The effects of speed cameras: How drivers respond

This study set out to examine the effects and effectiveness of various strategies related to the deployment of speed cameras, and to explore how different types of driver responded to cameras and perceived their operation. Recommendations for best deployment were to be considered. It was carried out between 1993 and 1996 after the Road Traffic Act 1991 authorised the use of automatic speed devices for the detection of offences. A series of 12 surveys arranged in five sets and having some cross-sectional and some longitudinal elements was undertaken together with some depth interviews, and self-report measures predominated. Five police forces helped to set up the research. In total 6879 drivers took part. The particular interventions focused upon comprised camera signing alone; two kinds of publicity campaign linked with speed camera deployment; prosecution following detection by speed camera; and the effects of cameras when first installed and over time.The Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions

Constraints on Cosmological Parameters from the 500 deg² SPTPOL Lensing Power Spectrum

We present cosmological constraints based on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing potential power spectrum measurement from the recent 500 deg² SPTPOL survey, the most precise CMB lensing measurement from the ground to date. We fit a flat ΛCDM model to the reconstructed lensing power spectrum alone and in addition with other data sets: baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), as well as primary CMB spectra from Planck and SPTPOL. The cosmological constraints based on SPTPOL and Planck lensing band powers are in good agreement when analyzed alone and in combination with Planck full-sky primary CMB data. With weak priors on the baryon density and other parameters, the SPTPOL CMB lensing data alone provide a 4% constraint on σ₈Ω^(0.25)_m = 0.593 ± 0.025. Jointly fitting with BAO data, we find σ₈ = 0.779±0.023, Ω_m = 0.368^(+0.032)_(−0.037), and H₀ = 72.0^(+2.1)_(−2.5)kms⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹, up to 2σ away from the central values preferred by Planck lensing + BAO. However, we recover good agreement between SPTPOL and Planck when restricting the analysis to similar scales. We also consider single-parameter extensions to the flat ΛCDM model. The SPTPOL lensing spectrum constrains the spatial curvature to be Ω_K = −0.0007±0.0025 and the sum of the neutrino masses to be ∑m_ν < 0.23 eV at 95% C.L. (with Planck primary CMB and BAO data), in good agreement with the Planck lensing results. With the differences in the signal-to-noise ratio of the lensing modes and the angular scales covered in the lensing spectra, this analysis represents an important independent check on the full-sky Planck lensing measurement

Does Engaging Commercial Customers in a Shared Social Mission Improve Impact Sourcing Service Provider (ISSP) Success? A Critically Appraised Topic

This topic paper examines whether engaging commercial customers through a shared social mission improves the success of social enterprises. It is based on an examination of a subset of the information technology and business process outsourcing (ITO/BPO) industries, known as impact sourcing service providers (ISSPs). ISSPs are social enterprises – B2R Technologies and Digital Divide Data are two examples – that provide call center, transaction processing, data entry, and other technology-enabled services for commercial customers from remote locations around the globe. What is unique about ISSPs is that they do this with a social mission of creating jobs and economic development in disadvantaged and marginalized communities. The analysis presented in this paper is based on an examination of academic research on ISSPs published in peer-reviewed journals from 2013 through 2022. The findings are that ISSPs that engage commercial customers through a shared social mission develop stronger bonds at both the personal and organizational levels. These bonds, in turn, strengthen the overall relationship between the companies and improve the ISSP’s success. Although specific to the case of ISSPs and the outsourcing industry, these findings offer lessons that can inform other industries and other types of relationships between commercial and social enterprises

The Community Involvement Program: Social Service as a Factor in Adolescent Moral and Psychological Development

The Community Involvement Program is a one-year high school program the aim of which is to lead students to a commitment to the solution of social problems by a combination of direct experience in social service and a classroom component in which to reflect critically on their experience. This thesis studies the effects of participation in the program on the moral and psychosocial development of adolescents

An Identification and Discussion of Key Success Factors in the Acquisition of Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS-) Based Systems

The purpose of this research was to explore COTS-based systems as they are acquired by the Air Force. Current guidance related to the acquisition of COTS-based systems is explored. Based upon the literature reviewed, the research targeted the specific area of acquisition plans. A multiple case study of acquisition plans from several COTS-based systems was performed. Current guidance related to the acquisition plan has not been specifically tailored to COTS-based systems. The results of the analysis of the COTS-based systems showed that the use total ownership cost (TOC) and cost as an independent variable (CAIV) enabled a system to he highly successful. The use of TOC combined with the use of CAIV in a COTS-based systems ensures a system has flexible requirements. This flexibility will lead to maintaining or lowering costs while increasing operational capabilities. Additionally, a plan for upgrades in a COTS-based system, that includes TOC and CAIV provides for reduced life cycle costs while allowing for system upgrades. It is imperative that any future acquisition guidance related to COTS-based systems includes TOC, CAIV and a plan for upgrades

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision

Carbon-optimal and carbon-neutral supply chains

Carbon footprinting is a tool for firms to determine the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their supply chain or with a unit of final product or service. Carbon footprinting efforts typically aim to identify where best to invest in emission reduction efforts, and/or to determine the proportion of total emissions that an individual firm is accountable for, whether financially and/or operationally. A major and under-recognized challenge in determining the appropriate allocation stems from the high degree to which GHG emissions (or emissions reductions) are the result of joint efforts by multiple firms. In this paper we introduce a simple but effective model of joint production of GHG emissions in general supply chains, decomposing the total footprint into processes, each of which can be influenced by any combination of firms. A supply chain in which all firms exert their first-best emissions reduction effort levels is "carbon optimal", while a supply chain which offsets all emissions is "carbon neutral". With this structure, we examine conditions under which the supply chain can be carbon-neutral and/or carbon-optimal. We find that, in order to induce the carbon-optimal effort levels, the emissions need to be over-allocated. This means that the focus in the life-cycle assessment (LCA) and carbon footprinting literature on avoiding double-counting is, in the context of setting incentives, misguided. We also compare the situation where a single firm offsets all supply chain emissions with that where one powerful firm can enforce an emissions reduction target across all firms in the supply chain, and find that neither scenario is always preferred over the other. Our work aims to lay the foundation for a framework to integrate the economics- and LCA-based perspectives on supply chain carbon footprinting

Retrospective Assessment of a Potential Cadmium Hazard

Author Institution: Department of Geology, The University of AkronIn 1968 an accidental discharge of cadmium plating solution caused a significant fish kill near Ravenna, Ohio. Water (130 samples) from West Branch Reservoir in 1971 and 1973 contained up to 0.055 mg/l cadmium, and fish (nine species, muscle tissue) contained up to 0.34 mg/kg. As a control, water and fish were sampled from Nimisila Reservoir. Cadmium was not detected in water (eight samples, 0.001 mg/l detection limit) and was detected in only one of eight species of fish (0.21 mg/kg)