Congestion and Safety: A Spatial Analysis of London

Spatially disaggregate Enumeration District (ED) level data for London is used in an analysis of various area-wide factors on road casualties. Data on 15335 EDs was input into a geographic information system (GIS) that contained data on road characteristics, public transport accessibility, information of nearest hospital location, car ownership and road casualties. Demographic data for each ED was also included. Various count data models e.g., negative binomial or zero-inflated Poisson and negative binomial models were used to analyze the associations between these factors with traffic fatalities, serious injuries and slight injuries. Different levels of spatial aggregation were also examined to determine if this affected interpretation of the results. Different pedestrian casualties were also examined. Results suggest that dissimilar count models may have to be adopted for modeling different types of accidents based on the dependent variable. Results also suggest that EDs with more roundabouts are safer than EDs with more junctions. More motorways are found to be related to fewer pedestrian casualties but higher traffic casualties. Number of households with no car seems to have more traffic casualties. Distance of the nearest hospital from EDs tends to have no significant effect on casualties. In all cases, it is found that EDs with more employees are associated with fewer casualties.

Coherent and Differential Downlink Space-Time Steering Aided Generalised Multicarrier DS-CDMA

This paper presents a generalised MultiCarrier Direct Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (MC DS-CDMA) system invoking smart antennas for improving the achievable performance in the downlink. In this contribution, the MC DSCDMA transmitter employs an Antenna Array (AA) and Steered Space-Time Spreading (SSTS). Furthermore, the proposed system employs both Time and Frequency (TF) domain spreading for extending the capacity of the system, which is combined with a user-grouping technique for reducing the effects of Multi-User Interference (MUI). Moreover, to eliminate the high complexity Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel estimation required for coherent detection, we also propose a Differential SSTS (DSSTS) scheme. More explicitly, for coherent SSTS detection MVNr number of channel estimates have to be generated, where M is the number of transmit AAs, V is the number of subcarriers and Nr is the number of receive antennas. This is a challenging task, which renders the low-complexity DSSTS scheme attractive. Index Terms—MIMO, MC DS-CDMA, beamforming, spacetime spreading, differential space-time spreading

The symptom and genetic diversity of cassava brown streak viruses infecting cassava in East Africa

The genetic and symptom diversity of six virus isolates causing cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) in the endemic (Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania) and the recently affected epidemic areas (Uganda) of eastern Africa was studied. Five cassava varieties; Albert, Colombian, Ebwanateraka, TMS60444 (all susceptible) and Kiroba (tolerant) were graft inoculated with each isolate. Based on a number of parameters including the severity of leaf and root symptoms, and the extent of virus transmission by grafting, the viruses were classified as either severe or relatively mild. These results were further confirmed by the mechanical inoculation of 13 herbaceous hosts in which the virulent isolates caused plant death in Nicotiana clevelandii and N. benthamiana whereas the milder isolates did not. Phylogenetic analysis of complete coat protein gene sequences of these isolates together with sequences obtained from 14 other field-collected samples from Kenya and Zanzibar, and reference sequences grouped them into two distinct clusters, representing the two species of cassava brown streak viruses. Put together, these results did not suggest the association of a hypervirulent form of the virus with the current CBSD epidemic in Uganda. Identification of the severe and milder isolates, however, has further implications for disease management and quarantine requirements

Extraction of Projection Profile, Run-Histogram and Entropy Features Straight from Run-Length Compressed Text-Documents

Document Image Analysis, like any Digital Image Analysis requires identification and extraction of proper features, which are generally extracted from uncompressed images, though in reality images are made available in compressed form for the reasons such as transmission and storage efficiency. However, this implies that the compressed image should be decompressed, which indents additional computing resources. This limitation induces the motivation to research in extracting features directly from the compressed image. In this research, we propose to extract essential features such as projection profile, run-histogram and entropy for text document analysis directly from run-length compressed text-documents. The experimentation illustrates that features are extracted directly from the compressed image without going through the stage of decompression, because of which the computing time is reduced. The feature values so extracted are exactly identical to those extracted from uncompressed images.Comment: Published by IEEE in Proceedings of ACPR-2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1403.778

Performance Analysis of Best Relaying Protocol Selection with Interferences at Relays

In this paper, we investigate the performance of selecting the best protocol between amplify and forward (AF) and decode and forward (DF) in multiple relay networks with multiple interferences at relays. In the selection scheme, the best protocol between AF and DF is selected depending on the comparisons of signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) for all source-relay links. All relays measure the received SINR to decide forwarding signal or not. When SINR is above a certain threshold then DF is used otherwise AF is used. Particularly, we develop an accurate mathematical model for best relaying protocol by considering the effect of interferences to our scheme. Firstly, we derive the asymptotic closed form expression for the symbol error rate (SER) for the system under study. Also we derive an upper and lower bound of symbol error rate and show how they were tight with exact SER. Furthermore an approximate expression for the outage probability is derived. Numerical results are finally presented to validate the theoretical analysis with a different number of relays