Analysing Pedestrian Traffic Around Public Displays

This paper presents a powerful approach to evaluating public technologies by capturing and analysing pedestrian traffic using computer vision. This approach is highly flexible and scales better than traditional ethnographic techniques often used to evaluate technology in public spaces. This technique can be used to evaluate a wide variety of public installations and the data collected complements existing approaches. Our technique allows behavioural analysis of both interacting users and non-interacting passers-by. This gives us the tools to understand how technology changes public spaces, how passers-by approach or avoid public technologies, and how different interaction styles work in public spaces. In the paper, we apply this technique to two large public displays and a street performance. The results demonstrate how metrics such as walking speed and proximity can be used for analysis, and how this can be used to capture disruption to pedestrian traffic and passer-by approach patterns

Urban Welfare-to-Work Transitions in the 1990s: Patterns in Six Urban Areas

This report focuses on patterns of welfare use and employment for welfare leavers for central counties in each of six metropolitan areas

Matching, Ethnicity and Identity. Reflections on the practice and realities of ethnic matching in adoption.

Ethnicity and adoption have taken centre stage in the Coalition Government's focus on child care social policy in the UK. The current political perspective is one of promoting the placement of children of minority ethnic heritage with white families, in order to avoid delay in adoption where no families of a similar ethnic heritage are available. John Wainwright and Julie Ridley reflect on the contemporary debate by discussing the findings from a commissioned service evaluation of an adoption agency that specialised in recruiting families of black, Asian and dual heritage, and placing children of black and minority ethnic (BME) heritage. This service evaluation provides evidence that focusing on recruiting BME individuals and families and matching them with children of similar heritage can be effective. The evaluation utilised mixed methods, including interviews with staff in the service, prospective and current adopters, and statistical information that informed an understanding of the type of ethnic matches made. Comparison was also made with a general adoption service within the commissioning agency using the same data collection methods

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

Spectroscopy and Photometry of Cataclysmic Variable Candidates from the Catalina Real Time Survey

The Catalina Real Time Survey (CRTS) has found over 500 cataclysmic variable (CV) candidates, most of which were previously unknown. We report here on followup spectroscopy of 36 of the brighter objects. Nearly all the spectra are typical of CVs at minimum light. One object appears to be a flare star, while another has a spectrum consistent with a CV but lies, intriguingly, at the center of a small nebulosity. We measured orbital periods for eight of the CVs, and estimated distances for two based on the spectra of their secondary stars. In addition to the spectra, we obtained direct imaging for an overlapping sample of 37 objects, for which we give magnitudes and colors. Most of our new orbital periods are shortward of the so-called period gap from roughly 2 to 3 hours. By considering the cross-identifications between the Catalina objects and other catalogs such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we argue that a large number of cataclysmic variables remain uncatalogued. By comparing the CRTS sample to lists of previously-known CVs that CRTS does not recover, we find that the CRTS is biased toward large outburst amplitudes (and hence shorter orbital periods). We speculate that this is a consequence of the survey cadence.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. 35 pages, including 7 figure

The Labour Market Mobility of Polish Migrants: A Comparative Study of Three Regions in South Wales, UK

Since Polish migrants began entering the UK labour market in the post-accession period, there has been a significant amount of case study research focusing on the impact of this large migrant group on the UK economy. However, ten years after enlargement, there is still insufficient information regarding the labour market mobility of Polish migrants residing in the UK for the longer term. The available research on this topic is largely concentrated in urban settings such as London or Birmingham, and does not necessarily capture the same patterns of labour market mobility as in non-urban settings. Using qualitative data collected in three case study locations – urban, semi-urban and rural – in the South Wales region from 2008–2012, this article has two main aims. First, given the proximity of the case study locations, the article highlights the diversity of the Polish migrant characteristics through the samples used. Second, using trajectories created from the data, this article compares the variations among the labour market movements of the Polish migrants in each sample to determine what characteristics influence labour market ascent. Through this comparative trajectory analysis, the findings from this article point to the relative English language competency of migrants as the primary catalyst for progression in the Welsh labour market across all three case study regions. The secondary catalyst, which is intertwined with the first, is the composition of the migrants’ social networks, which enable, or in some cases disable, labour market progression. These findings have significant implications in the national and in the supranational policy sphere regarding the employment of migrants as well as their potential for cultural integration in the future

Exploring Net Benefit Maximization: Conservation Easements and the Public-Private Interface

Gustanski and Wright talk about conservation easements and the public-private interface. The ease of application across varied lands coupled with the financial and tax-associated benefits of conservation easements have driven the popularity of their use in conserving private lands across the US. Conservation easements typically require sizeable public funding resources, which are provided through either direct public expenditures via diverse public programs established to promote the conservation of land or through tax benefits

Rethinking transparency and accountability in medicines regulation in the United Kingdom

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