Analysis of road potential and bottlenecks based on operating speed

Vehicle detectors have been installed at approximately every 300 meters on each lane on Tokyo metropolitan expressway. Various traffic data such as traffic volume, average speed and time occupancy are collected by vehicle detectors. We can understand traffic characteristics of every point by comparing traffic data collected at consecutive points. In this study, we focused on average speed, analyzed road potential by operating speed during free-flow conditions, and identified latent bottlenecks. Furthermore, we analyzed effects for road potential by the rainfall level and day of the week. It’s expected that this method of analysis will be utilized for installation of ITS such as drive assist, estimation of parameters for traffic simulation and feedback to road design as congestion measures.

Mobile phone use while driving : an investigation of the beliefs influencing drivers’ hands-free and hand-held mobile phone use.

This study explored the psychological influences of hands-free and hand-held mobile phone use while driving. Participants were 796 Australian drivers aged 17 to 76 years who owned mobile phones. A cross-sectional survey assessed frequency of calling and text messaging while driving (overall, hands-free, hand-held) as well as drivers’ behavioural, normative, and control beliefs relating to mobile phone use while driving. Irrespective of handset type, 43% of drivers reported answering calls while driving on a daily basis, followed by making calls (36%), reading text messages (27%), and sending text messages (18%). In total, 63.9% of drivers did not own hands-free kits and, of the drivers that owned hand-free kits, 32% did not use it most or all of the time. Significant differences were found in the behavioural, normative, and control beliefs of frequent and infrequent users of both types of handset while driving. As expected, frequent users reported more advantages of, more approval from others for, and fewer barriers that would prevent them from, using either a hands-free or a hand-held mobile phone while driving than infrequent users. Campaigns to reduce mobile phone use while driving should attempt to minimise the perceived benefits of the behaviour and highlight the risks of this unsafe driving practice.

Applying data mining to assess crash risk on curves

The wide range of contributing factors and circumstances surrounding crashes on road curves suggest that no single intervention can prevent these crashes. This paper presents a novel methodology, based on data mining techniques, to identify contributing factors and the relationship between them. It identifies contributing factors that influence the risk of a crash. Incident records, described using free text, from a large insurance company were analysed with rough set theory. Rough set theory was used to discover dependencies among data, and reasons using the vague, uncertain and imprecise information that characterised the insurance dataset. The results show that male drivers, who are between 50 and 59 years old, driving during evening peak hours are involved with a collision, had a lowest crash risk. Drivers between 25 and 29 years old, driving from around midnight to 6 am and in a new car has the highest risk. The analysis of the most significant contributing factors on curves suggests that drivers with driving experience of 25 to 42 years, who are driving a new vehicle have the highest crash cost risk, characterised by the vehicle running off the road and hitting a tree. This research complements existing statistically based tools approach to analyse road crashes. Our data mining approach is supported with proven theory and will allow road safety practitioners to effectively understand the dependencies between contributing factors and the crash type with the view to designing tailored countermeasures.

How does ambulance service utilisation impact demand for Emergency Departments in Queensland, Australia?

Background: There are indications that pre-hospital emergency care and management of patients can help reduce the demand for hospital emergency departments (EDs). Ambulance services play a significant role at this stage of care. In 2003, the Queensland Government introduced a Community Ambulance Cover (CAC) levy in return for a free ambulance service at the point of access to all Queenslanders. This may have led to the impression in consumers of an entitlement to free ambulance services under any circumstances regardless of the urgency of the matter which may have in turn contributed to the crowding of EDs in Queensland. Objectives: This paper aims to answer the following questions: - How many patients arrive at hospital EDs by ambulance in Queensland, compared to other modes of arrival? - How has this changed over time, particularly after the CAC introduction in 2003? What percentage of ambulance arrivals are urgent ED patients? - Has the perceived free ambulance services created extra demand for EDs in Queensland, compared with other Australian jurisdictions that charge patients for ambulance services? Methods: We will secondary analyse the data from sources such as Queensland Ambulance Services, Department of Health and Australian Bureau of Statistics to answer the research questions. Findings and Conclusions Queensland has the highest utilization rate of ambulance services (about 18% in 2007-08) and the highest annual growth rate in demand for these services (7.7% on average since 2000-01), well above the population growth. On the other hand, the proportion of ED patients arriving by ambulance in Queensland has increased by about 4% annually. However, when compared with other states and territories with charge at the point of access, it seems that the growth in demand for EDs cannot be explained solely or mainly by CAC or ambulance utilisation in Queensland.

Planning for smart urban ecosystems : information technology applications for capacity building in environmental decision making

Since the industrial revolution, our world has experienced rapid and unplanned industrialization and urbanization. As a result, we have had to cope with serious environmental challenges. In this context, an explanation of how smart urban ecosystems can emerge, gains a crucial importance. Capacity building and community involvement have always been key issues in achieving sustainable development and enhancing urban ecosystems. By considering these, this paper looks at new approaches to increase public awareness of environmental decision making. This paper will discuss the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), particularly Webbased Geographic Information Systems (Web-based GIS) as spatial decision support systems to aid public participatory environmental decision making. The paper also explores the potential and constraints of these webbased tools for collaborative decision making.

“Just try harder and you will shine” : a Study of 20 lazy children

Attributions of laziness, reflected in teacher comments such as “just try harder and you will shine” may mask specific cognitive, learning, attentional or emotional problems that could explain low motivation in some children. This paper reports findings from an investigation of 20 children, aged 7 to 10 years, who were regarded as lazy by their parents and teachers. Questionnaire measures provided evidence of low levels of motivation and classroom engagement. Psychometric assessments revealed the presence of a range of difficulties including phonologically-based learning disabilities and significant problems with attention in 17 of the 20 children. The paper concludes that the special needs of an unknown number of children may be overlooked because they are simply presumed to be lazy.

Open occupations - Why work should be free

The benefits of openness are widely apparent everywhere except, seemingly, in occupations. Yet the case against occupational licensing still remains strong. Consideration of dynamic costs strengthens the case further.

Structuring free-form tagging in online news

Tagging has become one of the key activities in next generation websites which allow users selecting short labels to annotate, manage, and share multimedia information such as photos, videos and bookmarks. Tagging does not require users any prior training before participating in the annotation activities as they can freely choose any terms which best represent the semantic of contents without worrying about any formal structure or ontology. However, the practice of free-form tagging can lead to several problems, such as synonymy, polysemy and ambiguity, which potentially increase the complexity of managing the tags and retrieving information. To solve these problems, this research aims to construct a lightweight indexing scheme to structure tags by identifying and disambiguating the meaning of terms and construct a knowledge base or dictionary. News has been chosen as the primary domain of application to demonstrate the benefits of using structured tags for managing the rapidly changing and dynamic nature of news information. One of the main outcomes of this work is an automatically constructed vocabulary that defines the meaning of each named entity tag, which can be extracted from a news article (including person, location and organisation), based on experts suggestions from major search engines and the knowledge from public database such as Wikipedia. To demonstrate the potential applications of the vocabulary, we have used it to provide more functionalities in an online news website, including topic-based news reading, intuitive tagging, clipping and sharing of interesting news, as well as news filtering or searching based on named entity tags. The evaluation results on the impact of disambiguating tags have shown that the vocabulary can help to significantly improve news searching performance. The preliminary results from our user study have demonstrated that users can benefit from the additional functionalities on the news websites as they are able to retrieve more relevant news, clip and share news with friends and families effectively.

Damage assessment in structures using vibration characteristics

Changes in load characteristics, deterioration with age, environmental influences and random actions may cause local or global damage in structures, especially in bridges, which are designed for long life spans. Continuous health monitoring of structures will enable the early identification of distress and allow appropriate retrofitting in order to avoid failure or collapse of the structures. In recent times, structural health monitoring (SHM) has attracted much attention in both research and development. Local and global methods of damage assessment using the monitored information are an integral part of SHM techniques. In the local case, the assessment of the state of a structure is done either by direct visual inspection or using experimental techniques such as acoustic emission, ultrasonic, magnetic particle inspection, radiography and eddy current. A characteristic of all these techniques is that their application requires a prior localization of the damaged zones. The limitations of the local methodologies can be overcome by using vibration-based methods, which give a global damage assessment. The vibration-based damage detection methods use measured changes in dynamic characteristics to evaluate changes in physical properties that may indicate structural damage or degradation. The basic idea is that modal parameters (notably frequencies, mode shapes, and modal damping) are functions of the physical properties of the structure (mass, damping, and stiffness). Changes in the physical properties will therefore cause changes in the modal properties. Any reduction in structural stiffness and increase in damping in the structure may indicate structural damage. This research uses the variations in vibration parameters to develop a multi-criteria method for damage assessment. It incorporates the changes in natural frequencies, modal flexibility and modal strain energy to locate damage in the main load bearing elements in bridge structures such as beams, slabs and trusses and simple bridges involving these elements. Dynamic computer simulation techniques are used to develop and apply the multi-criteria procedure under different damage scenarios. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated through numerical examples. Results show that the proposed method incorporating modal flexibility and modal strain energy changes is competent in damage assessment in the structures treated herein.

Developing authentic achievement for disengaged young people using an electronic portfolio system

Credentials are a salient form of cultural capital and if a student’s learning and productions are not assessed, they are invisible in current social systems of education and employment. In this field, invisible equals non-existent. This paper arises from the context of an alternative education institution where conventional educational assessment techniques currently fail to recognise the creativity and skills of a cohort of marginalised young people. In order to facilitate a new assessment model an electronic portfolio system (EPS) is being developed and trialled to capture evidence of students’ learning and their productions. In so doing a dynamic system of arranging, exhibiting, exploiting and disseminating assessment data in the form of coherent, meaningful and valuable reports will be maintained. The paper investigates the notion of assessing development of creative thinking and skills through the means of a computerised system that operates in an area described as the efield. A model of the efield is delineated and is explained as a zone existing within the internet where free users exploit the cloud and cultivate social and cultural capital. Drawing largely on sociocultural theory and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capitals, the article positions the efield as a potentially productive instrument in assessment for learning practices. An important aspect of the dynamics of this instrument is the recognition of teachers as learners. This is seen as an integral factor in the sociocultural approach to assessment for learning practices that will be deployed with the EPS. What actually takes place is argued to be assessment for learning as a field of exchange. The model produced in this research is aimed at delivering visibility and recognition through an engaging instrument that will enhance the prospects of marginalised young people and shift the paradigm for assessment in a creative world.

Where the bloody hell does parody fit in Australian copyright law?

This article examines the role of the recently introduced fair dealing exception for the purposes of parody and satire in Australian copyright law. Parody and satire, while central to Australian expression, pose a substantial challenge for copyright policy. The law is asked to strike a delicate balance between an author’s right to exploit their work, the interests of the public in stimulating free speech and critical discussion, the rights of artists who rely on existing material in creating their own expression, and the rights of all artists in their reputation and the integrity of their works. This article highlights the difficulty parodists and satirists have historically faced in Australia and examines the potential of the new fair dealing exceptions to relieve this difficulty. This article concludes that the new exceptions have the potential, if read broadly, not only to bridge the gap between humorous and non-humorous criticism, but also to allow for the use of copyright material to critique figures other than the copyright owner or author, extending to society generally. This article will argue that the new exceptions should be read broadly to further this important policy goal while also being limited in their application so as to prevent mere substitutable uses of copyright material. To achieve these twin goals, I suggest that the primary indication of fairness of an unlicensed parody should be whether or not it adds significant new expression so as not to be substitutable for the original work.