Arabian adventures

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is one of the world’s most rapidly urbanising countries. Despite the recent downturn in the economy, the region continues to undergo rapid development, particularly around Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Consequently the country is host to many major civil engineering projects including the world’s tallest building, artificial offshore islands, new international airports, metro systems and high-speed rail networks

Evaluating changes in driver behaviour for road safety outcomes: a risk profiling approach

Road safety continues to be an important issue with road crashes among the leading causes of death. Considerable effort has been put into improving our understanding of the factors that influence driving behaviour with a view to devising more effective road safety strategies. Within the literature, demographics, social norms, personality, enforcement and the road environment have all been identified as influencers of risky driving behaviour. What is missing is an integrated empirical approach which examines the relationship between these factors and drivers’ awareness of their speeding behaviour to a measure of day-to-day driving behaviour. This research employs demographic, psychological, vehicle, trip and Global Positioning System (GPS) driving data collected from 106 drivers in Sydney, Australia during a pay-as-you-drive study. The main contributions are three-fold. First, a methodology is developed to control for the influence of spatiotemporal characteristics on driver behaviour. This deals with the inherent variability introduced from road environment factors external to the driver which would otherwise lead to misleading results. Second, the creation of a composite measure of driver behaviour allows driver behaviour to be described using a single measure whilst accounting for the variability and multitude of aspects within the driving task. This allows drivers to be compared to each other and for the same driver to be compared across time and space permitting empirical testing of interventions in a before and after study. Lastly, this research reveals the potential for reducing the extent and magnitude of risky driving behaviour by making drivers aware of their own behaviour. The results indicate that drivers can be placed in three groups: drivers requiring a monetary incentive to change speeding behaviour, drivers requiring information alone to change their speeding behaviour and drivers that appear unresponsive to both monetary incentives and information

Speeding in urban environments: Are the time savings worth the risk?

Perceived time savings by travelling faster is often cited as a motivation for drivers’ speeding behaviour. These time savings, however, come at a cost of significant road injuries and fatalities. While it is known that drivers tend to overestimate the time savings attributable to speeding there is little empirical evidence on how much time drivers genuinely save during day-to-day urban driving and how this relates to speeding-related crashes. The current paper reports on a study to address the lack of empirical evidence on this issue using naturalistic driving data collected from 106 drivers over a period of five weeks. The results show that the average driver saves 26 seconds per day or two minutes per week by speeding. More importantly, the cost of these time savings is one fatality for every 18,947 hours saved by the population on 100 km/h roads and one injury for every 1,407 hours saved on the same roads. Full speed compliance – and consequently a dramatic reduction in the road toll – could be achieved through almost imperceptible increases in travel time by each driver

Analysing speeding behaviour: A multilevel modelling approach

This paper examines the variability in speeding for 147 motorists over a five-week period using data collected from Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. A multilevel modelling approach is employed to decompose speeding behaviour into four major levels of variation, namely: inter-individual variation, temporal variation, trip-level variation, and segment level variation. Initially, we estimate a null model (i.e., excludes the explanatory variables) to assess the variations at each level. Results suggest that the driver is more of a factor in speeding as the speed limit increases but that the majority of variation in speeding goes unexplained. This is followed by progressively including explanatory variables (e.g., age, gender, vehicle type, trips purpose etc) at each of the four levels to assess how much more of the variation in speeding can be explained. Results suggest that the reduction in unexplained variance in speeding varies markedly by speed zone, indicating the disproportionately different impacts of explanatory factors

Electronic ticketing systems as a mechanism for travel behaviour change? Evidence from Sydney’s Opal Card

Smartcard and other forms of electronic ticketing have become integral to modern public transport systems. While aggregate ridership figures have generally been positive, little is known about the drivers behind these changes because of a lack of travel information on individuals before and after implementation of such systems. This working paper presents analysis from a naturalistic travel behaviour study of inner-city Sydney residents that coincided with the phased introduction of the Opal smartcard system. Using a differences-in-differences methodology, results indicate significant reductions in car use of around 10 minutes/day with commensurate increases in train use and incidental walking. This trend holds across income groups and is more pronounced for older residents. Results add further weight to the merits of simplifying ticket purchasing as part of a package of policy measures designed to increase public transport usage

Development of an online diary for longitudinal travel / activity surveys

Motivated by the continued search for methods to reduce participant burden and non-response, and improve the quality of travel data, this paper details the development of a new online travel/activity diary to support a major longitudinal investigation of travel in Sydney, Australia. The diary employs several innovative features designed to simplify the process of data entry, and improve participant recall and completeness of travel, including auto-fills, prompts, trip editing capabilities, favourite trips and a dragand- drop technique for capturing travel mode. An additional innovation is the ability to view a GPS-based Google map of daily travel while completing the diary to assist with recall. The diary is tested on 37 participants, with a range of diagnostics provided to assess their comprehension and interaction with the diary, reaction and burden, and completeness of data provided. Overall, 89% of participants complete all seven days of the diary with 75% indicating no issues once they become accustomed to how it works. Trip entry times average around two minutes/trip with three-quarters of trips entered within 24 hours of being made and 96% of trips provided with complete details. In terms of the GPS component, while the data itself is of variable quality and the optional viewing of trips is lower than anticipated, those carrying a GPS report more trips/day and segments/day, fewer missing days, and provide more complete trip data

Creation of unstructured big data from customer service: The case of parcel shipping companies on Twitter

Purpose - Customer service provision is a growing phenomenon on social media and parcel shipping companies have been among the most prominent adopters. This has coincided with greater interest in the development of analysis techniques for unstructured big data from social media platforms, such as the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Given the growing use of dedicated customer service accounts on Twitter, this paper investigates the effectiveness with which parcel shipping companies use the platform. Design/methodology/approach – This paper demonstrates the use of a combination of tools for retrieving, processing and analysing large volumes of customer service related conversations generated between parcel shipping companies and their customers in Australia, United Kingdom and the United States. Extant studies using data from Twitter tend to focus on the contributions of individual entities and are unable to capture the insights provided by a holistic examination of the interactions. Findings – This study identifies the key issues that trigger customer contact with parcel shipping companies on Twitter. It identifies similarities and differences in the approaches that these companies bring to customer engagement and identifies opportunities for using the medium more effectively. Originality/value – The development of consumer-centric supply chains and relevant theories require researchers and practitioners to have the ability to include insights from growing quantities of unstructured data gathered from consumer engagement. This study makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the use of a set of tools to gather insight from a large volume of conversations on a social media platform

Value creation using social media in a virtual business model: how Amazon approaches customer service on twitter

With the growing popularity of social media sites, consumer-focused businesses across industry sectors have started conducting both promotional activities and customer service related interactions via the same platforms. Companies can no longer hope to keep expressions of customer dissatisfaction hidden from the public eye. This preliminary qualitative study examines the exchanges between Amazon and their customers on the micro blogging platform Twitter from over a period of 18 days. 2385 conversations involving 6518 tweets were analyzed and coded to achieve an understanding of how an online shopping site is approaching promotions and customer service issues. The study provides insight on how Amazon uses Twitter to interact with customers in relation to their enquiries, suggestions, and negative and positive feedback

Can a Red Wood-Ant Nest Be Associated with Fault-Related CH4 Micro-Seepage? A Case Study from Continuous Short-Term In-Situ Sampling

Simple Summary Methane (CH4) is common on Earth but its natural sources are not well-characterized. We investigated concentrations of CH4 and its stable carbon isotope (δ13C-CH4) within a red wood-ant (RWA; Formica polyctena) nest in the Neuwied Basin, a part of the East Eifel Volcanic Field (EEVF), and tested for associations between methane concentration and RWA activity patterns, earthquakes, and earth tides. Methane degassing was not synchronized with earth tides, nor was it influenced by a micro-earthquake or RWA activity. Elevated CH4 concentrations in nest gas appear to result from a combination of microbial activity and fault-related emissions. The latter could result from micro-seepage of methane derived from low-temperature gas-water-rock reactions that subsequently moves via fault networks through the RWA nest or from overlapping micro-seepage of magmatic CH4 from the Eifel plume. Given the abundance of RWA nests on the landscape, their role as sources of microbial CH4 and biological indicators for abiotically-derived CH4 should be included in estimations of methane emissions that are contributing to climatic change. Abstract We measured methane (CH4) and stable carbon isotope of methane (δ13C-CH4) concentrations in ambient air and within a red wood-ant (RWA; Formica polyctena) nest in the Neuwied Basin (Germany) using high-resolution in-situ sampling to detect microbial, thermogenic, and abiotic fault-related micro-seepage of CH4. Methane degassing from RWA nests was not synchronized with earth tides, nor was it influenced by micro-earthquake degassing or concomitantly measured RWA activity. Two δ13C-CH4 signatures were identified in nest gas: −69‰ and −37‰. The lower peak was attributed to microbial decomposition of organic matter within the RWA nest, in line with previous observations that RWA nests are hot-spots of microbial CH4. The higher peak has not been reported in previous studies. We attribute this peak to fault-related CH4 emissions moving via fault networks into the RWA nest, which could originate either from thermogenic or abiotic CH4 formation. Sources of these micro-seepages could be Devonian schists, iron-bearing “Klerf Schichten”, or overlapping micro-seepage of magmatic CH4 from the Eifel plume. Given the abundance of RWA nests on the landscape, their role as sources of microbial CH4 and biological indicators for abiotically-derived CH4 should be included in estimation of methane emissions that are contributing to climatic change

Rapid, reliable, and reproducible molecular sub-grouping of clinical medulloblastoma samples

The diagnosis of medulloblastoma likely encompasses several distinct entities, with recent evidence for the existence of at least four unique molecular subgroups that exhibit distinct genetic, transcriptional, demographic, and clinical features. Assignment of molecular subgroup through routine profiling of high-quality RNA on expression microarrays is likely impractical in the clinical setting. The planning and execution of medulloblastoma clinical trials that stratify by subgroup, or which are targeted to a specific subgroup requires technologies that can be economically, rapidly, reliably, and reproducibly applied to formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) specimens. In the current study, we have developed an assay that accurately measures the expression level of 22 medulloblastoma subgroup-specific signature genes (CodeSet) using nanoString nCounter Technology. Comparison of the nanoString assay with Affymetrix expression array data on a training series of 101 medulloblastomas of known subgroup demonstrated a high concordance (Pearson correlation r = 0.86). The assay was validated on a second set of 130 non-overlapping medulloblastomas of known subgroup, correctly assigning 98% (127/130) of tumors to the appropriate subgroup. Reproducibility was demonstrated by repeating the assay in three independent laboratories in Canada, the United States, and Switzerland. Finally, the nanoString assay could confidently predict subgroup in 88% of recent FFPE cases, of which 100% had accurate subgroup assignment. We present an assay based on nanoString technology that is capable of rapidly, reliably, and reproducibly assigning clinical FFPE medulloblastoma samples to their molecular subgroup, and which is highly suited for future medulloblastoma clinical trials