Reductions in Traffic Sign Retroreflectivity Caused by Frost and Dew
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A study of in-service traffic signs was undertaken to quantify the average effects of frost and dew on their retroreflective capabilities. The results were then compared with proposed minimum retroreflectivity standards recently developed by FHWA-sponsored research for inclusion in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. Although the effects of frost and dew were found to be variable, average reductions in retroreflectivity levels of 79% and 60%, respectively, were found. None of the different colored signs sampled with Type I (engineering grade) sheeting was found to meet the proposed minimum levels when covered in frost or dew (with the exception of signs with white backgrounds covered in dew), even though all signs were in like-new condition. Signs sampled with Type III (high intensity) sheeting had mixed results. The findings are significant enough that they should be considered in the development of the final version of the FHWA national standards. Furthermore, those jurisdictions subject to frequent cycles of frost and dew should review usage guidelines governing the grade of sign materials used, allowing for expected loss of retroreflectivity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it