Weighting Waiting: Evaluating the Perception of In-Vehicle Travel Time Under Moving and Stopped Conditions

This paper describes experiments comparing traditional computer administered stated preference with virtual experience stated preference to ascertain how people value stopped delay compared with stop-and- go or freeflow traffic. The virtual experience stated preference experiments were conducted using a wrap around driving simulator. The two methods produced two different results, with the traditional computer assisted stated preference suggesting that ramp delay is 1.6 Ð 1.7 times more onerous than freeway time, while the driving simulator based virtual experience stated preference suggested that freeway delay is more onerous than ramp delay. Several reasons are hypothesized to explain the differences, including recency, simultaneous versus sequential comparison, awareness of public opinion, the intensity of the stop-and-go traffic, and the fact that driving in the real-world is a goal directed activity. However without further research, which, if any, of these will eventually prove to be the reason is unclear. What is clear is that a comparison of the computer administered stated preference with virtual experience stated preference produces different results, even though both procedures strive to find the same answers in nominally identical sets of conditions. Because people experience the world subjectively, and make decisions based on those subjective experiences, future research should be aimed at better understanding the differences between these subjective methodologies.transportation, travel behavior, driving simulator, ramp meters

Open Architecture Curricular Design and the Teaching of Corporate English

In this article, the authors describe how Open Architecture Curricular Design is a preferable strategy to fixed Business English curricula offered by traditional providers such as Cambridge English and Berlitz. The authors cite three cases in which OACD, used in blended learning platforms, makes language learning effective. They include (1) Online Safety English, a program designed for nonnative English-speaking agribusiness employees; (2) Boardroom English® designed for senior corporate executives; and (3) The Business Trip, a virtual reality unit designed for the needs of corporations who send their employees abroad. They posit that the use of OACD is a strategy to boost the proficiency levels of B1 business practitioners, agronomists, and engineers to C1, the level required by many multinational corporations. @font-face {font-family: Cambria Math ; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent: ; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family: Times New Roman ,serif; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman ;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family: Calibri ,sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: Times New Roman ; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;

An Overview of Enhancing Distance Learning Through Augmented and Virtual Reality Technologies

Although distance learning presents a number of interesting educational advantages as compared to in-person instruction, it is not without its downsides. We first assess the educational challenges presented by distance learning as a whole, and identify 4 main challenges that distance learning currently presents as compared to in-person instruction: the lack of social interaction, reduced student engagement and focus, reduced comprehension and information retention, and the lack of flexible and customizable instructor resources. After assessing each of these challenges in-depth, we examine how AR/VR technologies might serve to address each challenge along with their current shortcomings, and finally outline the further research that is required to fully understand the potential of AR/VR technologies as they apply to distance learning.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, submitted to TVC

A Network Congestion control Protocol (NCP)

The transmission control protocol (TCP) which is the dominant congestion control protocol at the transport layer is proved to have many performance problems with the growth of the Internet. TCP for instance results in throughput degradation for high bandwidth delay product networks and is unfair for flows with high round trip delays. There have been many patches and modifications to TCP all of which inherit the problems of TCP in spite of some performance improve- ments. On the other hand there are clean-slate design approaches of the Internet. The eXplicit Congestion control Protocol (XCP) and the Rate Control Protocol (RCP) are the prominent clean slate congestion control protocols. Nonetheless, the XCP protocol is also proved to have its own performance problems some of which are its unfairness to long flows (flows with high round trip delay), and many per-packet computations at the router. As shown in this paper RCP also makes gross approximation to its important component that it may only give the performance reports shown in the literature for specific choices of its parameter values and traffic patterns. In this paper we present a new congestion control protocol called Network congestion Control Protocol (NCP). We show that NCP can outperform both TCP, XCP and RCP in terms of among other things fairness and file download times.unpublishe