For Whom the Tunnel Be Tolled: A Four-Factor Model for Explaining Willingness-to-Pay Tolls

This research examines citizen acceptance of tolls and road pricing, and specifically focuses on determinants of the individual’s expressed willingness-to-pay tolls to use a tunnel express lane that would be free of traffic delays. We answer the research question “What factors influence citizens’ willingness-to-pay tolls” by empirically estimating a four factor model of willingness-to-pay: (a) direct benefit to the respondent; (b) relative cost over time; (c) community concern; and (d) political and environmental liberalism. We use data about citizen perceptions from the Life in Hampton Roads Survey, a survey of residents of Hampton Roads, Virginia. We find that willingness-to-pay is primarily driven and motivated by self-interest, through a balancing of benefit to cost relative to individual income and frequency of use. In addition, concern for the community also contributes to willingness-to-pay tolls. The individual’s perception of government’s trustworthiness, a reflection of political and environmental beliefs, also influences the extent to which an individual is willing to pay tolls

An Innovative of Simul Model for Ready-Mix Concretes in The Concept of Third Party Logistics and Supply Chain Management in Malaysia and Thailand

The research discusses on issues in an order fulfilment for sustainable ready-mix concrete as desired for an eco-friendly choice of integration in the concept of third-party logistics and supply chain management. There are insufficient and inappropriate means in concrete industry which has contributed to un-environmentally friendly especially in Malaysia and Thailand. The supply management and logistics are the factors in designing of product which influence on the environmental, safety and health. It also involves on costs of energy, effectiveness, economic certainty, businesses and other related issues. Through the current practices with relevant factors, the analysis of model is no longer realistic. The sustainable of simulation in logistics model should relate to descriptive approaches. Through the less numbers of movements and reduction on carbon dioxide are significant for the simulation. In some developing countries, the involvements of commercial players and government bodies have their responsibility in controlling, simulating economic and business development. Relation to this fundamental deficiency, this paper utilized SIMUL model in the logistics for sustainable ready mixed concrete, eco-friendly and to meet on the order fulfilments. The result clearly indicates that the eco-friendly SIMUL model can be more sustainable, cost efficient and time effective in fulfilling orders for the operational of ready-mix concrete in future

Paying for Infrastructure in an Urban Environment: Roles of Ideological Beliefs and Self-Interest in Support for Two Funding Mechanisms

This study examines public preferences for two revenue options—fuel taxes and tolls—to finance transportation infrastructure in an urban area with the use of the results of a survey of residents of the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia. Specifically, the study addresses two related research questions: (a) To what extent do residents support instituting tolls, increasing the fuel tax, or both? (b) What roles do self-interest and ideological beliefs play in support of increasing the fuel tax, imposing tolls, or doing both? The study finds that 50% of respondents expressed a willingness to support fuel taxes or tolls for infrastructure, 29% for increasing fuel taxes, and 28% for tolls, with 7% supporting both revenue options. The study also finds that the support for each funding source is associated with a different set of ideological beliefs and self-interest factors. Implications for generating public support for increases in revenue and funding for transportation facilities are discussed

Parasitological and serological investigation into lymphatic filariasis among immigrants at Semenyih Detention Centre, Selangor, West Malaysia

Parasitological and serological investigations for lymphatic filariasis were performed on 450 immigrants detained at the Immigration Centre at Semenyih, Seiangor, West Malaysia. The country of origin of these immigrants were Indonesia, The Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Brugia malayi adult worm homogenate (BmAH) antigen was used for the detection of antifilarial IgG. A monoclonal antibody-based ELISA (MAb.XC3~ELISA) specific for filarial circulating antigens and non-phosphorylcholine reactive was used to detect antigenemia in these immigrants. Parasitologically 67 (14.89 %) were positive for W, bancrofti and 54 (12.0%) for Brugia malayi. Serologically 63 % had antifilarial IgG titre to the BmAH antigen. While Bancroftian filariasis is now unknown in Peninsular Malaysia, the potential of it to be reintroduced into Peninsular Malaysia by the immigrant population is discussed

The Role of Nerve Exploration in Supracondylar Humerus Fracture in Children with Nerve Injury

The supracondylar humerus fracture (SCHF) in children is common and can be complicated with nerve injury either primarily immediate post-trauma or secondarily posttreatment. The concept of neurapraxic nerve injury makes most surgeons choose to ‘watch and see’ the nerve recovery before deciding second surgery if the nerve does not recover. We report three cases of nerve injury in SCHF, all of which underwent nerve exploration for different reasons. Early reduction in the Casualty is important to release the nerve tension before transferring the patient to the operation room. If close reduction fails, we proceed to explore the nerve together with open reduction of the fracture. In iatrogenic nerve injury, we recommend nerve exploration to determine the surgical procedure that is causing the injury. Primary nerve exploration will allow early assessment of the injured nerve and minimize subsequent surgery

ENHANCED NON-LINEAR FILTERING SCHEME FOR EDGE DETECTION

Edge detection plays an important role in image processing. Edge detectors have always been a compromising between information and noise. Since edge detection is a derivative operation, it tends to amplify noise. This means that increasing the amount of information may increase the noise as well. There are a variety of edge detectors or operators with different size of the kernel. In general, many established edge detectors focus on the gradient in grayscale image to detect edges. This paper proposed an improvement of edge detection algorithm by considering two edge features: gradient and length. In the proposed algorithm, the threshold value of the gradient was set to a value similar to a default value used in other existing edge detectors. The length of the edges feature was used to increase the robustness of the proposed algorithm towards the noise. The proposed algorithm was validated with synthetic and natural images with the inclusion of three types of noise: additive, multiplicative and impulsive noises. Results were compared with other established edge detectors whereby the proposed algorithm demonstrated its superiority in handling edges in low contrast regions and less sensitive towards the noise

Spread enhancement for firefly algorithm with application to control mechanism of exoskeleton system

Firefly algorithm (FA) is a swarm intelligence based algorithm for global optimization and has widely been used in solving problems in many areas. The FA is good at exploring the search space and locating the global optimum, but it always gets trapped at local optimum especially in case of high dimensional problems. In order to overcome such drawbacks of FA, this paper proposes a modified variant of FA, referred to as spread enhancement strategy for firefly algorithm (SE-FA), by devising a nonlinear adaptive spread mechanism for the control parameters of the algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the original FA and one variant of FA on six benchmark functions. Experimental and statistical results of the approach show better solutions in terms of reliability and convergence speed than the original FA especially in the case of high-dimensional problems. The algorithms are further tested with control of dynamic systems. The systems considered comprise assistive exoskeletons mechanism for upper and lower extremities. The performance results are evaluated in comparison to the original firefly and invasive weed algorithms. It is demonstrated that the proposed approaches are superior over the individual algorithms in terms of efficiency, convergence speed and quality of the optimal solution achieved

Symmetrical couple f-shaped notches with high rejection c-band of uwb patch antenna

The ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna is developed to cover a broad bandwidth. ‎The UWB radio systems are interfered ‎by the ‎same ‎spectrum ‎that shared with the local bands. In this paper, two F-shaped slots on a hexagonal patch UWB antenna are demonstrated ‎‎ to realize a high band rejection. The symmetrical couple F-slots is ‎notched on the hexagonal UWB ‎ ‎patch antenna to avoid the interference ‎and ‎‎enhance the notching results at C-band. The demonstrated ‎antenna employs a coplanar waveguide ‎(CPW) technique to meet a fractional bandwidth of 126%. The proposed method validates ‎several ‎‎reconfigurations of the F-slot location on the demonstrated design. Six steps ‎parametric study are considered to test the slots location. The results of the proposed antenna with slots are introduced based on analytical, simulation, and ‎measurement. The total design size ‎‎28 mm × 43 mm × 1.6 ‎mm is simulated by ‎using CST Microwave Studio. The two F-slots are achieved the antenna gain of -6 dB, ‎return loss of -1.2 ‎dB, and ‎VSWR of 15.2 at the rejected band of 4 GHz. The ‎measurement results are compared with the simulation results between the three ‎prototypes. The current ‎distribution on the design is discussed at 2.88 GHz and 4 GHz frequencies. The radiation patterns illustrate ‎omnidirectional of H-plane and bidirectional of E-plane. This paper validates the slots locations to enhance the notches performance and reduce the interference

Implementing lightweight reservation protocol for mobile network using hybrid schema

This paper presents our method to improve lightweight reservation protocol. This was inspired by the ever increasing volume of multimedia traffic over the Internet which demanding quality of service beyond the traditional best-effort. The Integrated Services model relies on the Resource reservation Protocol (RSVP) for signaling and reserving resources. RSVP uses the receiver-initiated reservation mechanism to set up the reservation which executes protocol complexity and incurs additional processing and storage overheads on the routers. Due to heavyweight characteristic, many researchers changed the focus to the lightweight reservation protocol. In this paper, we propose a lightweight signaling protocol of Sender-initiated and Mobility-support Reservation Protocol (SMRP) with Crossover Router (COR) as an extension to SMRP. COR scheme cannot provide smooth handover as it affects the SMRP in Mobile hosts. This is the main disadvantage of COR scheme. Pointer Forwarding Scheme makes an advance resource reservation only a forwarding one-step path from the sender along the forwarding chains. In order to make SMRP more suitable for Mobile hosts, we propose a hybrid method combining the advantages of COR scheme with Pointer Forwarding scenarios. We use ns2 Java version network simulator to test it. We evaluate the performance of SMRP in a mobile network environment. The results show that the hybrid scheme can support seamless and also efficient SMRP path rerouting during handoff in respect of decreased the drop probability

INFLUENCE OF THE DEPOSITION TIME ON THE STRUCTURE AND MORPHOLOGY OF THE ZnS THIN FILMS ELECTRODEPOSITED ON INDIUM TIN OXIDE SUBSTRATES

Zinc sulphide thin films were grown on indium tin oxide glass substrates by electrodeposition method in an aqueous solution that contained zinc chloride, sodium thiosulfate and triethanolamine. Effect of deposition time on the deposition of ZnS thin films was investigated. The crystallinity and surface morphology of ZnS thn films were studied by X-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy, respectively. From the X-ray diffraction results, it could be seen that the prominent growth orientation was (200) plane. The number of peaks related to ZnS increased as the deposition time was increased from 15 to 30 min. However, the total ZnS peaks reduced to two peaks as the deposition time was further increased to 60 min. Based on the atomic force microscopy analysis, it was found that the grain size, thickness and surface roughness were strongly influenced by deposition time