Assessment of Drivers and Deterrents of Development of High-Speed Passenger Railway Transportation

Reduction in travel time is one of the eloquent trends in transport developments. It is consistent with the desire of leading transport companies to create conditions to increase traffic speeds.The objective of the article is to analyse prospects and drivers for development of high-speed rail transportation as of a priority transport segment characterised by best safety rates and environmental friendliness as compared to other types of transportation.The review of core parameters of HSR is suggested to show features of its global development.Ecological friendliness, encouragement of labour and other mobility of people, of innovative technology development of railways and interconnected industries are most relevant as universal drivers of HSR development.Constraints due to substantial investment needs, long payback period, necessity to implement additional side projects to develop interrelated transport infrastructure to obtain more tangible economic and social effects, to provide for sufficient passenger flow at the initial or further stages of HSR operation were considered as main deterrents.The factors, their parameters, assessment of their priority ranking when making decisions on construction or development of HSR are determined in each country by transport development strategies, current economic conditions, and a set of other factors.

Towards Sustainable Management of Anchoring on Mediterranean Islands—Concession Support Concept

The focus of this paper is to define anchorage management model for concession planning purposes to provide quality support to experts in spatial planning when developing maritime spatial plans. The research aim is to develop an anchorage management model that includes decision and concession support concept. Decision support concept is defined in order to support the processes of identifying potential anchorage locations, their evaluation and comparison, and finally, the priority ranking and selection of locations for their construction. The final step is modelling the concession support concept that includes financial analysis to concession parameters definition. The problem of decision making and concession of the anchorage location selection is complex and ill-structured because of the unsystematic and ad-hoc decisions by all included stakeholders. Additionally, the involvement of several stakeholders’ groups with different preferences and background knowledge, a large amount of conflicting and seemingly incomparable information and data, and numerous conflicting goals and criteria impact final decisions. The proposed concepts overcome the above obstacles in order to enable the construction of anchorages in a way of optimal use of maritime space. The model is tested on the island of Brač, Croatia. The methods used to solve the task are SWARA (The Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) for defining the criteria weights and ELECTRE (Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality) for ranking anchorage locations.

Qualitative Exploration of the ‘Rolling Unmasking Effect’ for Downwind Odor Dispersion from a Model Animal Source

Solving environmental odor issues can be confounded by many analytical, technological, and socioeconomic factors. Considerable know-how and technologies can fail to properly identify odorants responsible for the downwind nuisance odor and, thereby, focus on odor mitigation strategies. We propose enabling solutions to environmental odor issues utilizing troubleshooting techniques developed for the food, beverage, and consumer products industries. Our research has shown that the odorant impact-priority ranking process can be definable and relatively simple. The initial challenge is the prioritization of environmental odor character from the perspective of the impacted citizenry downwind. In this research, we utilize a natural model from the animal world to illustrate the rolling unmasking effect (RUE) and discuss it more systematically in the context of the proposed environmental odorant prioritization process. Regardless of the size and reach of an odor source, a simplification of odor character and composition typically develops with increasing dilution downwind. An extreme odor simplification-upon-dilution was demonstrated for the prehensile-tailed porcupine (P.T. porcupine); its downwind odor frontal boundary was dominated by a pair of extremely potent character-defining odorants: (1) ‘onion’/‘body odor’ and (2) ‘onion’/‘grilled’ odorants. In contrast with the outer-boundary simplicity, the near-source assessment presented considerable compositional complexity and composite odor character difference. The ultimate significance of the proposed RUE approach is the illustration of naturally occurring phenomena that explain why some environmental odors and their sources can be challenging to identify and mitigate using an analytical-only approach (focused on compound identities and concentrations). These approaches rarely move beyond comprehensive lists of volatile compounds emitted by the source. The novelty proposed herein lies in identification of those few compounds responsible for the downwind odor impacts and requiring mitigation focus.

Evaluating Olympic Pictograms Using Fuzzy TOPSIS – Focus on Judo, Taekwondo, Boxing, and Wrestling

This study evaluated the ranking of comprehensibility of the pictograms for judo, taekwondo, boxing, and wrestling used in the six games from the 27th Sydney Olympics in 2000 to the 32nd Tokyo Olympics in 2021. The evaluation was done using the Fuzzy TOPSIS method, one of the multi-criteria decision-making methodologies commonly used in economics and others fields. The results are as follows. The first, pictograms from the 2008 Beijing Olympics ranked first in three sports: taekwondo, boxing, and wrestling, but there were no pictograms that consistently ranked first or sixth in all sports. Second, the result of the sensitivity analysis shows a possibility that the ranking will be reversed if the weight of the evaluation factors changes, but in the 1000-time repetitive prediction, the better the evaluation ranking, the closer the value of the priority ranking to the ideal solution on average even if the weight changes.

Attitudes Toward Organ Donation for Persons Who Have a Substance Use Disorder Relative to Other Health Conditions

Background: Increases in opioid-related overdose and death have led to increases in the number of organs available for donation and transplant, however persons who have a substance use disorder (SUD) may be disadvantaged relative to other health conditions with regard to receiving an organ for transplant.Objective: This study aimed to evaluate perceptions regarding acceptability and priority for organ donation vs. a control condition (resuscitation) for hypothetical persons with nine target health conditions including a substance use disorder, among persons recruited as part of an online survey.Methods: Respondents (N = 285; male = 172, female = 113) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk rated acceptability and priority that hypothetical persons representing nine target health conditions expected to influence transplant success (including a SUD) receive an organ transplant and resuscitation via a survey hosted by Qualtrics. Primary outcomes of stigma ratings and priority ranking of persons as a function of the hypothetical target health condition were analyzed using Repeated Measures Analyses of Variance and Bonferroni-corrected t-tests. Demographic information was presented descriptively for all respondents.Results: Ratings for acceptability and priority for persons who had a SUD were generally lower than ratings for other conditions for both organ for transplant and resuscitation, though respondents reported less stigma toward resuscitation, F(8) = 22.35, p <0.001 overall. Respondents were least supportive of persons who smoked cigarettes receiving an organ, p's < 0.001. Priority rankings favored persons who were young or had a history of heart disease. Multivariable models determined that target health condition, F(8) = 33.64, p < 0.001, was a better and more consistent predictor of response than demographic variables that were examined.Conclusions: Data suggest that general perception of acceptability and priority ranking for receipt of life-saving interventions was lower for persons who have a SUD relative to other clinically-relevant health conditions. Research to examine this effect among persons working in the donation system are warranted and efforts to reduce stigma toward persons who have a SUD should be continued.

A GIS Based Morphometric Analysis of Watershed for Soil Erosion Planning

Soil erosion, if remain non attentive, will increase the sediment load of the river and also affecting the life of the hydraulic structures constructed across it. Hence, proper investigations related to the soil erosion is very much essential for watershed planners and designers. In the present study, morphometric analysis is carried out for basic, linear, areal, shape and landscape aspects using 28 morphometric parameters for Bhima river watershed to prioritize and categorized it based on its erosive potential. Total 48 toposheet of Survey of India of the scale 1:50,000 are used to delineate the watersheds for the preparation of base map containing information about drainage, contours, etc. so as to ensure accuracy and quality of the work. The All India Soil and Land Use Survey (AISLUS) codification is adopted for the study area. According to AISLUS, the study area falls under region 4, covered in 19 watersheds. Morphometric parameters in Arc-GIS software and compound factor method is employed to identify the sub-watersheds which are susceptible to soil erosion. Final Priority Ranking (FPR) based category map of watersheds is reported in this study by categorized it under five categories indicating % area of each category (very high category: 15.94%; high category: 23.50%; medium category: 12.73%; low category: 23.90%; and very low category: 23.93%). Based on the findings, this study is suggesting suitable sites soil conservation practices for reducing the sediment load in Bhima river watersheds as well as Ujjani reservoir, which will be useful to the concerning authorities for better management.

Automated Triage System for Intensive Care Admissions during the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Hybrid XGBoost-AHP Approach

The sudden increase in patients with severe COVID-19 has obliged doctors to make admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) in health care practices where capacity is exceeded by the demand. To help with difficult triage decisions, we proposed an integration system Xtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assist health authorities in identifying patients’ priorities to be admitted into ICUs according to the findings of the biological laboratory investigation for patients with COVID-19. The Xtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier was used to decide whether or not they should admit patients into ICUs, before applying them to an AHP for admissions’ priority ranking for ICUs. The 38 commonly used clinical variables were considered and their contributions were determined by the Shapley’s Additive explanations (SHAP) approach. In this research, five types of classifier algorithms were compared: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), K-Nearest Neighborhood (KNN), Random Forest (RF), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), to evaluate the XGBoost performance, while the AHP system compared its results with a committee formed from experienced clinicians. The proposed (XGBoost) classifier achieved a high prediction accuracy as it could discriminate between patients with COVID-19 who need ICU admission and those who do not with accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity rates of 97%, 96%, and 96% respectively, while the AHP system results were close to experienced clinicians’ decisions for determining the priority of patients that need to be admitted to the ICU. Eventually, medical sectors can use the suggested framework to classify patients with COVID-19 who require ICU admission and prioritize them based on integrated AHP methodologies.

Antecedents of mobile advertising value: a precedence analysis using the hybrid RIDIT-GRA approach

Purpose Massive transformations in mobile communication technologies have forced marketers to recognize and emphasize the factors that influence consumers’ perception of advertising value. This paper aims to explore and rank the various antecedents of advertising value as perceived by consumers to offer meaningful conclusions to marketers on mobile platforms. Design/methodology/approach Responses were collected from 483 consumers using a shopping mall intercept survey and analyzed using SPSS to confirm reliability, validity and data reduction. The Relative to an Identified Distribution (RIDIT) analysis and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) methods were then applied to prioritize the scale items of the antecedents of mobile advertising value. Findings Five antecedents of advertising value were found: credibility, entertainment, informativeness, irritation and message relevance. A priority ranking was allotted to the antecedents’ scale items using the RIDIT analysis and was verified via GRA results with a correlation of 98% between the rankings of the two independent methodologies. Practical implications The findings provide a roadmap to determine which antecedents of mobile advertising value have a higher or lower impact on consumers’ overall perceptions of the advertisements they are exposed to on mobile platforms. Originality/value This study aims to use first-hand data to prioritize the underlying antecedents of mobile advertising value, which has rarely been done to the best of the authors’ knowledge. It also used two different approaches in a single study to rank the dimensions, thus producing more valid results.