Change in walking for transport : a longitudinal study of the influence of neighbourhood disadvantage and individual-level socioeconomic position in mid-aged adults

Background Unlike leisure time physical activity, knowledge of the socioeconomic determinants of active transport is limited, research on this topic has produced mixed and inconsistent findings, and it remains unknown if peoples’ engagement in active transport declines as they age. This longitudinal study examined relationships between neighbourhood disadvantage, individual-level socioeconomic position and walking for transport (WfT) during mid- and early old-age (40 – 70 years). Three questions were addressed: (i) which socioeconomic groups walk for transport, (ii) does the amount of walking change over time as people age, and (iii) is the change socioeconomically patterned? Methods The data come from the HABITAT study of physical activity, a bi-annual multilevel longitudinal survey of 11,036 residents of 200 neighbourhoods in Brisbane, Australia. At each wave (2007, 2009 and 2011) respondents estimated the duration (minutes) of WfT in the previous 7 days. Neighbourhood disadvantage was measured using a census-derived index comprising 17 different socioeconomic components, and individual-level socioeconomic position was measured using education, occupation, and household income. The data were analysed using multilevel mixed-effects logistic and linear regression. Results The odds of being defined as a ‘never walker’ were significantly lower for residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but significantly higher for the less educated, blue collar employees, and members of lower income households. WfT declined significantly over time as people aged and the declines were more precipitous for older persons. Average minutes of WfT declined for all neighbourhoods and most socioeconomic groups; however, the declines were steeper for the retired and members of low income households. Conclusions Designing age-friendly neighbourhoods might slow or delay age-related declines in WfT and should be a priority. Steeper declines in WfT among residents of low income households may reflect their poorer health status and the impact of adverse socioeconomic exposures over the life course. Each of these declines represents a significant challenge to public health advocates, urban designers, and planners in their attempts to keep people active and healthy in their later years of life.

Traffic safety at road-rail level crossings using a driving simulator and traffic simulation

A number of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) were used with an advanced driving simulator to assess its influence on driving behavior. Three types of ITS interventions namely, Video in-vehicle (ITS1), Audio in-vehicle (ITS2), and On-road flashing marker (ITS3) were tested. Then, the results from the driving simulator were used as inputs for a developed model using a traffic micro-simulation (Vissim 5.4) in order to assess the safety interventions. Using a driving simulator, 58 participants were required to drive through a number of active and passive crossings with and without an ITS device and in the presence or absence of an approaching train. The effect of driver behavior changing in terms of speed and compliance rate was greater at passive crossings than at active crossings. The difference in speed of drivers approaching ITS devices was very small which indicates that ITS helps drivers encounter the crossings in a safer way. Since the current traffic simulation was not able to replicate a dynamic speed change or a probability of stopping that varies based on different ITS safety devices, some modifications of the current traffic simulation were conducted. The results showed that exposure to ITS devices at active crossings did not influence the drivers’ behavior significantly according to the traffic performance indicators used, such as delay time, number of stops, speed, and stopped delay. On the other hand, the results of traffic simulation for passive crossings, where low traffic volumes and low train headway normally occur, showed that ITS devices improved overall traffic performance.

Bullying in children and adolescents : a modifiable risk factor for mental illness

It is a serious concern to health practitioners and policymakers that, in spite of substantial investment, there has been no meaningful decline in the prevalence of mental illness in Australia (Slade et al., 2009). It is now understood that a complex array of biopsychosocial factors confer varying degrees of risk of mental illness. Genetic predisposition, obstetric complications, environmental toxins, poverty, developmental delay, substance abuse, exposure to loss and trauma, chaotic family environments with accompanying abuse and neglect, chronic physical illness and maladaptive interpersonal interactions all contribute to an increased risk of developing mental disorders (Kieling et al., 2011). Bullying in childhood and adolescence is an identified risk factor for mental disorders, suicide attempts and drug and alcohol problems (Copeland et al., 2013; Moore et al., 2013)...

A C-ITS based lane changing advisory for weaving sections

This study examines the benefits of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) in weaving sections. The research proposes a lane-changing advisory application to alleviate the lane-changing concentration in weaving sections by coordinating weaving vehicles. While non-weaving vehicles travel as normal, weaving vehicles are monitored and advised through personalized messages based on their destination lane. The findings of this research, derived from a microscopic simulation in AIMSUN, reveal that the proposed strategy has the potential to improve delay significantly and that it can be applied to any existing one-sided weaving sections.

Protecting World Heritage sites from the adverse impacts of climate change : obligations for States Parties to the World Heritage Convention

Through its mandate to protect and preserve places of ‘outstanding universal value’, the World Heritage Convention provides an unlikely yet effective tool in global efforts to mitigate climate change. The practical efficacy of the Strategy to Assist States Parties to Implement Appropriate Management Responses (‘the Strategy’), which represents the World Heritage Committee’s primary response to the threats posed by climate change to World Heritage sites, is undermined by its weak stance on mitigation. This paper argues that the World Heritage Convention imposes stronger obligations on States Parties than those contained in the Strategy, including a duty on States Parties to commit to ‘deep cuts’ in greenhouse gas emissions. In order to ensure the continuing success of the World Heritage Convention States Parties must engage in extensive mitigation strategies without delay.

Much ado about nothing? The surprising persistence of nascent entrepreneurs through macroeconomic crisis

We hypothesize that a major macroeconomic crisis triggers four alternative responses among nascent entrepreneurs: disengagement, delay, compensation, and adaptation. We also suggest that commitment and ambition (or “high potential”) moderate these responses. Our most important finding is the relative absence of behavioral crisis responses. However, crises may make high-tech founders become more likely to disengage, whereas the opposite holds for founders far into the process. Our study sheds light on the mechanisms behind aggregate effects of crises on the number and type of start-ups in an economy, and can guide future research on the effect of crises on nascent entrepreneurship.

DS-VBF : dual sink vector-based routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor network

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have become the seat of researchers' attention recently due to their proficiency to explore underwater areas and design different applications for marine discovery and oceanic surveillance. One of the main objectives of each deployed underwater network is discovering the optimized path over sensor nodes to transmit the monitored data to onshore station. The process of transmitting data consumes energy of each node, while energy is limited in UWSNs. So energy efficiency is a challenge in underwater wireless sensor network. Dual sinks vector based forwarding (DS-VBF) takes both residual energy and location information into consideration as priority factors to discover an optimized routing path to save energy in underwater networks. The modified routing protocol employs dual sinks on the water surface which improves network lifetime. According to deployment of dual sinks, packet delivery ratio and the average end to end delay are enhanced. Based on our simulation results in comparison with VBF, average end to end delay reduced more than 80%, remaining energy increased 10%, and the increment of packet reception ratio was about 70%.

Impact of Mobility Constraints on Epidemic Broadcast in DTNs

In this paper, we investigate the effect of mobility constraints on epidemic broad-cast mechanisms in DTNs (Delay-Tolerant Networks). Major factors affecting epidemic broadcast performances are its forwarding algorithm and node mobility. The impact of forwarding algorithm and node mobility on epidemic broadcast mechanisms has been actively studied in the literature, but those studies use generally unconstrained mobility models. The objective of this paper is therefore to quantitatively investigate the effect of mobility constraints on epidemic broadcast mechanisms. We evaluate the performances of P-BCAST (PUSH-based BroadCast), SA-BCAST (Self-Adaptive BroadCast), and HP-BCAST (History-based P-BCAST) with a random waypoint mobility model with mobility constraints.

Impact of mobility and topology on information diffusion in MANETs

In some delay-tolerant communication systems such as vehicular ad-hoc networks, information flow can be represented as an infectious process, where each entity having already received the information will try to share it with its neighbours. The random walk and random waypoint models are popular analysis tools for these epidemic broadcasts, and represent two types of random mobility. In this paper, we introduce a simulation framework investigating the impact of a gradual increase of bias in path selection (i.e. reduction of randomness), when moving from the former to the latter. Randomness in path selection can significantly alter the system performances, in both regular and irregular network structures. The implications of these results for real systems are discussed in details.

Hand, foot and mouth disease in China: Evaluating an automated system for the detection of outbreaks

Objective To evaluate the performance of China’s infectious disease automated alert and response system in the detection of outbreaks of hand, foot and mouth (HFM) disease. Methods We estimated size, duration and delay in reporting HFM disease outbreaks from cases notified between 1 May 2008 and 30 April 2010 and between 1 May 2010 and 30 April 2012, before and after automatic alert and response included HFM disease. Sensitivity, specificity and timeliness of detection of aberrations in the incidence of HFM disease outbreaks were estimated by comparing automated detections to observations of public health staff. Findings The alert and response system recorded 106 005 aberrations in the incidence of HFM disease between 1 May 2010 and 30 April 2012 – a mean of 5.6 aberrations per 100 days in each county that reported HFM disease. The response system had a sensitivity of 92.7% and a specificity of 95.0%. The mean delay between the reporting of the first case of an outbreak and detection of that outbreak by the response system was 2.1 days. Between the first and second study periods, the mean size of an HFM disease outbreak decreased from 19.4 to 15.8 cases and the mean interval between the onset and initial reporting of such an outbreak to the public health emergency reporting system decreased from 10.0 to 9.1 days. Conclusion The automated alert and response system shows good sensitivity in the detection of HFM disease outbreaks and appears to be relatively rapid. Continued use of this system should allow more effective prevention and limitation of such outbreaks in China.

Modelling busway operation with mixed stopping and non-stopping buses

This thesis investigated the complexity of busway operation with stopping and non-stopping buses using field data and microscopic simulation modelling. The proposed approach made significant recommendations to transit authorities to achieve the most practicable system capacity for existing and new busways. The empirical equations developed in this research and newly introduced analysis methods will be ideal tools for transit planners to achieve optimal reliability of busways.

Fast and accurate business process drift detection

Business processes are prone to continuous and unexpected changes. Process workers may start executing a process differently in order to adjust to changes in workload, season, guidelines or regulations for example. Early detection of business process changes based on their event logs – also known as business process drift detection – enables analysts to identify and act upon changes that may otherwise affect process performance. Previous methods for business process drift detection are based on an exploration of a potentially large feature space and in some cases they require users to manually identify the specific features that characterize the drift. Depending on the explored feature set, these methods may miss certain types of changes. This paper proposes a fully automated and statistically grounded method for detecting process drift. The core idea is to perform statistical tests over the distributions of runs observed in two consecutive time windows. By adaptively sizing the window, the method strikes a trade-off between classification accuracy and drift detection delay. A validation on synthetic and real-life logs shows that the method accurately detects typical change patterns and scales up to the extent it is applicable for online drift detection.

Wide-area damping control for inter-area oscillations using inverse filtering technique

In this study, a non-linear excitation controller using inverse filtering is proposed to damp inter-area oscillations. The proposed controller is based on determining generator flux value for the next sampling time which is obtained by maximising reduction rate of kinetic energy of the system after the fault. The desired flux for the next time interval is obtained using wide-area measurements and the equivalent area rotor angles and velocities are predicted using a non-linear Kalman filter. A supplementary control input for the excitation system, using inverse filtering approach, to track the desired flux is implemented. The inverse filtering approach ensures that the non-linearity introduced because of saturation is well compensated. The efficacy of the proposed controller with and without communication time delay is evaluated on different IEEE benchmark systems including Kundur's two area, Western System Coordinating Council three-area and 16-machine, 68-bus test systems.

Choosing appropriate contract methods for design-build projects

For design-build (DB) projects, owners normally use lump sum and Guaranteed Maximum Price (GMP) as the major contract payment provisions. However, there was a lack of empirical studies to compare the project performance within different contract types and investigate how different project characteristics affect the owners’ selection of contract arrangement. Project information from Design-build Institute of America (DBIA) database was collected to reveal the statistical relationship between different project characteristics and contract types and to compare project performance between lump sum and GMP contract. The results show that lump sum is still the most frequently used contract method for DB projects, especially in the public sector. However, projects using GMP contract are more likely to have less schedule delay and cost overrun as compared to those with lump sum contract. The chi-square tests of cross tabulations reveal that project type, owner type, and procurement method affect the selection of contract types significantly. Civil infrastructure rather than industrial engineering project tends to use lump sum more frequently; and qualification-oriented contractor selection process resorts to GMP more often compared with cost-oriented process. The findings of this research contribute to the current body of knowledge concerning the effect of associated project characteristics on contract type selection. Overall, the results of this study provide empirical evidence from real DB projects that can be used by owners to select appropriate contract types and eventually improve future project performance.

EVERSUN: A phase 2 trial of alternating sunitinib and everolimus as first-line therapy for advanced renal cell carcinoma

Background We hypothesised that alternating inhibitors of the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR) and mammalian target of rapamycin pathways would delay the development of resistance in advanced renal cell carcinoma (aRCC). Patients and methods A single-arm, two-stage, multicentre, phase 2 trial to determine the activity, feasibility, and safety of 12-week cycles of sunitinib 50 mg daily 4 weeks on / 2 weeks off, alternating with everolimus 10 mg daily for 5 weeks on / 1 week off, until disease progression or prohibitive toxicity in favourable or intermediate-risk aRCC. The primary end point was proportion alive and progression-free at 6 months (PFS6m). The secondary end points were feasibility, tumour response, overall survival (OS), and adverse events (AEs). The correlative objective was to assess biomarkers and correlate with clinical outcome. Results We recruited 55 eligible participants from September 2010 to August 2012. Demographics: mean age 61, 71% male, favourable risk 16%, intermediate risk 84%. Cycle 2 commenced within 14 weeks for 80% of participants; 64% received ≥22 weeks of alternating therapy; 78% received ≥22 weeks of any treatment. PFS6m was 29/55 (53%; 95% confidence interval [CI] 40% to 66%). Tumour response rate was 7/55 (13%; 95% CI 4% to 22%, all partial responses). After median follow-up of 20 months, 47 of 55 (86%) had progressed with a median progression-free survival of 8 months (95% CI 5–10), and 30 of 55 (55%) had died with a median OS of 17 months (95% CI 12–undefined). AEs were consistent with those expected for each single agent. No convincing prognostic biomarkers were identified. Conclusions The EVERSUN regimen was feasible and safe, but its activity did not meet pre-specified values to warrant further research. This supports the current approach of continuing anti-VEGF therapy until progression or prohibitive toxicity before changing treatment.