Tag Archives: Research

No Left Turn: ‘Superstreet’ Traffic Design Improves Travel Time, Safety

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“The study shows a 20 percent overall reduction in travel time compared to similar intersections that use conventional traffic designs,” says Dr. Joe Hummer, professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State and one of the researchers who conducted the study. “We also found that superstreet intersections experience an average of 46 percent fewer reported automobile collisions – and 63 percent fewer collisions that result in personal injury.”

[Link to No Left Turn: ‘Superstreet’ Traffic Design Improves Travel Time, Safety]

Urban Planning Conferences

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Urban Studies Conference Alerts provides a useful list of opportunities to present your research. But the list is dominated by international events. Can we create (crowdsourcing?) a similar list focused only on the conferences in the United States? Does such a list already exist? By being focused on the U.S., the list can feature even student symposiums and smaller events.

Offering Financial Incentives to Faculty for Teaching Better

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My university, Texas A&M has floated an interesting (and controversial) proposal for bettering teaching standards – by offering a $10,000 bonus to faculty receiving favorable student evaluations. As expected, there is much consternation and the reality on the ground is that only 300 of more than 2,000 faculty members have opted in the ‘program’.

Matthew Yglesias while understanding that this might not be the best way to better teaching standards, agrees that “financial payoff to effective instruction might be reasonable” but we need to measure that “effective instruction” in a better manner. Measurement issues in a clearly qualitative environment (quality of teaching) is always going to be an issue that no bonus however high is going to solve. The first question ought to be how much really do you enjoy and want to teach as opposed to doing research. Those who love teaching will always do a good job; $10,000 incentive or not.

Open-Plan Offices Harmful?

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A review of global studies into the impact of modern office design found the switch to open-plan spaces had been overwhelmingly negative, with 90 percent reporting adverse health and psychological effects.

Open-plan offices not so good? Contrary to the popular opinion in business circles, Australian researchers have found open-plan offices counter productive and in fact, harmful to the health of the employees. Now let me get back to my cubicle and get some work done. Hopefully.

Significant Web Presence through Open Access

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Webometrics analyzes about 15,000 universities around the world and ranks 5,000 on their ‘web performance’ based on the institutions’ proclivity for a significant web presence. The criteria was determined by a weighted combination of visibility (external inlinks), size (web pages), rich files, and Google Scholar availability [via].

Their aim is to promote web publication and not rank institutions thus supporting open access initiatives and electronic access to scientific publications for research. Such a ‘web presence’ might have a correlation with academic quality and prestige as is evident through the ranking of top 4000 institutions (I’m glad to see Texas A&M ranked 16).

On a related note, there is a call for JSTOR to release academic research material into public domain as the content was created by academics funded by not-for-profit institutions. JSTOR in fact also is a self-sustaining not-for-profit institution.

Questia Online Library

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One of the first things I noticed when I came to the United States for my graduate education was the ubiquity of online resources. The Internet back home in India was still a novelty and its potential for educational resources was extremely limited.

Questia Online Library is an example of one such online library that gives you access to a large collection of books and journal articles in the fields of humanities and social sciences. The database also includes magazines and newspaper articles and is searchable by title, author, subject, and keyword.

One of the impressive options in Questia is the availability of online tools that enable users to create footnotes, bibliographical references, and hyperlinking across titles. I cannot overemphasize the importance of such tools that not only recreate the way you would use physical resources but also enhance your experience in using online tools in order to help you maintain a list of resources you accessed. One more additional feature that impressed me was the availability of more than 5000 books in online format. These books are public domain books whose copyright has expired hence are available to read for free in their entirety. No more buying expensive books or looking them up in libraries. You can use all the above mentioned reference tools in these books as well.

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