantom Rouse polymers, andby identifying polymeric response to local strains, I argue the case for the GLE formulation for self-avoiding polymers and polymer translocation through a narrow pore in a membrane. The number of instances in polymer physics, where the anomalous dynamics corresponds to the GLE, thus seems to be fairly common.Comment: 8 pages, no figures, minimal changes, to appear in JSTAT as a Lette

"Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and limits of computing technologies in philosophy and religion

Computing technologies like other technological innovations in the modern West are inevitably introduced with the rhetoric of "revolution". Especially during the 1980s (the PC revolution) and 1990s (the Internet and Web revolutions), enthusiasts insistently celebrated radical changes— changes ostensibly inevitable and certainly as radical as those brought about by the invention of the printing press, if not the discovery of fire.\ud These enthusiasms now seem very "1990s�—in part as the revolution stumbled with the dot.com failures and the devastating impacts of 9/11. Moreover, as I will sketch out below, the patterns of diffusion and impact in philosophy and religion show both tremendous success, as certain revolutionary promises are indeed kept—as well as (sometimes spectacular) failures. Perhaps we use revolutionary rhetoric less frequently because the revolution has indeed succeeded: computing technologies, and many of the powers and potentials they bring us as scholars and religionists have become so ubiquitous and normal that they no longer seem "revolutionary at all. At the same time, many of the early hopes and promises instantiated in such specific projects as Artificial Intelligence and anticipations of virtual religious communities only have been dashed against the apparently intractable limits of even these most remarkable technologies. While these failures are usually forgotten they leave in their wake a clearer sense of what these new technologies can, and cannot do

Towards a Common Language of Infrastructure Interdependency

Infrastructure systems can exist interdependently with one another either by design, necessity or evolution. There is evidence that interdependencies can be the source of emergent benefits and hazards, and therefore there is value in their identification and management. Achieving this requires collaboration and communication between infrastructure stakeholders across all relevant sectors. Recognising, developing and sharing multiple understandings of infrastructure interdependency and dependency will facilitate a wide range of multi-disciplinary and cross-sectorial work and support productive stakeholder dialogues. This paper therefore aims to initiate discussion around the nature of infrastructure interdependency and dependency in order to establish the basis of a useful, coherent and complete conceptual taxonomy. It sets out an approach for locating this taxonomy and language within a framework of commonplace stakeholder viewpoints. The paper looks at the potential structural arrangements of infrastructure interdependencies before exploring the qualitative ways in which the relationships can be characterised. This builds on the existing body of knowledge as well as experience through case studies in developing an Interdependency Planning and Management Framework for Infrastructure