1,721,130 research outputs found
Influence of drivers’ psychological risk profiles on the effectiveness of traffic calming measures
No full textRoad traffic injuries represent a serious public health problem and are one of leading cause of death, injury and disability around the world. Road accidents are often caused by an accumulation of factors; however, drivers appear to be by far the most decisive one. The driver's behaviour is complex and depends on reflex (or involuntary) and voluntary driving actions. The first class of actions (reflex actions) are typical human reactions that remain inaccessible to awareness and refer to the direct interaction between the road user and the characteristics of the road and its surrounding environment. Conversely, voluntary actions are conscious behaviours adopted on the basis of planned decisions. Both types of driving actions act simultaneously and the interaction between them and their relative effects on road safety are an aspect not yet well examined. The main objective of this study was to provide, by means of a driving simulation experiment, an insight on this interaction by evaluating the influence of some psychological characteristics on the effectiveness of different types of traffic calming measures at pedestrian crossings, designed according to the Human Factors principles. Fifty-eight participants drove a virtual urban route while data on their performance, as they approached five configurations of pedestrian crossings equipped with different physical and perceptual treatments, were collected. The participants were preliminarily characterized by means of two psychological questionnaires, which allowed the identification of three distinct groups of drivers belonging to three risk profiles (careful, worried, and at risk). The three groups of drivers reacted differently to the proposed engineering treatments, confirming the clustering identified by the preliminary analysis. The results showed that the proposed traffic calming measures are effective on all psychological sub-groups of drivers, with different effectiveness. These first results support that, in the considered driving environment (pedestrian crossings), the Human Factors approach, with which traffic calming measures can be arranged, could be effective, even if different psychological sub-groups are differently affected
The "Hourglass" model
No full textWhen there is an abnormality of the motorway traffic with drastic reduction of capacity, the almost immediate establishment of a queue is frequent. The note shows a generalized methodology to estimate the time needed to travel along a route in which a malfunction has occurred (even partial) forming a queue and with several possible time evolutions to free the section. The method is applicable to real situations in a motorway infrastructure with the primary purpose of providing correct information to users by means of variable message panels placed in a section upstream of the malfunction. The methodology was developed under a research agreement stipulated between the company Autostrade per l’Italia SpA and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Florence.When there is an abnormality of the motorway traffic with drastic reduction of capacity, the almost immediate establishment of a queue is frequent. The note shows a generalized methodology to estimate the time needed to travel along a route in which a malfunction has occurred (even partial) forming a queue and with several possible time evolutions to free the section. The method is applicable to real situations in a motorway infrastructure with the primary purpose of providing correct information to users by means of variable message panels placed in a section upstream of the malfunction. The methodology was developed under a research agreement stipulated between the company Autostrade per l’Italia SpA and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Florence
Infrastrutture aeroportuali
No full textIl libro raccoglie l’insieme del lavoro didattico svolto negli anni dai tre docenti autori per fornire agli studenti un supporto alle lezioni del corso.
Lo scopo del libro è quello di offrire agli studenti e ai tecnici di settore un percorso di conoscenza delle maggiori problematiche che occorre affrontare nella progettazione e nella gestione di un aeroporto, senza la pretesa di essere esaustivo, considerata la numerosità di argomenti coinvolti e la complessità di ognuno di essi
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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