Public Participation In The 1970s Channel Tunnel Debate Part II: The Garden Tunnel Alternative

Public participation in the 1970s Channel Tunnel system designdebates assumed the form of protest and calls for regulation andcompensation in the area most affected: the Garden of England,particularly around the tunnel entrance near Folkestone as well asthe land that would be used to accommodate the increase in lorriesand automobiles bound for the tunnel. The environmental protest(and the then Labour government's willingness to accommodate it)eventually led to expensive design changes to the Channel Tunnelsystem, and, according to most analysts, was one of the mostsignificant factors behind the cancellation of the project in 1975 (cf.Bonavia, 1987).Far less attention has been paid to the other significant outcomeof tunnel resistance in Kent, which was formulated during the publicdebate at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in 1973, and eventuallytranslated into a concrete system design proposal. Apart from theenvironmentalist voice, another set of garden interests emerged,dedicated to preserving and reviving the 'train in the garden'. Morein the pastoralist tradition, social groups coalesced to formulate whatmay be termed the 'Garden Tunnel' alternative. In the ChannelTunnel debate of the 1970s is the story of how loosely structuredpublic participation yielded a culturally acceptable system design.     

The personality correlates of adults who had imaginary companions in childhood

Two studies showed that adults who reported having an imaginary companion as a child differed from adults who did not on certain personality dimensions. The first yielded a higher mean on the Gough Creative Personality Scale for the group who had imaginary companions. Study 2 showed that such adults scored higher on the Achievement and Absorption subscales of Tellegen's Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. The results suggest that some differences reported in the developmental literature may be observed in adults.     

Illusory continuous motion from oscillating positive-negative patterns: implications for motion perception

A black and white (positive) grating pattern was superimposed in exact register on its own photographic negative. Four operations were repetitively applied to this positive pattern so that it moved fractionally to the right, grew dimmer, moved back to the left, and grew brighter again. This sequence produced a strong illusion of continuous apparent motion to the right for as long as the cycle was repeated. The small relative motion between the two patterns generated two new illusory effects: enhanced real movement (ERM) and reversed real movement (RRM). The dimming and brightening phases gave rise to reversed apparent movement (RAM). All three effects are attributed to spatial filtering by neural mechanisms, which shifts the effective position of the positive-negative contours.