Measuring the satisfaction of multimodal travelers for local transit services in different urban contexts

The importance of measuring customer satisfaction for a public transport service is apparent, even beyond more immediate marketing purposes. The present paper shows how satisfaction measures can be exploited to gain insights on the relationship between personal attitudes, transit use and urban context. We consider nine satisfaction measures of urban transit services, as expressed by a representative sample of Italian multimodal travelers (i.e. users of both private cars and public transport). We use correlations and correspondence analyses to show if and how each attribute is related to the levels of use of public transport, and how the relationship is affected by the urban context. Then we apply a recently developed method to combine ordinal variables into one score, by adapting it to work with large samples and with satisfaction measures which have a neutral point in the scale (i.e. ‘‘neither satisfied nor dissatisfied''). The resulting overall satisfaction levels and frequency of use were not correlated in our sample. We also found the highest satisfaction levels in smaller towns and the lowest ones in metropolitan cities. Since we focus on multimodal travelers, an interpretation paradigm is proposed according to which transit services must be well evaluated by car drivers in smaller towns in order to be considered a real alternative to cars. On the other hand, transit is more competitive on factual elements in larger cities, so that it can still be used by drivers, even if it is not very well evaluate

Parity-violating aysmmetries in elastic e⃗p\vec{e}p scattering in the chiral quark-soliton model: Comparison with A4, G0, HAPPEX and SAMPLE

We investigate parity-violating electroweak asymmetries in the elastic scattering of polarized electrons off protons within the framework of the chiral quark-soliton model ($\chi$QSM). We use as input the former results of the electromagnetic and strange form factors and newly calculated SU(3) axial-vector form factors, all evaluated with the same set of four parameters adjusted several years ago to general mesonic and baryonic properties. Based on this scheme, which yields positive electric and magnetic strange form factors with a $\mu_s=(0.08-0.13)\mu_N$, we determine the parity-violating asymmetries of elastic polarized electron-proton scattering. The results are in a good agreement with the data of the A4, HAPPEX, and SAMPLE experiments and reproduce the full $Q^2$-range of the G0-data. We also predict the parity-violating asymmetries for the backward G0 experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Picture Perfect: The Impact of Spirituality and Media on Women\u27s Sexuality

Media plays a large role in the sexualization of women. The increase in sexual socialization of media has brought the hookup culture to college campuses. Moreover, it has led to several negative consequences in healthy sexual and identity development in females. Understanding that sexual well-being is vital in one’s development, higher education professionals have begun to take note of this increasingly important issue affecting the larger student body. Although sexuality is difficult to navigate for any emerging adult, it seems particularly complex for women who follow a specific religion. More specifically, Christian women from faith-based institutions face cultural pressures from both the hookup culture and the pervasive purity culture. In order to examine the influence of spirituality and media on female college students’ sexuality, a qualitative phenomenological study was conducted at a small, liberal arts, faith-based university in the Midwestern United States. The question used to guide the research was as follows: How do spirituality and media impact female college students’ perceptions of sexuality at a faith-based institution? The study consisted of 31 female participants within four focus group interviews. The results of the study found strong emerging themes including social incongruence, silence within the church, and increase in sexual and spiritual development. Suggestions for further research are included, along with the implications of these findings on the work of those within institutions of higher education

The Engineering Hubs and Spokes Project - institutional cooperation in educational design and delivery

The emergence of blended learning techniques that embrace a combination of face-to-face and online learning environments offers a raft of opportunity for flexibility in education. While much writing has focused on the opportunities for flexibility for the students and teachers, this paper focuses on the opportunities for effective sharing of expertise and effort between institutions. The Engineering 'Hubs and Spokes' project is a collaboration between The Australian National University and the University of South Australia. It draws on the strengths of each to improve the range and quality of educational opportunities for students. Two components of the project are underpinned by blended teaching and learning techniques: sharing of courses at the advanced undergraduate level; and development of an integrated graduate development program. We describe choices made, benefits identified, and the challenges encountered in the early stages of the project. We discuss recommendations for the future of cooperation in educational design and delivery, and comment on the opportunities that arise for structural reform of the higher education sector

The Shape of Art History in the Eyes of the Machine

How does the machine classify styles in art? And how does it relate to art historians' methods for analyzing style? Several studies have shown the ability of the machine to learn and predict style categories, such as Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, etc., from images of paintings. This implies that the machine can learn an internal representation encoding discriminative features through its visual analysis. However, such a representation is not necessarily interpretable. We conducted a comprehensive study of several of the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks applied to the task of style classification on 77K images of paintings, and analyzed the learned representation through correlation analysis with concepts derived from art history. Surprisingly, the networks could place the works of art in a smooth temporal arrangement mainly based on learning style labels, without any a priori knowledge of time of creation, the historical time and context of styles, or relations between styles. The learned representations showed that there are few underlying factors that explain the visual variations of style in art. Some of these factors were found to correlate with style patterns suggested by Heinrich W\"olfflin (1846-1945). The learned representations also consistently highlighted certain artists as the extreme distinctive representative of their styles, which quantitatively confirms art historian observations