What Do Professional Drivers Think about Their Profession? An Examination of Factors Contributing to the Driver Shortage

A shortage of qualified and available professional drivers in the Freight, Transport, Distribution and Logistics (FTDL) sector is becoming an area of increasing concern in Ireland, and across the European mainland. This paper applies a two-stage research approach to address the issues causing the driver shortage and to analyse contributing factors. The findings reveal that remuneration and salaries are detrimental to recruitment and retention. While driver wellbeing in terms of physical and mental health is a major issue, little support is provided for training and education. There is a relationship between a driver’s age group and job satisfaction, and between the length of time working as a professional driver and job satisfaction. By uncovering the variety of factors that contribute to driver shortage, this research provides theoretical and practical knowledge in order to attract and retain a sustainable labour force of drivers required to sustain transportation services

Heartbeat of the Southern Oscillation explains ENSO climatic resonances

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) nonlinear oscillator phenomenon has a far reaching ~ influence on the climate and human activities. The up to 10 year quasi-period cycle of the El Nino and ~ subsequent La Nina is known to be dominated in the tropics by nonlinear physical interaction of wind with ~ the equatorial waveguide in the Pacific. Long-term cyclic phenomena do not feature in the current theory of the ENSO process. We update the theory by assessing low (>10 years) and high (<10 years) frequency coupling using evidence across tropical, extratropical, and Pacific basin scales. We analyze observations and model simulations with a highly accurate method called Dominant Frequency State Analysis (DFSA) to provide evidence of stable ENSO features. The observational data sets of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), North Pacific Index Anomaly, and ENSO Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly, as well as a theoretical model all confirm the existence of long-term and short-term climatic cycles of the ENSO process with resonance frequencies of {2.5, 3.8, 5, 12–14, 61–75, 180} years. This fundamental result shows long-term and short-term signal coupling with mode locking across the dominant ENSO dynamics. These dominant oscillation frequency dynamics, defined as ENSO frequency states, contain a stable attractor with three frequencies in resonance allowing us to coin the term Heartbeat of the Southern Oscillation due to its characteristic shape. We predict future ENSO states based on a stable hysteresis scenario of short-term and long-term ENSO oscillations over the next century.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML

How should sparse marine in situ measurements be compared to a continuous model: an example

This work demonstrates an example of the importance of an adequate method to sub-sample model results when comparing with in situ measurements. A test of model skill was performed by employing a point-to-point method to compare a multi-decadal hindcast against a sparse, unevenly distributed historic in situ dataset. The point-to-point method masked out all hindcast cells that did not have a corresponding in situ measurement in order to match each in situ measurement against its most similar cell from the model. The application of the point-to-point method showed that the model was successful at reproducing the inter-annual variability of the in situ datasets. Furthermore, this success was not immediately apparent when the measurements were aggregated to regional averages. Time series, data density and target diagrams were employed to illustrate the impact of switching from the regional average method to the point-to-point method. The comparison based on regional averages gave significantly different and sometimes contradicting results that could lead to erroneous conclusions on the model performance. Furthermore, the point-to-point technique is a more correct method to exploit sparse uneven in situ data while compensating for the variability of its sampling. We therefore recommend that researchers take into account for the limitations of the in situ datasets and process the model to resemble the data as much as possible

4-{[2-(2,4-Dinitro­phen­yl)hydrazinyl­idene]meth­yl}phenol ethanol hemisolvate

In the title compound, C13H10N4O5·0.5C2H5OH, the two benzene rings form a dihedral angle of 4.29 (9)°. The ethanol solvent mol­ecule was treated as disordered between two orientations related by symmetry (center of inversion), with occupancies fixed at 0.5. The crystal packing, stabilized by inter­molecular O—H⋯O and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds and π–π inter­actions [indicated by the short distance of 3.7299 (7) Å between the centroids of benzene rings from neighbouring mol­ecules], exhibits short inter­molecular O⋯O contacts of 2.8226 (3) Å

3,5-Dicarb­oxy-2,6-dimethyl­pyridinium chloride dihydrate

In the title compound, C9H10NO4 +·Cl−·2H2O, both the cation and the anion have crystallographic twofold rotation symmetry; in the former, one N and one C atom lie on the rotation axis. In the crystal structure, the ions and water mol­ecules are linked via O—H⋯O, O—H⋯Cl and N—H⋯Cl hydrogen bonds into layers parallel to (101)

3-Hydr­oxy-4-nitro­phenyl acetate

In the mol­ecule of the title compound, C8H7NO5, the acetate group is oriented with respect to the aromatic ring at a dihedral angle of 85.30 (3)°. An intra­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bond results in the formation of a non-planar six-membered ring, adopting an envelope conformation. In the crystal structure, inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules

Is the Stack Distance Between Test Case and Method Correlated With Test Effectiveness?

Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite and its outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However, despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significant computational effort and has not been widely adopted in industry. Therefore, we study in this paper whether test effectiveness can be approximated using a more light-weight approach. We hypothesize that a test case is more likely to detect faults in methods that are close to the test case on the call stack than in methods that the test case accesses indirectly through many other methods. Based on this hypothesis, we propose the minimal stack distance between test case and method as a new test measure, which expresses how close any test case comes to a given method, and study its correlation with test effectiveness. We conducted an empirical study with 21 open-source projects, which comprise in total 1.8 million LOC, and show that a correlation exists between stack distance and test effectiveness. The correlation reaches a strength up to 0.58. We further show that a classifier using the minimal stack distance along with additional easily computable measures can predict the mutation testing result of a method with 92.9% precision and 93.4% recall. Hence, such a classifier can be taken into consideration as a light-weight alternative to mutation testing or as a preceding, less costly step to that.Comment: EASE 201

1-Cyclo­pentyl­idene-2-(2,4-dinitro­phenyl)­hydrazine

The title compound, C11H12N4O4, was synthesized by the reaction of (2,4-dinitro­phen­yl)hydrazine with cyclo­penta­none. The cyclo­pentyl fragment is disordered over two sites with occupancies of 0.63 (1) and 0.37 (1). An intra­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond helps to establish the conformation. Pairs of mol­ecules are held together by π–π inter­actions between adjacent benzene rings [centroid-to-centroid distance 3.589 (2) Å]

2-(1H-1,2,3-Benzotriazol-1-yl)-N′-cyclo­pentyl­ideneacetohydrazide

The title compound, C13H15N5O, was synthesized by the reaction of 2-(1H-1,2,3-benzotriazol-1-yl)acetohydrazide with cyclo­penta­none. In the cyclopentane ring, two C atoms and their attached H atoms are disordered over two positions; the site occupancy factors are ca 0.63 and 0.37. In the crystal structure, mol­ecules are linked into infinite chains directed along the b axis by N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. In addition, there are weak C—H⋯O and C—H⋯N hydrogen bonds, as well as C—H⋯π-ring inter­actions in the structure