scholarly journals Right On Track

2007 ◽  
Vol 129 (06) ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Harry Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Scientific Observation ◽  
The Road ◽  
Work Histories ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Safety Action

This article describes features of the U.S. National Rail Safety Action Plan. Under this program, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) the agency is addressing numerous factors that can contribute to accidents. Some of its solutions are procedural, addressing human behavior and the effects of fatigue. Others involve evolving technology meant to assure that the road itself is safe. The track technology promises to let the railroads perform predictive rather than reactive maintenance on their roads. According to FRA, its National Rail Safety Action Plan, begun in 2005, is working. After a three-year plateau, the total number of accidents declined slightly, about 2.4 percent, in 2005 and dropped by 8.5 percent in 2006. The FRA argues that the rules are not based on scientific observation, and to correct that, the agency is developing statistical models based on work histories that will predict when fatigue may be nearing a critical point.

scholarly journals The Black Swan of the Coronavirus and How American Organizations Have Adapted to the New World of Remote Work

2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
David C. Wyld
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Remote Work ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

This article presents a look at how leading-edge American companies have adapted to the very changing nature of work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article begins with an examination of the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on all of us, placing the pandemic in historical context as a “Black Swan”-level disruptive, historical event. Drawing upon current research, the author examines how the pandemic induced a shift to remote work for many workers, not just in the U.S., but globally, and how that impacted both employees and organizations. Next, the findings of an examination of how major U.S. companies, across many industries, have shifted permanently to offering their employees either full or partial-time remote work options are presented. Based on this research, the author discusses how this change has - and will continue - to impact organizations into the future. The article concludes with a look at the road ahead, as management of all organizations adapts to a very new world of work and a new operating model. To assist and inform managers of how to best make this transition, the author presents an 8-step action plan for implementing remote work into organizations today.

scholarly journals The use of cement concrete pavements for roads, depending on climatic conditions

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 235-240
Author(s):  
Iryna Solonenko
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Road Network ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Rational Selection ◽  
Cement Concrete ◽  
The Road ◽  
Road Pavement ◽  
Operational Characteristics ◽  
Selection Of

The development of road network infrastructure is an important component of the economic development of the European Union. Updating of the road network contributes to the integration of the economies of countries into a coherent whole. The road network provides the free movement of citizens, the movement of goods and the effective implementation of various services. The increase in the length of the road network leads to an increase in the financial and material costs necessary to ensure its maintenance and repair. One of the ways to reduce costs is by strengthening the physic-mechanical and operational characteristics of the pavement due to the widespread use of cement concrete. The quality of the pavement of cement concrete depends largely on the rational selection of its composition. This allows a significant increase in the durability of road pavement. The purpose of the research was: the development of recommendations for the rational selection of the composition of the road pavement material of cement concrete, aimed at upgrading longevity, and taking into account its frost resistance grade. According to the goal, the following tasks were developed: the analyses of the climatic zones in which the road network of the European Union is located; the development of a research plan, a selection of the response function and influence factors; the study of physico-mechanical and operational characteristics of the researched material of road pavement; on the basis of the obtained data, the calculation of the complex of experimental-statistical models, which describe the physico-mechanical and operational characteristics of the road pavement material; on the basis of experimental statistical models, a method was proposed for selecting the rational compositions of the cement concrete pavement road material depending on the conditions of its application. The results presented in the article can be used in engineering and scientific practice for the selection of road pavement from cement concrete for highways.

AGI's Framework on Addressing Equity in the Geoscience Societies and the Challenge of Defining Success

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Keane ◽  
Susan Sullivan ◽  
Leila Gonzales
Keyword(s):  
Earth Science ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
National Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Professional Societies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Federal Data

<p>The American Geosciences Institute in cooperation with its member societies has developed the Framework for Addressing Racial and Ethnic Equity in Geosciences Professional Societies.  The geoscience societies are a pivotal area to influence the culture of the geosciences, and in response to the events of June 2020, many societies determined they needed to directly act on the issue of equity in the geosciences. Being birthed from a federation of US-centric organizations, the Framework has clear US-aligned approaches and boundaries.  However, the baseline proposed actions are fundamentally universal and meet the goal of the authoring committee to provide a framework from which we hope geoscience organizations of all types would use it to craft their own specific action plan and policies.   A critical component of this framework for the committee was to ensure definable actions were included.   Some of these suggested actions and their intended extensions will be discussed.  Additionally, ongoing conversations among the societies, with the US National Academy of Sciences Board on Earth Science and Resources, and other science organizations have begun to examine what the path forward looks like.   One area that AGI particularly is concerned about is the process of measuring progress.   Understanding and recognizing the impacts of efforts like this is critical to ensure agile responses for success.   But with AGI's intimate knowledge of much of the U.S. federal data, some of the ambiguities and definitional challenges within the US system complicates the ability to directly measure progress and for which further discussion of what success looks like is critically needed.  </p>

scholarly journals ADDRESSING SOIL HEALTH MANAGEMENT ISSUES IN INDIA

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (12) ◽  
pp. 110-123
Author(s):  
Amrit Patel
Keyword(s):  
Health Management ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Sustainable Use ◽  
Soil Health ◽  
Director General ◽  
Strategic Action ◽  
The Road ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Global Soil ◽  
International Year Of Soils

World has been observing 5th December since 2012 as the World Soil Day to ensure maintenance of soil health, This was complimented by the United Nations’ General Assembly declaring 2015, as the International Year of Soils to create awareness among all stakeholders and promote more sustainable use of soil being the critical resource. On this occasion, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon had said that without healthy soils life on Earth would be unsustainable. Indeed, soils are the foundation of agriculture. He had urged all Governments to pledge to do more to protect this important yet forgotten resource. A healthy life is not possible without healthy soils. According to the Director General of the FAO, Jose Graziano da Silva, today, world has more than 805 million people facing hunger and malnutrition. Soils are under increased pressure because population growth will require an approximately increase of 60 per cent in food output and competing land uses.Unfortunately, 33 per cent of our global soil resources are under degradation and human pressures on soils are reaching critical limits, reducing and sometimes eliminating essential soil functions. He had emphasised the role of all stakeholders in promoting the cause of soils as it is important for paving the road towards a real sustainable development for all and by all. Against this background, this article briefly highlights the significance and aspects of soil health management in India and suggests aspects of strategic action plan to conserve this precious resource for the benefit of mankind.

Real-Time V2V Communication With a Machine Learning-Based System for Detecting Drowsiness of Drivers

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Ahmed Y. Awad ◽  
Seshadri Mohan
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Traffic Accidents ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Economic Losses ◽  
Drowsy Driving ◽  
The Road ◽  
V2v Communication ◽  
Physical Injuries ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The U.S

This article applies machine learning to detect whether a driver is drowsy and alert the driver. The drowsiness of a driver can lead to accidents resulting in severe physical injuries, including deaths, and significant economic losses. Driver fatigue resulting from sleep deprivation causes major accidents on today's roads. In 2010, nearly 24 million vehicles were involved in traffic accidents in the U.S., which resulted in more than 33,000 deaths and over 3.9 million injuries, according to the U.S. NHTSA. A significant percentage of traffic accidents can be attributed to drowsy driving. It is therefore imperative that an efficient technique is designed and implemented to detect drowsiness as soon as the driver feels drowsy and to alert and wake up the driver and thereby preventing accidents. The authors apply machine learning to detect eye closures along with yawning of a driver to optimize the system. This paper also implements DSRC to connect vehicles and create an ad hoc vehicular network on the road. When the system detects that a driver is drowsy, drivers of other nearby vehicles are alerted.

An Energy Frame of Reference to Assess Vehicle’s Physical Externalities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Otremba ◽  
José A. Romero Navarrete ◽  
Alejandro A. Lozano Guzmán
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Asphalt Pavement ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Deterministic Approach ◽  
Road Transportation ◽  
The Road ◽  
Pavement Damage ◽  
Simulation Scheme

Abstract Externalities of the road transportation are multidimensional in nature and involve the road-vehicle interaction under different environmental conditions. Estimating the pavement and vehicle damage potentials as a function of the conditions under which such interaction takes place, is important to avoid accelerated or catastrophic damages in these systems. Such an assessing is crucial from the perspective of pricing the effects of the vehicle on the infrastructure and vice versa. The existing models for pricing such interaction, critically depends on gross average statistical models. In this paper, it is proposed a deterministic approach to realize such an assessment, based upon validated approaches for the pavement damage. The simulation scheme considers different degrees-of-freedom vehicle models, and a discrete asphalt pavement, that make possible the simulation of massive traffic situations on realistic road lengths.

Three eGovernments Living Happily Ever After

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 43-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina L. Gidlund
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Decision Processes ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
National Action Plan ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Epistemic Cultures

There exists a vast amount of different texts (policy documents, guidelines, action plans etc.) with the aim of stipulating the road forward for digitalisation of public sector, and an often used rationale for digitalisation is that the use of digitalised services will stimulate efficiency, reduce costs and at the same time enhance service quality. This is also often coupled with the idea that guarantee of success can be found participatory practices. This paper aims to disclose some of the underpinnings to the above logic by a closer analysis of ‘the who, the why and how' of involving participators in digitalization of public sector. This paper uses a combination of discourse analysis and a Bourdieuan inspired use of the concept of epistemic cultures as an analytical framework to disentangle the notion of a participatory eGovernment development. The empirical case is a text analysis of a national action plan for digitalisation and the results of the analysis unfold two interesting notions; 1) three conflicting notions of for whom, why and how this is done, and 2) the consequences of conflicting epistemic cultures for practitioners to solve in the everyday practice when customer-oriented market logics are naively linked with democratically oriented inclusive participatory decision processes; two not so easily combined ideologies.

U.S.-Israeli Policies: Reading the Signs for '77

Worldview ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Mark A. Bruzonsky
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Near East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Issue ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
Democratic Candidate ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Sense Of Urgency

The real crunch for Israel will probably come during 1977 if Ford is elected—it will be delayed by only a few months if a Democratic candidate wins.” So writes Wolf Blitzer, editor of the “Jewish lobby's” Washington publication Near East Report, in a recent issue of the Jerusalem Post.With the same sense of urgency Abba Eban insists that “Time is of the essence, and unhappily for us, time is running out. We ought to grasp the central issues now and involve the United States in resolving them.” He and a growing number of his colleagues fear that should Israel not choose to “cooperate” with the U.S., the Americans might run right over Israel on the road to Geneva and some form of imposed settlement.

Game Theory-Based Framework for Modeling Human–Vehicle Interactions on the Road

2020 ◽  
Vol 2674 (9) ◽  
pp. 701-713
Author(s):  
Yalda Rahmati ◽  
Alireza Talebpour ◽  
Archak Mittal ◽  
James Fishelson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Realistic Model ◽  
Shared Environment ◽  
The Road ◽  
Interactive Behavior ◽  
Interactive Decision Making ◽  
Decision Making Framework ◽  
On The Road

New application domains have faded the barriers between humans and robots, introducing a new set of complexities to robotic systems. The major impediment is the uncertainties associated with human decision making, which makes it challenging to predict human behavior. A realistic model of human behavior is thus vital to capture humans’ interactive behavior with their surroundings and provide robots with reliable estimates on what is most likely to happen. Focusing on operations of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in areas with a high presence of human actors (i.e., pedestrians), this study creates an interactive decision-making framework to predict pedestrians’ trajectories when walking in a shared environment with vehicles and other pedestrians. It develops a game theoretical structure to approximate the movement and directional components of pedestrian motion using the theory of Nash equilibria in non-cooperative games. It also introduces a novel payoff structure to address the inherent uncertainties in human behavior. Ground truth pedestrian trajectories are then used to calibrate the game parameters and evaluate the model’s performance in approximating the motion decisions of human agents in interaction with interfering vehicles and pedestrians. The main contribution of the study is to develop an interactive human–vehicle decision-making framework toward realizing human–vehicle coexistence by capturing the effect of pedestrian–vehicle and pedestrian–pedestrian interactions on choice of walking strategies. The derived knowledge could be used in CAV navigation algorithms to provide the vehicle with more accurate predictions of pedestrian behavior, and in turn, improve CAV motion planning in human-populated areas.

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