Optimization models for selecting bus stops for accessibility improvements for people with disabilities

Bus stops are key links in the journeys of transit patrons with disabilities. Inaccessible bus stops prevent people with disabilities from using fixed-route bus services, thus limiting their mobility. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 prescribes the minimum requirements for bus stop accessibility by riders with disabilities. Due to limited budgets, transit agencies can only select a limited number of bus stop locations for ADA improvements annually. These locations should preferably be selected such that they maximize the overall benefits to patrons with disabilities. In addition, transit agencies may also choose to implement the universal design paradigm, which involves higher design standards than current ADA requirements and can provide amenities that are useful for all riders, like shelters and lighting. Many factors can affect the decision to improve a bus stop, including rider-based aspects like the number of riders with disabilities, total ridership, customer complaints, accidents, deployment costs, as well as locational aspects like the location of employment centers, schools, shopping areas, and so on. These interlacing factors make it difficult to identify optimum improvement locations without the aid of an optimization model. This dissertation proposes two integer programming models to help identify a priority list of bus stops for accessibility improvements. The first is a binary integer programming model designed to identify bus stops that need improvements to meet the minimum ADA requirements. The second involves a multi-objective nonlinear mixed integer programming model that attempts to achieve an optimal compromise among the two accessibility design standards. Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques were used extensively to both prepare the model input and examine the model output. An analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was applied to combine all of the factors affecting the benefits to patrons with disabilities. An extensive sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the reasonableness of the model outputs in response to changes in model constraints. Based on a case study using data from Broward County Transit (BCT) in Florida, the models were found to produce a list of bus stops that upon close examination were determined to be highly logical. Compared to traditional approaches using staff experience, requests from elected officials, customer complaints, etc., these optimization models offer a more objective and efficient platform on which to make bus stop improvement suggestions.

Measuring Hotel Service Quality: Tools for Gaining the Competitive Edge

As the hotel industry grows more competitive, quality guest service becomes an increasingly important part of managers' responsibility measuring the quality of service delivery is facilitated when managers know what types of assessment methods are available to them. The authors present and discuss the following available measurement techniques and describe the situations where they best meet the needs of hotel managers: management observation, employee feedback programs, comment cards, mailed surveys, personal and telephone interviews, focus groups, and mystery shopping.

Understanding Immigrants' Travel Behavior in Florida: Neighborhood Effects and Behavioral Assimilation

The goal of this study was to develop Multinomial Logit models for the mode choice behavior of immigrants, with key focuses on neighborhood effects and behavioral assimilation. The first aspect shows the relationship between social network ties and immigrants’ chosen mode of transportation, while the second aspect explores the gradual changes toward alternative mode usage with regard to immigrants’ migrating period in the United States (US). Mode choice models were developed for work, shopping, social, recreational, and other trip purposes to evaluate the impacts of various land use patterns, neighborhood typology, socioeconomic-demographic and immigrant related attributes on individuals’ travel behavior. Estimated coefficients of mode choice determinants were compared between each alternative mode (i.e., high-occupancy vehicle, public transit, and non-motorized transport) with single-occupant vehicles. The model results revealed the significant influence of neighborhood and land use variables on the usage of alternative modes among immigrants. Incorporating these indicators into the demand forecasting process will provide a better understanding of the diverse travel patterns for the unique composition of population groups in Florida.

Ícones urbanos na cidade de Natal: arquitetura e desenvolvimento urbano na cidade do sol e mar

Natal has come through major changes in the last 150 years, since the actions of city beautification, in the 19th century, until the present day, when such transformations start to have the objective of including the city in the competition for the attraction of the capital flows and consumption, domestically and in a foreign sense. It is thought that the first initiatives aimed at increasing tourism in Natal occurred in the 1960s, however, it became apparent that only from the 1980s was there a significant increase in tourist activities in Natal and the Metropolitan Region, especially on the east coast of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, leading to an expansion of the labour market, the significant increase of foreign investment, territorial changes of great impact and the production of buildings primarily intended for the hotel industry and second residence for European tourists. Since then, the incentives for tourist activity in the state have been maintained and even increased, based on tourism aimed at natural beauties, local cuisine and events, which transformed the tourist activity in one of the main sources of foreign exchange for the city of Natal. In the early 21st century, the construction of high-rise condominiums, monuments (including the designer ones), such as the Parque da Cidade, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, were already established. Also, shopping centers and, in order to host the World Cup, the new football stadium, the Arena das Dunas, among others, which were aimed at local and foreign consumers, especially European, stood out in the city. It is understood that these new buildings, monuments and also renovations and restorations that were deployed in the city of Natal aimed at constructing a new identity for the city, within the process of capitalist development and urban spectacle. It is considered that the monuments and the iconic buildings are attributes of the cities aimed at selling locations as goods, establishing a new urban environment, a new role as cities, which aimed at seeking greater autonomy from the nation-state. In this research, it was sought to analyze the architectural object, that is, buildings and monuments built or restored in Natal and its relevance to the city marketing promoted by the city itself. It was found that, indeed, such buildings and monuments are inserted in contemporary architectural production as a basis for increasing the competitive nature of Natal. In addition, they reveal a capitalist mode of production, supported by public resources, operating in the production of urban space with a view to repeating the hegemonic model of a competitive city

A dinâmica geográfica da construção de um território para moradias sociais: estudo testemunhal do empreendimento Vitória Brasil em Uberlândia (MG)

This work describes and analyzes the situation planned with the current, according to the housing development project style of social interest (Gleba 9), named Victory Brazil at Shopping Park II neighborhood, located in the southern sector of Uberlândia (MG), built with Program resources Minha Casa, Minha Vida (PMCMV). The specific objectives are: to present the housing policy of social interest directed to the Minha Casa, Minha Vida in the city of Uberlândia, from its history to its current information; trace the environmental characterization of the housing Vitoria Brazil through the development of thematic maps; identify the impacts generated by the housing projects of social interest; and show through interviews with 25 residents of Vitoria Brazil, the structural problems of the houses. Therefore, the research became quali-quantitative with descriptive approach and use of semi- structured interviews to collect data. In addition, the iconographic sources, ie photographs of the problems raised by the residents of the whole Victory Brazil and maps of the study area, enlarged the qualitative and dialogic nature of this study, as there is opportunity to contextualize specific way what was reported the residents interviewed. We understand that the city is intrinsically related to the design of agglomeration, characterized by the production of the possessor market capitalism a public administration system that is guided by the ideals of consumption and utilization of space, and its inhabitants are high class with the construction of equipment and adequate social services. One of the important biases to solving the problems of urbanization is by the intervention of the government through public policies through the master plan so that would allow prospects to enable the population of low-income housing in locations that offer housing and decent urbanization conditions.

Entre as tramas da indústria da moda: argumentos sobre o trabalho escravo contemporâneo na sociedade de consumo

Even after its abolition, the slave labor still exists in the world. In a new socio-historic context, the shackles and slave quarters have been left behind, nowadays the workers are tempted, subjected to degrading conditions and have their rights retrenched. The contemporary slave labor has been emerging as subject of research in the Organizational Studies since the early 2000s, calling attention to many gaps to be filled about the way organizations all around the world use this practice. Contemporary slave labor is found in many and various economic activities, since coal to textile industries or even stores. In this dissertation, we have incorporated the consumption dimension to the field of Organizational Studies, discussing the modern slavery, aiming to understand the consumers’ point of view about this topic, that is, we have researched the consumers’ interpretations concerning the slave labor in the fashion industry. Our objective is to analyze consumer’s argumentative construction in the decision of buying or not products made by industries from the fashion field that were denounced because of slave labor usage. We have adopted fashion industry as research focus because it obscures the reflection of the consumers that feel like in a new world while shopping, a world of beauty and fantasy, seeking their own satisfaction. Furthermore, the Brazilian fashion industry is one of the biggest of the world (ABIT, 2015), with a huge symbolic strength in the country. We have realized a qualitative research using semi-structured interviews with 35 consumers to identify their arguments according to the criteria defined by Liakopoulos (2002): data, propositions, guarantees, supports and refutations. The data are the statements used by the interviewees categorically, that is, those which are clear in the interviews. The propositions are what qualifies and justifies the used data. The guarantees are related to the nature of the data, they are what gives the sense to the data and are introduced implicitly in the interviewee speech. The supports are universal premises introduced in order to legitimate the arguments. The refutations, when present, counter the used arguments. As results, we’ve found consumers who developed arguments pro-consumption and anti-consumption and who have defended ideas about the responsibility of different actors for the existence of this practice and for the fight against it. From these two categories: (1) pro-consumption – consume despite the complaints and (2) anti-consumption – don’t consume, because of the accusations; we have identified the following argumentative lines: skepticism, faultfinding and moral engagement. By the end, we have presented the interviewees’ argumentative construction and the obtained results.

Uma abordagem baseada em filtragem colaborativa integrada a mapas de saliência para a recomendação de imagens

Nowadays, the amount of customers using sites for shopping is greatly increasing, mainly due to the easiness and rapidity of this way of consumption. The sites, differently from physical stores, can make anything available to customers. In this context, Recommender Systems (RS) have become indispensable to help consumers to find products that may possibly pleasant or be useful to them. These systems often use techniques of Collaborating Filtering (CF), whose main underlying idea is that products are recommended to a given user based on purchase information and evaluations of past, by a group of users similar to the user who is requesting recommendation. One of the main challenges faced by such a technique is the need of the user to provide some information about her preferences on products in order to get further recommendations from the system. When there are items that do not have ratings or that possess quite few ratings available, the recommender system performs poorly. This problem is known as new item cold-start. In this paper, we propose to investigate in what extent information on visual attention can help to produce more accurate recommendation models. We present a new CF strategy, called IKB-MS, that uses visual attention to characterize images and alleviate the new item cold-start problem. In order to validate this strategy, we created a clothing image database and we use three algorithms well known for the extraction of visual attention these images. An extensive set of experiments shows that our approach is efficient and outperforms state-of-the-art CF RS.

Differences in expenditure and amounts of fresh foods, fruits & vegetables and fish purchased in urban and rural Scotland

Peer reviewed

Differences in expenditure and amounts of fresh foods, fruits & vegetables and fish purchased in urban and rural Scotland

Peer reviewed

Entre chegadas e partidas: a sociabilidade em trânsito

New ways of sociability can be perceive in a historical context marked by the social change. The investigation developed by this thesis follow this idea, pointing the emergency of social relations established between individuals in drift. The foremost aim of this research was to assay, using a case study, the bonds constructed among the people that attend the Terminal Central - Pratic Shopping of Uberlândia-MG, the main responsible for the reception and distribution of public transport of the city. With the growth of the urban centers, their population became attractive objects of analysis in the social science field and the understanding of the city, in their core, by the dwellers displacement. Thus, after the separation of the people that use the Terminal Central in seven groups (students, families and couples, elderly, deaf and/or mute, employees of the stores in Terminal and of the bus companies), their interactions tried to be understood, by identifying the similarity with the sociability in traffic studies. In places with a great flow of people, the sociability in traffic suggests bonds of friendship, kindness, as foray, impersonality, frailty and the sudden break of contact.

Consumer Behavior and Firm Competition

Understanding consumer behavior is critical for firms' decision making. How consumers make decisions about what they want and buy directly affect the profits of firms. Therefore, it is important to consider consumer behaviors and incorporate them into the model when studying the optimal strategy of firms and competition between firms. In this dissertation, I study rich and interesting consumer behaviors and their impact on firms' strategy in two essays. The first essay considers consumers' shopping cost which leads to their preference for one-stop shopping. I examine how store visit costs and consumer knowledge about a product affect the strategic store choice of consumers and, in turn, the pricing, customer service and advertising decisions of competing retailers. My analysis offers insights on how specialty stores can compete with big-box retailers. In the second essay, I focus on a well-established psychology phenomenon, cognitive dissonance. I incorporate the idea of cognitive dissonance into a model of spatial competition and examine its implications for selling strategy. I provide new insight on the profitability of advance selling and spot selling as well as the pricing of bundle and its components. Collectively, two essays in this dissertation introduce novel ways to model consumer behaviors and help to understand the impact of consumer behaviors on firm profitability and strategy.

L’accès aux ressources alimentaires : facteurs prédicteurs de l’insécurité alimentaire sévère parmi les ménages bénéficiers des programmes communautaires en sécurité alimentaire à Montréal

Objectif : Examiner la relation entre l’accès aux ressources alimentaires et le degré de l’insécurité alimentaire du ménage parmi les nouveaux utilisateurs des organismes communautaires d’intervention en sécurité alimentaire de Montréal. Méthode : Étude observationnelle transversale. Elle consiste en une analyse secondaire de données (n=785) qui proviennent du premier temps de mesure de l’enquête sur les effets des interventions en sécurité alimentaire à Montréal menée entre 2011 et 2012. La variable dépendante a été l’insécurité alimentaire. Les variables indépendantes ont été le mode de transport utilisé pour transporter les aliments, l’emplacement de l’épicerie la plus fréquentée par le participant, la distance entre l’organisme communautaire fréquenté par le participant et son domicile, la proximité de l’épicerie la plus fréquentée, la satisfaction quant à l’acceptabilité et le caractère abordable des aliments dans l’épicerie la plus fréquentée, et les difficultés d’accès aux aliments. Des régressions logistiques furent effectuées afin d’évaluer la relation entre les variables indépendantes et le degré de l’insécurité alimentaire, en utilisant l’insécurité sévère comme catégorie de référence. Résultats : Nos données suggèrent que la sévérité de l’insécurité alimentaire est associée à la difficulté d’accès aux aliments à cause de la cherté des aliments (pour la sécurité alimentaire, OR=0.13; CI : 0.07-0.25 et pour l’insécurité alimentaire modérée, OR=0.42; CI : 0.28-0.63), au fait de faire l’épicerie à l’extérieur du quartier ou de faire rarement l’épicerie (pour l’insécurité alimentaire modérée, OR=0.50, CI : 0.30-0.84), au fait d’avoir accès au transport collectif (pour l’insécurité alimentaire modérée, OR=1.73; CI : 1.09-2.73), au fait de résider à une distance moyenne (soit entre 1000 et 2000 mètres) d’un organisme communautaire en sécurité alimentaire (pour l’insécurité alimentaire modérée, OR=1.83; CI : 1.14-2.92), et à la difficulté d’accès aux aliments à cause de contraintes de transport (pour la sécurité alimentaire, OR=0.18, CI : 0.06-0.52). Conclusion : L’accès aux ressources alimentaires est associé au degré de l’insécurité alimentaire des nouveaux ménages participant aux interventions en sécurité alimentaire à Montréal.

Assisting End-users in Filling Out Web Services

With the quick advance of web service technologies, end-users can conduct various on-line tasks, such as shopping on-line. Usually, end-users compose a set of services to accomplish a task, and need to enter values to services to invoke the composite services. Quite often, users re-visit websites and use services to perform re-occurring tasks. The users are required to enter the same information into various web services to accomplish such re-occurring tasks. However, repetitively typing the same information into services is a tedious job for end-users. It can negatively impact user experience when an end-user needs to type the re-occurring information repetitively into web services. Recent studies have proposed several approaches to help users fill in values to services automatically. However, prior studies mainly suffer the following drawbacks: (1) limited support of collecting and analyzing user inputs; (2) poor accuracy of filling values to services; (3) not designed for service composition. To overcome the aforementioned drawbacks, we need maximize the reuse of previous user inputs across services and end-users. In this thesis, we introduce our approaches that prevent end-users from entering the same information into repetitive on-line tasks. More specifically, we improve the process of filling out services in the following 4 aspects: First, we investigate the characteristics of input parameters. We propose an ontology-based approach to automatically categorize parameters and fill values to the categorized input parameters. Second, we propose a comprehensive framework that leverages user contexts and usage patterns into the process of filling values to services. Third, we propose an approach for maximizing the value propagation among services and end-users by linking a set of semantically related parameters together and similar end-users. Last, we propose a ranking-based framework that ranks a list of previous user inputs for an input parameter to save a user from unnecessary data entries. Our framework learns and analyzes interactions of user inputs and input parameters to rank user inputs for input parameters under different contexts.

Architecture and health care: a place for sociology.

Sociologists of health and illness have tended to overlook the architecture and buildings used in health care. This contrasts with medical geographers who have yielded a body of work on the significance of places and spaces in the experience of health and illness. A review of sociological studies of the role of the built environment in the performance of medical practice uncovers an important vein of work, worthy of further study. Through the historically situated example of hospital architecture, this article seeks to tease out substantive and methodological issues that can inform a distinctive sociology of healthcare architecture. Contemporary healthcare buildings manifest design models developed for hotels, shopping malls and homes. These design features are congruent with neoliberal forms of subjectivity in which patients are constituted as consumers and responsibilised citizens. We conclude that an adequate sociology of healthcare architecture necessitates an appreciation of both the construction and experience of buildings, exploring the briefs and plans of their designers, and observing their everyday uses. Combining approaches and methods from the sociology of health and illness and science and technology studies offers potential for a novel research agenda that takes healthcare buildings as its substantive focus.