Developing Safety Management Tools for State Departments of Transportation

Author(s):  
Koohong Chung ◽  
Offer Grembek ◽  
Jinwoo Lee ◽  
Keechoo Choi

Two safety management tools have recently been developed for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). One is the continuous risk profile (CRP) approach, which is a network screening procedure, and the other is the California Safety Analyst (CASA), a web-based application designed to assist state safety engineers in conducting safety investigations and in documenting their findings. This paper provides a qualitative description of the two tools and summarizes feedback from more than 100 Caltrans safety engineers who attended demonstrations of the web-based application. Findings from both empirical analysis and the survey indicate that CRP can significantly reduce the false positive rate and that CASA can greatly improve the efficiency of traffic safety investigations. However, misunderstandings remain about the relationship between the CRP approach, other methods explained in the Highway Safety Manual, and different safety management tools. The misunderstandings create challenges for the deployment of CRP and CASA in California.

2003 ◽  
Vol 1819 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Ford ◽  
Eugene C. Calvert

Mendocino County is a large rural county in northern California with more than 1,000 centerline miles of county-maintained roads. The terrain is mountainous, with a few small inland valleys. During the 1990s, the Mendocino County Department of Transportation developed a program of road system traffic safety reviews to improve signing and markings on the arterials and collectors in the system. The effectiveness of the program was measured by comparing accident data for the reviewed roads with data for roads not included in, or influenced by, the reviews. To control for different groups of factors, two sets of control roads were selected—county-maintained roads not reviewed and state highways within the county. Over two consecutive 3-year review cycles, the number of accidents on the reviewed roads fell by 42.1%, while on the county-maintained roads not reviewed they increased by 26.5%, and on the state highways they fell by 3.3%. The total cost to conduct the reviews and implement the recommended changes was $ 79,300. The accident histories of the control roads were used to define the limits of the range of probable benefits. On the basis of average accident costs provided by the California Department of Transportation, calculated savings ranged from $ 12.58 million to $23.73 million, yielding a costs-to-benefits ratio between 1:159 and 1:299. The county is expanding the road system traffic safety review program to cover its entire maintained road system.


Cephalalgia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (13) ◽  
pp. 1359-1367 ◽  
Author(s):  
WPJ van Oosterhout ◽  
CM Weller ◽  
AH Stam ◽  
F Bakels ◽  
T Stijnen ◽  
...  

Objective: To assess validity of a self-administered web-based migraine-questionnaire in diagnosing migraine aura for the use of epidemiological and genetic studies. Methods: Self-reported migraineurs enrolled via the LUMINA website and completed a web-based questionnaire on headache and aura symptoms, after fulfilling screening criteria. Diagnoses were calculated using an algorithm based on the International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD-2), and semi-structured telephone-interviews were performed for final diagnoses. Logistic regression generated a prediction rule for aura. Algorithm-based diagnoses and predicted diagnoses were subsequently compared to the interview-derived diagnoses. Results: In 1 year, we recruited 2397 migraineurs, of which 1067 were included in the validation. A seven-question subset provided higher sensitivity (86% vs. 45%), slightly lower specificity (75% vs. 95%), and similar positive predictive value (86% vs. 88%) in assessing aura when comparing with the ICHD-2-based algorithm. Conclusions: This questionnaire is accurate and reliable in diagnosing migraine aura among self-reported migraineurs and enables detection of more aura cases with low false-positive rate.


Author(s):  
Akash Naren ◽  
Manoj Kumar D S

This paper utilizes Smartphone sensing of vehicle dynamics to determine driver phone use, which can facilitate many traffic safety applications. Our system uses embedded sensors in smart phones, i.e., accelerometers and gyroscopes, to capture differences in centripetal acceleration due to vehicle dynamics These differences combined with angular speed can determine whether the phone is on the left or right side of the vehicle. Despite noisy sensor readings from Smartphone, our approach can achieve a classification accuracy of over 90 percent with a false positive rate of a few percent. We also find that by combining sensing results in a few turns, we can achieve better accuracy (e.g., 95 percent) with a lower false positive rate.


2022 ◽  
pp. 453-479
Author(s):  
Layla Mohammed Alrawais ◽  
Mamdouh Alenezi ◽  
Mohammad Akour

The growth of web-based applications has increased tremendously from last two decades. While these applications bring huge benefits to society, yet they suffer from various security threats. Although there exist various techniques to ensure the security of web applications, still a large number of applications suffer from a wide variety of attacks and result in financial loses. In this article, a security-testing framework for web applications is proposed with an argument that security of an application should be tested at every stage of software development life cycle (SDLC). Security testing is initiated from the requirement engineering phase using a keyword-analysis phase. The output of the first phase serves as input to the next phase. Different case study applications indicate that the framework assists in early detection of security threats and applying appropriate security measures. The results obtained from the implementation of the proposed framework demonstrated a high detection ratio with a less false-positive rate.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fu-Hau Hsu ◽  
Chih-Wen Ou ◽  
Yan-Ling Hwang ◽  
Ya-Ching Chang ◽  
Po-Ching Lin

Web-based botnets are popular nowadays. A Web-based botnet is a botnet whose C&C server and bots use HTTP protocol, the most universal and supported network protocol, to communicate with each other. Because the botnet communication can be hidden easily by attackers behind the relatively massive HTTP traffic, administrators of network equipment, such as routers and switches, cannot block such suspicious traffic directly regardless of costs. Based on the clients constituent of a Web server and characteristics of HTTP responses sent to clients from the server, this paper proposes a traffic inspection solution, called Web-based Botnet Detector (WBD). WBD is able to detect suspicious C&C (Command-and-Control) servers of HTTP botnets regardless of whether the botnet commands are encrypted or hidden in normal Web pages. More than 500 GB real network traces collected from 11 backbone routers are used to evaluate our method. Experimental results show that the false positive rate of WBD is 0.42%.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Layla Mohammed Alrawais ◽  
Mamdouh Alenezi ◽  
Mohammad Akour

The growth of web-based applications has increased tremendously from last two decades. While these applications bring huge benefits to society, yet they suffer from various security threats. Although there exist various techniques to ensure the security of web applications, still a large number of applications suffer from a wide variety of attacks and result in financial loses. In this article, a security-testing framework for web applications is proposed with an argument that security of an application should be tested at every stage of software development life cycle (SDLC). Security testing is initiated from the requirement engineering phase using a keyword-analysis phase. The output of the first phase serves as input to the next phase. Different case study applications indicate that the framework assists in early detection of security threats and applying appropriate security measures. The results obtained from the implementation of the proposed framework demonstrated a high detection ratio with a less false-positive rate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Seung-oh Son ◽  
Juneyoung Park ◽  
Cheol Oh ◽  
Chunho Yeom

This study develops an algorithm to detect the risk of collision between trucks (i.e., yard tractors) and pedestrians (i.e., workers) in the connected environment of the port. The algorithm consists of linear regression-based movable coordinate predictions and vertical distance and angle judgments considering the moving characteristics of objects. Time-to-collision for port workers (TTCP) is developed to reflect the characteristics of the port using the predictive coordinates. This study assumes the connected environment in which yard tractors and workers can share coordinates of each object in real time using the Internet of Things (IoT) network. By utilizing microtraffic simulations, a port network is implemented, and the algorithm is verified using data from simulated workers and yard trucks in the connected environment. The risk detection algorithm is validated using confusion matrix. Validation results show that the true-positive rate (TPR) is 61.5∼98.0%, the false-positive rate (FPR) is 79.6∼85.9%, and the accuracy is 72.2∼88.8%. This result implies that the metric scores improve as the data collection cycle increases. This is expected to be useful for sustainable transportation industry sites, particularly IoT-based safety management plans, designed to ensure the safety of pedestrians from crash risk by heavy vehicles (such as yard tractors).


2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (01) ◽  
pp. 37-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Shung-Shung ◽  
S. Yu-Chien ◽  
Y. Mei-Due ◽  
W. Hwei-Chung ◽  
A. Kao

Summary Aim: Even with careful observation, the overall false-positive rate of laparotomy remains 10-15% when acute appendicitis was suspected. Therefore, the clinical efficacy of Tc-99m HMPAO labeled leukocyte (TC-WBC) scan for the diagnosis of acute appendicitis in patients presenting with atypical clinical findings is assessed. Patients and Methods: Eighty patients presenting with acute abdominal pain and possible acute appendicitis but atypical findings were included in this study. After intravenous injection of TC-WBC, serial anterior abdominal/pelvic images at 30, 60, 120 and 240 min with 800k counts were obtained with a gamma camera. Any abnormal localization of radioactivity in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen, equal to or greater than bone marrow activity, was considered as a positive scan. Results: 36 out of 49 patients showing positive TC-WBC scans received appendectomy. They all proved to have positive pathological findings. Five positive TC-WBC were not related to acute appendicitis, because of other pathological lesions. Eight patients were not operated and clinical follow-up after one month revealed no acute abdominal condition. Three of 31 patients with negative TC-WBC scans received appendectomy. They also presented positive pathological findings. The remaining 28 patients did not receive operations and revealed no evidence of appendicitis after at least one month of follow-up. The overall sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive and negative predictive values for TC-WBC scan to diagnose acute appendicitis were 92, 78, 86, 82, and 90%, respectively. Conclusion: TC-WBC scan provides a rapid and highly accurate method for the diagnosis of acute appendicitis in patients with equivocal clinical examination. It proved useful in reducing the false-positive rate of laparotomy and shortens the time necessary for clinical observation.


1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (02) ◽  
pp. 175-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Brambati ◽  
T. Chard ◽  
J. G. Grudzinskas ◽  
M. C. M. Macintosh

Abstract:The analysis of the clinical efficiency of a biochemical parameter in the prediction of chromosome anomalies is described, using a database of 475 cases including 30 abnormalities. A comparison was made of two different approaches to the statistical analysis: the use of Gaussian frequency distributions and likelihood ratios, and logistic regression. Both methods computed that for a 5% false-positive rate approximately 60% of anomalies are detected on the basis of maternal age and serum PAPP-A. The logistic regression analysis is appropriate where the outcome variable (chromosome anomaly) is binary and the detection rates refer to the original data only. The likelihood ratio method is used to predict the outcome in the general population. The latter method depends on the data or some transformation of the data fitting a known frequency distribution (Gaussian in this case). The precision of the predicted detection rates is limited by the small sample of abnormals (30 cases). Varying the means and standard deviations (to the limits of their 95% confidence intervals) of the fitted log Gaussian distributions resulted in a detection rate varying between 42% and 79% for a 5% false-positive rate. Thus, although the likelihood ratio method is potentially the better method in determining the usefulness of a test in the general population, larger numbers of abnormal cases are required to stabilise the means and standard deviations of the fitted log Gaussian distributions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Kvarven ◽  
Eirik Strømland ◽  
Magnus Johannesson

Andrews & Kasy (2019) propose an approach for adjusting effect sizes in meta-analysis for publication bias. We use the Andrews-Kasy estimator to adjust the result of 15 meta-analyses and compare the adjusted results to 15 large-scale multiple labs replication studies estimating the same effects. The pre-registered replications provide precisely estimated effect sizes, which do not suffer from publication bias. The Andrews-Kasy approach leads to a moderate reduction of the inflated effect sizes in the meta-analyses. However, the approach still overestimates effect sizes by a factor of about two or more and has an estimated false positive rate of between 57% and 100%.


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