81,831 research outputs found
The impacts of neighbourhood traffic management
A major traffic-related problem faced by residents is speeding, which not only
causes safety concerns, but also noise issues. Traffic calming is a much
favoured traffic management tool employed by road controlling authorities to
primarily reduce vehicle speed, hence improve community liveability.
This research aimed to investigate the impacts of traffic calming on speed,
safety and traffic noise. The objectives included developing models for the
prediction of speed and noise on traffic-calmed streets, and providing
guidance for good design practices.
Speeds of individual vehicles as they approached and crossed traffic calming
devices were observed in order to identify the behaviour of individual drivers.
Results indicated that the speed hump and the raised angled slow point
produced the largest speed reductions and least variation in speeds, while
mid-block narrowings had no significant speed changes. Inter-device speed
was found to be mainly controlled by the separation between devices.
85th percentile speeds at distances from calming devices were 40 – 45 km/h
for vertical deflections and 45 – 55 km/h for horizontal deflections. Speeds on
approach to speed humps were found to be influenced by the distance
available on the approaches, while operating speed at the speed humps were
partly influenced by the hump width relative to the road width.
There was evidence of safety benefits of traffic calming overall, despite mid�block crashes increasing post-calming. However, there was no association
between the traffic calming and the crashes, which appeared to probably be
due to other factors, human factors in particular.
Noise levels produced by light vehicles across speed humps were in fact lower
than on a flat section of road, given their respective mean speeds. At a
reference speed of 25 km/h, noise levels produced over the 100 mm hump
were 3.6 dBA higher than those produced by the 75 mm hum
Graph-RAT: Combining data sources in music recommendation systems
The complexity of music recommendation systems has increased rapidly in recent years, drawing upon different sources of information: content analysis, web-mining, social tagging, etc. Unfortunately, the tools to scientifically evaluate such integrated systems are not readily available; nor are the base algorithms available. This article describes Graph-RAT (Graph-based Relational Analysis Toolkit), an open source toolkit that provides a framework for developing and evaluating novel hybrid systems. While this toolkit is designed for music recommendation, it has applications outside its discipline as well. An experiment—indicative of the sort of procedure that can be configured using the toolkit—is provided to illustrate its usefulness
Weak convergence of the Stratonovich integral with respect to a class of Gaussian processes
For a Gaussian process and smooth function , we consider a
Stratonovich integral of , defined as the weak limit, if it exists, of a
sequence of Riemann sums. We give covariance conditions on such that the
sequence converges in law. This gives a change-of-variable formula in law with
a correction term which is an It\^o integral of with respect to a
Gaussian martingale independent of . The proof uses Malliavin calculus and a
central limit theorem from [10]. This formula was known for fBm with
[9]. We extend this to a larger class of Gaussian processes.Comment: 39 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.484
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