Dear Rui
Please don't read; it might exceed your attention span.
What a good advice, perhaps you may benefit from it, for example:
1/ From the UK Department for Transport, you may wish to read research
that shows that on the long run the convergence between land uses
location and transportation do not converge as classic transport theory
would assume it. Please explain.
2/ From a different angle, what people do and what people say they do,
when they go around:
Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes
by Reginald G. Golledge. 445 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (November 30, 1998)
The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking
by Priti Shah (Editor), Akira Miyake (Editor)
454 pages - Navigation D. R. Montello
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (August 15, 2005)
Where it is shown that when people are chaining activities - that is
what most people do even if classic transport model assumed otherwise
then distance and shortest time is not what people use as way finding
heuristic despite what they may say: layout complexity is.
Perhaps, as well, you may wish to dwell on the subtleties of the
problems of stated preference versus revealed preference studies.
In transportation planning and in planning theory one recurrent problem
is the following one: should we be planning for people and what say they
do or for what they do or are we planning according to model that does
not account for what people actually do - i.e. we plan according to what
the model can say.
3/ Please do not come back with number of publication by square meter
kind of indices - I don't buy this kind of argument, competing theories
and their overlaps and heterogeneities are what make research
interesting and surely on the operational side there is a very pragmatic
urgency: it is not sot much what is right but what work best. Here a
counter example to your citation index and probably many exist:
Research on "where have all the criminals gone?" extracted from
Freakonomics Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
As you may know very different explanation were proposed about the drop
crime in the US. Page 120-121 of that book there is a table giving
explanation and citation rates from the LexisNexis database, it goes as
follow:
Crime-drop explanation nb of citations
1. Innovative policing strategies 52
2. Increased reliance on prisons 47
3. Changes in crack and other drug markets 33
4. Aging of the population 32
5. Tougher gun control laws 32
6. Strong economy 28
7. Increased number of police 26
8. All other explanations 34
Only 3 of 7 major explanations can be shown to have mildly contributed
to the drop of crime, and none of the proposed explanations whatever
citations rates they got is the right explanation. Conclusion load of
citation is not a warranty of doing the right thing.
From what I read recently, I trust there is a battle raging in physic
about atomic structure differing views, what do you make of it?
For comfort you may read Bruno Latour's classic:
- Laboratory Life
I suppose you are already familiar with it: i.e. the bullying rule.
Kind regards
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Alain Chiaradia GradDipl (AA) Arch dplg
Expressing a personal opinion
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