A review of factors which influence pedestrian use of the streets: Task 1 report for an EPSRC funded project on measuring pedestrian accessibility

INTRODUCTION This document was written to report the results from Task 1 of the Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility project funded through the EPSRC Future Integrated Transport programme. The project is being carried out by staff at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds in collaboration with the Pedestrians Association and City of York Council. The overall aim of this project is to identify ways to encourage and enable more people to make more journeys on foot. The specific objectives are to: • quantify attitudes and perceptions held towards walking and the barriers to walking; • study the feasibility of developing a tool that can be used to evaluate pedestrian routes; • undertake validation of the tool. The achievement of these objectives will represent a thorough investigation into the two sides of providing for walking - the physical environment for pedestrians and people's attitudes to walking. Task 1 of the project is an extended literature review and survey of experts to identify an initial list of features that are thought to influence pedestrian use of the streets. The paper that follows is split into a number of sections which look at the different characteristics of pedestrians, factors which affect route choice, factors which affect mode choice, problems faced by pedestrians on our streets and a short review of recent Government (local and national) policy which has influenced pedestrian provision

A Gradualist Approach to Criminality: Early British Socialists, Utopia and Crime

The attitudes of early British socialists to criminality are a thoroughly under-researched area of historical scholarship. This paper draws on the utopian ideas of Robert Owen, William Morris, H. G. Wells, Robert Blatchford, Edward Carpenter and Ramsay MacDonald as a vehicle for investigating the attitudes of mainstream fin de siècle British socialists to crime, punishment and penal reform. Placing these figures and their utopias along a spectrum that sees radical ‘Arcadian’ socialists on the far left, ‘technological’ socialists on the far right, and moderate socialists occupying the middle ground, it presents two principal findings. First it demonstrates how crime was predicted by most of the left to decrease to a minimum level under socialism. ‘Arcadians’, ‘technological’ and moderate socialists invoked different methods in this pursuit, but each were in essence grappling with the same broader issue of the relationship of the individual to the state under socialism. Secondly, examining the multifaceted ideological heritage of the British left in relation to their approaches to crime, it is argued that, despite the left’s gradualist philosophy, their own attitudes to criminality actually closely reflected utopian conceptions. Examination of these issues offers an important opportunity to re-evaluate the evolution of British socialist thought

Quantitative relationships between benthic diatom assemblages and water chemistry in Macquarie Island lakes and their potential for reconstructing past environmental changes

This study is the first published survey of diatom-environment relationships Oil sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island. Fifty-eight sites in 50 coastal and inland lakes were sampled for benthic diatoms and water chemistry. 208 diatom species from 34 genera were identified. Multivariate analyses indicated that the lakes were distributed along nutrient and conductivity gradients. Conductivity, pH, phosphate (SRP), silicate and temperature all explained independent portions of the variance in the diatom data. Transfer functions provide a quantitative basis for palaeolimnological studies of past climate change and human impacts, and can be used to establish baseline conditions for assessing the impacts of recent climate change and the introduction of non-native plants and animals. Statistically robust diatom transfer functions for conductivity, phosphate and silicate were developed, while pH and temperature transfer functions performed less well. The lower predictive abilities of the pH and temperature transfer functions probably reflect the broad pH tolerance range of diatoms on Macquarie Island and uneven distribution of lakes along the temperature gradient. This study contributes to understanding the current ecological distribution of Macquarie Island diatoms and provides transfer functions that will be applied in studies of diatoms in lake sediment cores to quantitatively reconstruct past environmental changes

Numerical modelling and simulation in sheet metal forming

The application of numerical modelling and simulation in manufacturing technologies is looking back over about a 20–30 years history. In recent years, the role of modelling and simulation in engineering and in manufacturing industry has been continuously increasing. It is well known that during manufacturing processes simultaneous the effect of many different parameters can be observed. This is the reason why in former years, detailed analysis of manufacturing processes could have been done only by time-consuming and expensive trial-and-error methods. Due to the recent developments in the methods of modelling and simulation, as well as in computational facilities, modelling and simulation has become an everyday tool in engineering practice. Besides the aforementioned facts, the emerging role of modelling and simulation can also be explained by the growing globalisation and competition of the world market requiring shorter lead times and more cost effective solutions. In spite the enormous development of hardware and software facilities, the exclusive use of numerical modelling still seems to be very time- and cost consuming, and there is still often a high scepticism about the results among industrialists. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to overview the present situation of numerical modelling and simulation in sheet metal forming, mainly from the viewpoint of scientific research and industrial applications

European Railway Comparisons: Final Report

The Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds and the British Railways Board (BRB) carried out a major comparative study of Western European railways in the late 1970s (BRB and University of Leeds, 1979). Follow-up work was carried out by ITS financed by the Social Science Research Council and reported by Nash (1985). It was deaded to revive this work at ITS for a number of reasons: It is over ten years since the last set of comparisons (for 1981) were made at ITS and therefore a review of the changes in costs and productivity may be timely. There has been a number of technical developments that make the use of statistical cost analysis more promising. These developments include the use of more flexible functional forms such as the translog, and the development of comprehensive total factor productivity indices (see, for example, Dodgson, 1985 and, more recently, Hensher and Waters, 1993). There is increasing interest in the organisational structure of railway industries as a result of the 1988 Transport Act in Sweden, the EC directive 91/4-40 and the publication of proposals for privatising British Rail in July 1992 (see, for example, ECMT, 1993). Given the explosion in information technology, there were some hopes that data availability would have improved. (Continues..

Effect of matrix parameters on mesoporous matrix based quantum computation

We present a solid state implementation of quantum computation, which improves previously proposed optically driven schemes. Our proposal is based on vertical arrays of quantum dots embedded in a mesoporous material which can be fabricated with present technology. We study the feasibility of performing quantum computation with different mesoporous matrices. We analyse which matrix materials ensure that each individual stack of quantum dots can be considered isolated from the rest of the ensemble-a key requirement of our scheme. This requirement is satisfied for all matrix materials for feasible structure parameters and GaN/AlN based quantum dots. We also show that one dimensional ensembles substantially improve performances, even of CdSe/CdS based quantum dots

Varieties of Capitalism : Some Philosophical and Historical Considerations

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Cambridge Journal of Economics following peer review. The version of record: Goeffry Hodgson, “Varieties of Capitalism: Some Philosophical and Historical Considerations”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 40 (3): 941-960, January 2016. is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/cje/bev083.The literature on varieties of capitalism has stimulated some authors to challenge notions of ‘essentialism’ and even the concept of capitalism itself. In this essay it is argued that the existence of varieties of capitalism does not rule out the need for, or possibility of, specification or definition of that type. Accordingly, ‘capitalism’ is still a viable term. The critique of ‘essentialism’ is also countered, after clarifying its meaning. In particular, it is pointed out that a suitably-defined ‘essentialism’ does not imply some kind of ontological or explanatory reductionism – ‘economic’ or otherwise. But while adopting what are basically Aristotelian arguments about essences, we need to reject Aristotle’s auxiliary notion that variety generally results from temporary deviations from a representative type or trend. Furthermore, capitalism is a historically specific and relatively recent system: we need to develop a classificatory definition of that system that demarcates it from other past or possible social formations.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

External and internal noise surveys of London primary schools

Internal and external noise surveys have been carried out around schools in London, UK, to provide information on typical levels and sources to which children are exposed while at school. Noise levels were measured outside 142 schools, in areas away from flightpaths into major airports. 86% of the schools surveyed were exposed to noise from road traffic, the average external noise level outside a school being 57 dB LAeq. Detailed internal noise surveys have been carried out in 140 classrooms in 16 schools, together with classroom observations. It was found that noise levels inside classrooms depend upon the activities in which the children are engaged, with a difference of 20 dB LAeq between the 'quietest' and 'noisiest' activities. The average background noise level in classrooms exceeds the level recommended in current standards. The number of children in the classroom was found to affect noise levels. External noise influenced internal noise levels only when children were engaged in the quietest classroom activities. The effects of the age of the school buildings and types of window upon internal noise were examined but results were inconclusive