Enabling Data-Driven Transportation Safety Improvements in Rural Alaska

Safety improvements require funding. A clear need must be demonstrated to secure funding. For transportation safety, data, especially data about past crashes, is the usual method of demonstrating need. However, in rural locations, such data is often not available, or is not in a form amenable to use in funding applications. This research aids rural entities, often federally recognized tribes and small villages acquire data needed for funding applications. Two aspects of work product are the development of a traffic counting application for an iPad or similar device, and a review of the data requirements of the major transportation funding agencies. The traffic-counting app, UAF Traffic, demonstrated its ability to count traffic and turning movements for cars and trucks, as well as ATVs, snow machines, pedestrians, bicycles, and dog sleds. The review of the major agencies demonstrated that all the likely funders would accept qualitative data and Road Safety Audits. However, quantitative data, if it was available, was helpful

Development of Geographical Information Systems Applications for Local Government Organizations: the Case of the Rhodes Municipality, Greece

The present recommendation summons up matter from a project in progress, concerning the possibilities and conditions of founding a Social Geographical Information System (GIS) in the Municipality of Rhodes. It is argued that, on the level of local societies and their self-administration, the importance of GIS can prove decisive for the rational management of resources and mainly for a better service of the citizens. Local governments, being that very institution at the closest possible relationship and contact with the resident-citizen, are called to cope with a constantly expanding spectrum of functions and services, often with insufficient infrastructures and limited resources. Today’s stage of the applied development of the GIS technology permits an overall arrangement and regulation of a series of functions that are important elements of everyday life in a city. In this sense, the use of GIS, although in the beginning seems as an “unnecessary luxury†for Greek administrational matters, can contribute in a creative way to the realization of the institutional role of local government organizations, to the accomplishment of the declared goals of each municipal authority but also to the saving of time and expenses. However, beyond the applications of GIS related to the improvement of a city’s functions, and which are the most frequent, there is a whole constellation of additional uses that are often downgraded or ignored. It is about those dimensions and applications, during which the GIS are utilized as an implement of social studies and search, as a mechanism of tendency diagnosis, as a starting point for awareness on the problems of urban areas and of their residents. It is the perspective and necessity of such applications that we are trying not to downgrade in the present, initial stage of development of a “Social GIS for the Municipality of Rhodesâ€. Our fundamental point of view is that no modern “leading-edge†technology, no advanced implement is by itself a panacea. It can simply assist the development procedures, when it is in the right hands and with the appropriate staff, information and infrastructure. Procedures that have finally reference to the level of central or local political choices but also to the disposition, dynamic or not dynamic, of the body politic for interference and action.

Dynamic cities and creative clusters

The author focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this sub-sector encompasses software, multimedia, video games, industrial design, fashion, publishing, and research and development. The cities that form the basis for the empirical investigations are those where policy-induced transitions have been most evident, including Boston; San Francisco; San Diego; Seattle; Austin; Washington, D.C.; Dublin (Ireland); Hong Kong (China); and Bangalore (India). The key research questions are: 1) What types of cities are creative? 2) What locational factors are essential? 3) What are the common urban policy initiatives used by creative cities? The author explores the importance of the external environment for innovation and places it in the larger context of national innovation systems. Based on a study of development in Boston and San Diego, he isolates the factors and policies that have contributed to the local clustering of particular creative industries. In both cities, universities have played a major role in catalyzing the local economy by generating cutting-edge research findings, proactively collaborating with industries, and supplying the needed human capital. In addition, these two cities benefited from the existence of anchor firms and active industry associations that promoted fruitful university-industry links. Many cities in East Asia are aspiring to become the creative hubs of the region. But their investments tend to be heavily biased toward infrastructure provision. Although this is necessary, the heavy emphasis on hardware can lead to underinvestment in developing the talents and skills needed for the emergence of creative industries in these cities.Public Health Promotion,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Decentralization,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Educational Technology and Distance Education,Agricultural Research

Industrial Agglomeration, Production Networks and FDI Promotion The Case Study of China

Chinas Industrial clustering is a distinguished economic phenomenon over the last 20 years. It began to enter into its fast track in the mid-1990s and developed rapidly in recent years. Both market-driven force and government-driven force contribute to Chinese industrial clusters. The opening and stable macroeconomic policies create a favorable climate for the industrial clustering. Local government has made its contribution to construction on both hardware and software environments for industrial clusters. The major contribution of FDI to the local industrial clustering lies in helping integrating Chinese domestic industries into international division of labor and at the same time forging a relatively integrated production chain for Chinese domestic industries. At present, China has stepped into the new phase of industrial clusters upgrading. Chinese government is gradually improving the local software infrastructure for industry clustering.Industrial Agglomeration, China, Production Networks, FDI, foreign direct investment

Spatial land-use inventory, modeling, and projection/Denver metropolitan area, with inputs from existing maps, airphotos, and LANDSAT imagery

A landscape model was constructed with 34 land-use, physiographic, socioeconomic, and transportation maps. A simple Markov land-use trend model was constructed from observed rates of change and nonchange from photointerpreted 1963 and 1970 airphotos. Seven multivariate land-use projection models predicting 1970 spatial land-use changes achieved accuracies from 42 to 57 percent. A final modeling strategy was designed, which combines both Markov trend and multivariate spatial projection processes. Landsat-1 image preprocessing included geometric rectification/resampling, spectral-band, and band/insolation ratioing operations. A new, systematic grid-sampled point training-set approach proved to be useful when tested on the four orginal MSS bands, ten image bands and ratios, and all 48 image and map variables (less land use). Ten variable accuracy was raised over 15 percentage points from 38.4 to 53.9 percent, with the use of the 31 ancillary variables. A land-use classification map was produced with an optimal ten-channel subset of four image bands and six ancillary map variables. Point-by-point verification of 331,776 points against a 1972/1973 U.S. Geological Survey (UGSG) land-use map prepared with airphotos and the same classification scheme showed average first-, second-, and third-order accuracies of 76.3, 58.4, and 33.0 percent, respectively

Appropriate Economic Space for Transnational Infrastructural Projects: Gateways, Multimodal Corridors, and Special Economic Zones

This study addresses three questions that arise in Asia when formulating, financing, implementing, and maintaining transnational linkages versus purely domestic connections. Firstly, how is optimal economic space to be defined as a useful starting point? Secondly, how can relevant criteria be developed to define the emerging spatial economy and identify efficient transnational transport networks? Thirdly, what are the main investment opportunities in physical infrastructure that would result in more efficient and effective regional cooperation and integration (making special reference to the potential role of cross-border special economic zones (SEZs) or their equivalents)?asia transnational infrastructure; asia regional cooperation

Modeling the Worldwide Spread of Pandemic Influenza: Baseline Case and Containment Interventions

We present a study of the worldwide spread of a pandemic influenza and its possible containment at a global level taking into account all available information on air travel. We studied a metapopulation stochastic epidemic model on a global scale that considers airline travel flow data among urban areas. We provided a temporal and spatial evolution of the pandemic with a sensitivity analysis of different levels of infectiousness of the virus and initial outbreak conditions (both geographical and seasonal). For each spreading scenario we provided the timeline and the geographical impact of the pandemic in 3,100 urban areas, located in 220 different countries. We compared the baseline cases with different containment strategies, including travel restrictions and the therapeutic use of antiviral (AV) drugs. We show that the inclusion of air transportation is crucial in the assessment of the occurrence probability of global outbreaks. The large-scale therapeutic usage of AV drugs in all hit countries would be able to mitigate a pandemic effect with a reproductive rate as high as 1.9 during the first year; with AV supply use sufficient to treat approximately 2% to 6% of the population, in conjunction with efficient case detection and timely drug distribution. For highly contagious viruses (i.e., a reproductive rate as high as 2.3), even the unrealistic use of supplies corresponding to the treatment of approximately 20% of the population leaves 30%-50% of the population infected. In the case of limited AV supplies and pandemics with a reproductive rate as high as 1.9, we demonstrate that the more cooperative the strategy, the more effective are the containment results in all regions of the world, including those countries that made part of their resources available for global use.Comment: 16 page

The Critical Role of Public Charging Infrastructure

Editors: Peter Fox-Penner, PhD, Z. Justin Ren, PhD, David O. JermainA decade after the launch of the contemporary global electric vehicle (EV) market, most cities face a major challenge preparing for rising EV demand. Some cities, and the leaders who shape them, are meeting and even leading demand for EV infrastructure. This book aggregates deep, groundbreaking research in the areas of urban EV deployment for city managers, private developers, urban planners, and utilities who want to understand and lead change

Role of Geographical Information System (GIS) for Eco-city Planning: A Review

The rapid expansion of cities expected to rise within population and global economic growth is increasing additional demand on natural resource that leads to land-use changes in particularly cities. In the present scenario, cities are becoming the center of human activities. Cities in developing countries become overpopulated and over-crowded as a result of the migration of population from rural to urban due to job opportunities, educational facilities, availability of health facilities etc. This has resulted in ever-growing size of cities, informal settlements environmental pollution, destruction of ecological structure and scarcity of natural resources and also leads to traffic congestion, housing shortage, unaffordable housing prices, crowded streets, degraded ecosystem, increasing demands for waste disposal and many others. Eco-cities have a strong potential to solve the urban challenges and derive to manage the environment and natural resources. This review article presents the brief on innovative uses of GIS techniques for eco-city planning. The purpose of this article is to provide information about GIS tool for planners, engineers and others to think about the impact of urban sprawl and to develop eco-city for sustainable development