Pedestrian gap acceptance behavior in street designs with elements of shared space

Recent developments in the field of urban street design have seen the emergence of the concept of “shared space,” a term that refers to a range of streetscape treatments aiming at creating a better public realm by asserting the function of streets as places and designing more to a scale aimed at easier pedestrian movement and lower vehicle speeds. In light of this shift in focus toward the pedestrian, an examination was done on the aspect of pedestrian gap acceptance behavior and how this may have changed as a result of the implementation of street layouts with elements of shared space. With the use of video data from London’s Exhibition Road site during periods before and after its conversion from a conventional dual carriageway to a layout featuring a number of elements of shared space, the study looked at changes in key gap acceptance variables, such as waiting time, crossing time, crossing speed, and critical gap. The effects of several traffic- and pedestrian-specific attributes on gap acceptance were also investigated by means of binary logistic regression modeling. Results suggest that pedestrians felt more comfortable and confident in their interaction with vehicles post-redevelopment of the site because they not only tended to accept shorter gaps in traffic but also appeared to be more at ease when crossing. In particular, elderly people and pedestrians traveling with children seemed to benefit the most, no longer appearing to be any less comfortable when crossing the road than other pedestrians

Human rights and public education

This article attempts a contrast to the contribution by Hugh Starkey. Rather than his account of the inexorable rise of human rights discourse, and of the implementation of human rights standards, human rights are here presented as always and necessarily scandalous and highly contested. First, I explain why the UK has lagged so far behind its European neighbours in implementing citizenship education. Second, a comparison with France shows that the latest UK reforms bring us up to 1789. Third, the twentieth-century second-generation social and economic rights are still anathema in the UK. Fourth, the failure to come to terms with Empire and especially the slave trade means that the UK’s attitude to third-generation rights, especially the right of peoples to self-determination, is heavily compromised. Taking into account the points I raise, citizenship education in the UK might look very different

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements