NOx and CO Fluctuations in a Busy Street Canyon

Busy street canyons can have a large flow of vehicles and reduced air exchange and wind speeds at street level, exposing pedestrians to high pollutant concentrations. The airflow tended to move with vehicles along the canyon and the 1-s concentrations of NO, NO2 and CO were highly skewed close to the road and more normally distributed at sensors some metres above the road. The pollutants were more autocorrelated at these elevated sensors, suggesting a less variable concentration away from traffic in the areas of low turbulence. The kerbside concentrations also showed cyclic changes approximating nearby traffic signal timing. The cross-correlation between the concentration measurements suggested that the variation moved at vehicle speed along the canyon, but slower vertically. The concentrations of NOx and CO were slightly higher at wind speeds of under a metre per second. The local ozone concentrations had little effect on the proportion of NOx present as NO2. Pedestrians on the roadside would be unlikely to exceed the USEPA hourly guideline value for NO2 of 100 ppb. Across the campaign period, 100 individual minutes exceeded the guidelines, though the effect of short-term, high-concentration exposures is not well understood. Tram stops at the carriageway divider are places where longer exposures to higher levels of traffic-associated pollutants are possible.

How Do Birds Sing Over City Noise?

Have you ever raised your voice because someone could not hear you? Imagine talking to a friend in a peaceful park. Now imagine trying to talk on a busy street or near a highway. The traffic noise makes it difficult to communicate, and you may speak up so your friend can hear you. Other animals have this issue, too. Songbirds can live in various environments, such as forests and grasslands, and they use their songs to communicate with each other. As cities grow and invade their habitats, birds may find it harder to hear one another. To be heard, some birds might change their songs. For example, some birds in cities sing louder, longer, or at a higher pitch than rural birds. Researchers are studying this problem: how does human-made noise affect birdsong? Answering this question is important so we can protect the birds around us and their habitats.

Caste as Performance: Ayyankali and the Caste Scripts of Colonial Kerala

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body cloth. While a few young women wore printed blouses, many, particularly the older women, wore no upper-body clothes except for large, beaded necklaces made of red-colored stones. Most people, with the exception of the men who clothed their upper body, walked along the sides of the road, leaving the path clear for the occasional bullock cart. These bullock carts, also known as villuvandi, carried young men-about-town, almost exclusively landowning, upper-caste Nairs. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, white mundu, and matching white turban, the Nair riding his villuvandi assumed the haughty air of a master surveying his subjects; out to observe his inferiors as much as be seen as a superior. These Nairs, and other upper-caste men and women, had the exclusive right of way, on bullock cart or on foot, the right to wear clean white clothes, and, of course, the right to ride a villuvandi. These rights were codified through caste-based rules or norms known as jati maryada, which governed all aspects of social behavior.

The Exiled Spaces Of The City: Transforming Laneways Into Community Spaces

This goal of this project is to re-imagine a derelict, underutilized, and exiled laneway in the Roncesvalles Village neighbourhood (alternatively known as ‘Roncy’), into a place that can be celebrated and used by the community. I imagine it to be a project that expands the street level excitement into the laneways. This project is heavily grounded in the practical. The idea for it flourished while standing on a rooftop of a building during a festival in the ‘Roncy’ neighbourhood. After spending the afternoon on the ground we retreated from the busy street to a private rooftop. From here, I was able to watch as people squeezed by each other enjoying street vendors and local artisans and music. But I could also see the intricate network of laneways that stood vacant and still amidst the heavy traffic on the street below. Since then I’ve spent countless hours wandering through the laneways in Roncy hoping to see activity, kids playing, informal economies, or seniors sitting and reading books. But alas, the only people I’ve come across are those looking through garbage and recycle bins in search of bottles to return for a few cents.

The Exiled Spaces Of The City: Transforming Laneways Into Community Spaces

This goal of this project is to re-imagine a derelict, underutilized, and exiled laneway in the Roncesvalles Village neighbourhood (alternatively known as ‘Roncy’), into a place that can be celebrated and used by the community. I imagine it to be a project that expands the street level excitement into the laneways. This project is heavily grounded in the practical. The idea for it flourished while standing on a rooftop of a building during a festival in the ‘Roncy’ neighbourhood. After spending the afternoon on the ground we retreated from the busy street to a private rooftop. From here, I was able to watch as people squeezed by each other enjoying street vendors and local artisans and music. But I could also see the intricate network of laneways that stood vacant and still amidst the heavy traffic on the street below. Since then I’ve spent countless hours wandering through the laneways in Roncy hoping to see activity, kids playing, informal economies, or seniors sitting and reading books. But alas, the only people I’ve come across are those looking through garbage and recycle bins in search of bottles to return for a few cents.

Neither a Hoax nor Art: Politics

On a Saturday morning in May 2013, a sign indicating a public work was installed on Padre Belchior Street, in central Belo Horizonte. According to the sign, in just a couple of days the busy street would become a construction site in which the main goal would be to undo four asphalted lanes and bring back instead the late Leitão stream – an urban stream which four decades ago was channeled and covered with concrete, giving place to a roadway. Three days later, the sign was no longer in place and the Federal Police had began to investigate the authors of the "fictitious project" for improper use of government logos. This article recovers this story in order to discuss the relationship between the proccesses that mark how cities are constructed, public participation and urban interventions.

Stimulus reliability automatically biases temporal integration of discrete perceptual targets

Many decisions, from crossing a busy street to choosing a profession, require integration of discrete sensory events. Previous studies have shown that integrative decision-making favours more reliable stimuli, mimicking statistically optimal integration. It remains unclear, however, whether reliability biases are automatic or strategic. To address this issue, we asked observers to reproduce the average motion direction of two suprathreshold coherent motion signals, presented successively and varying in reliability. Although unbiased responses were both optimal and possible by virtue of task rules and suprathreshold motion coherence, we found robust behavioural biases favouring the more reliable stimulus. Using population-tuning modelling of brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, we characterised tuning to the average motion direction. In keeping with the behavioural biases, the tuning profiles also exhibited reliability biases. Taken together, our findings reveal that temporal integration of discrete sensory events is automatically and sub-optimally weighted according to stimulus reliability.

Blind Submission

Muslims in the West are under pressure to perform nationalism and hegemonic gender ideology to neutralize themselves as threats. This has triggered a series of “blindfolded hug” viral videos that show individual Muslim males standing blindfolded in a busy street asking for hugs from passersby who “agree” that they are not a danger to society. In this article, I examine 51 such videos and argue that the visual of a minority male made abject reifies state might while building an aesthetic of peacefulness that Western Muslims are compelled to demonstrate. Such an aesthetic relies on the rhetorics of disability, the affective circulation of hate, and the stripping off of oppositional gazing to be read legibly by White audiences.

THE IMPACT OF TRAFFIC DYNAMIC ON AIR QUALITY AND VULNERABLE OBJECTS NEAR BUSY STREET IN NOVI SAD

In this paper, the distribution of nitrogen dioxide originating from vehicles from a busy street in Novi Sad, located near residential buildings and kindergartens, was performed. Based on the calculated level of nitrogen dioxide emissions from the vehicle, as well as the most frequent meteorological conditions, simulation of nitrogen dioxide propagation was carried out using ADMS urban software. Considering that the street is a part of the bridge whose elevation is gradually increasing, this research reveals permanently and intense exposure of certain parts of the residential buildings. The results presented in this paper can serve as a useful basis for taking measures to reduce the impact of traffic on air quality and human health through urban planning particulary of vulnerable facilities.

Penggunaan Aplikasi Sound Level Meter Berbasis Android pada Pengukuran Kebisingan PLTD Ni’u Bima dan SDN 77 Kota Bima

Lingkungan pendidikan seyogyanya mendukung terwujudnya suasana belajar dan proses pembelajaran, dimana peserta didik secara aktif dapat mengembangkan potensi diri sehingga memiliki kecerdasan intelektual, spiritual, akhlak serta keterampilan. Namun dalam kenyataaannya, perkembangan kebutuhan masyarakat menimbulkan masalah baru seperti berdampingannya SDN 77 Kota Bima dengan PLTD Ni’u Bima dalam penelitian ini. Sesuai aturan Menteri Lingkungan Hidup No. 48 Tahun 1996, intensitas standar lingkungan pendidikan ≤ 55 dBA. Otomatis intensitas diatas standar ini menjadi polutan dan harus dicari solusinya jika tidak, dapat mengganggu kesehatan apalagi jika terpapar dalam waktu yang lama. Penelitian ini merupakan pendekatan kuantitatif yang dimulai dengan tahapan pendahuluan, tahapan pengukuran data intensitas dan frekuensi, dan tahapan penyusunan rekomendasi penciptaan lingkungan belajar yang kondusif dalam bentuk bahan ajar mahasiswa yang berisi konsep dan aplikasi rekomendasi sekolah berbasis kebisingan. Teknik pengukuran terdiri dari 2 yaitu jarak dari sumber bising dan keliling pada PLTD serta lingkungan sekolah. Adapun data hasil pengukuran rata – rata di dalam PLTD memiliki (Lmax) 100 dBA, (Lmin) 85,64 dBA, (Lavg) 88,46 dBA dengan frekuensi 1.250 Hz dan 2 klasifikasi Subway Train serta Factory machinery. Sedangkan pada lingkungan sekolah (Lmax) 86,0 dBA, (Lmin) 71,0 dBA, (Lavg) 79,59 dBA dengan frekuensi 950 Hz dan klasifikasi Busy street serta Busy traffic. Keseluruhan tahapan penelitian memberikan indikasi kuat akan perlunya upaya treatment lingkungan sekolah demi terjaganya konduktivitas lingkungan belajar