Work domain analysis and intelligent transport systems: Implications for vehicle design

This article presents a Work Domain Analysis (WDA) of the road transport system in Victoria, Australia. A series of driver information requirements and tasks that could potentially be supported through the use of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are then extracted from the WDA. The potential use of ITS technologies to circumvent these information gaps and provide additional support to drivers is discussed. It is concluded that driver information requirements are currently not entirely satisfied by contemporary vehicle design and also that there are a number of driving tasks that could be further supported through the provision of supplementary systems within vehicles

An analysis of social studies practices in the intermediate grades,

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Reify Your Collection Queries for Modularity and Speed!

Modularity and efficiency are often contradicting requirements, such that programers have to trade one for the other. We analyze this dilemma in the context of programs operating on collections. Performance-critical code using collections need often to be hand-optimized, leading to non-modular, brittle, and redundant code. In principle, this dilemma could be avoided by automatic collection-specific optimizations, such as fusion of collection traversals, usage of indexing, or reordering of filters. Unfortunately, it is not obvious how to encode such optimizations in terms of ordinary collection APIs, because the program operating on the collections is not reified and hence cannot be analyzed. We propose SQuOpt, the Scala Query Optimizer--a deep embedding of the Scala collections API that allows such analyses and optimizations to be defined and executed within Scala, without relying on external tools or compiler extensions. SQuOpt provides the same "look and feel" (syntax and static typing guarantees) as the standard collections API. We evaluate SQuOpt by re-implementing several code analyses of the Findbugs tool using SQuOpt, show average speedups of 12x with a maximum of 12800x and hence demonstrate that SQuOpt can reconcile modularity and efficiency in real-world applications.Comment: 20 page

Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy

A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, focuses on the specific skills and literacy support needed for reading in academic subject areas in higher grades. Outlines strategies for teaching content knowledge and reading strategies together

Modeling urban evolution by identifying spatiotemporal patterns and applying methods of artificial intelligence.Case study: Athens, Greece.

While during the past decades, urban areas experience constant slow population growth, the spatial patterns they form, by means of their limits and borders, are rapidly changing in a complex way. Furthermore, urban areas continue to expand to the expense of "rural” intensifying urban sprawl. The main aim of this paper is the definition of the evolution of urban areas and more specifically, the specification of an urban model, which deals simultaneously with the modification of population and building use patterns. Classical theories define city geographic border, with the Aristotelian division of 0 or 1 and are called fiat geographic boundaries. But the edge of a city and the urbanization "degree" is something not easily distinguishable. Actually, the line that city ends and rural starts is vague. In this respect a synthetic spatio - temporal methodology is described which, through the adaptation of different computational methods aims to assist planners and decision makers to gain an insight in urban - rural transition. Fuzzy Logic and Neural Networks are recruited to provide a precise image of spatial entities, further exploited in a twofold way. First for analysis and interpretation of up - to - date urban evolution and second, for the formulation of a robust spatial simulation model, the theoretical background of which is that the spatial contiguity between members of the same or different groups is one of the key factors in their evolution. The paper finally presents the results of the model application in the prefecture of Attica in Greece, unveiling the role of the Athens Metropolitan Area to its current and future evolution, by illustrating maps of urban growth dynamics.urban growth; urban dynamics; neural networks; fuzzy logic; Greece; Athens

Consumer motivations in the purchase of organic food. A means-end approach

The paper presents partial results from an Italian study on consumer perception and knowledge of organic food and related behaviour. Uses the means-end chain model to link attributes of products to the needs of consumers. In order to provide insights into consumer motivation in purchasing organic products, 60 respondents were interviewed using ``hard’’ laddering approach to the measurement of means-end chains. The results (ladders) of these semi-qualitative interviews are coded, aggregated and presented in a set of hierarchical structured value maps. Even if organic products are perceived as difficult to find and expensive, most consumers judge them positively. All consumers associate organic products with health at different levels of abstraction and want good, tasty and nourishing products, because pleasure and wellbeing are their most important values. Results show that differences exist between groups of consumers with respect to their frequency of use (experience) of organic products and level of information (expertise). Reports and discusses results on consumer cognitive structures at different level of experience.Organic food, Consumer behaviour, Italy, Means-End Chain, Laddering