4,944 research outputs found
Selective Screening of Rail Passengers, MTI 06-07
The threat of another major terrorist attack in the United States remains high, with the greatest danger coming from local extremists inspired by events in the Middle East. Although the United States removed the Taliban government and destroyed al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan, events in Europe and elsewhere have shown that the terrorist network leadership remains determined to carry out further attacks and is capable of doing so. Therefore, the United States must systematically conduct research on terrorist strikes against transportation targets to distill lessons learned and determine the best practices for deterrence, response, and recovery. Those best practices must be taught to transportation and security professionals to provide secure surface transportation for the nation. Studying recent incidents in Europe and Asia, along with other research, will help leaders in the United States learn valuable lessons—from preventing attacks, to response and recovery, to addressing the psychological impacts of attacks to business continuity. Timely distillations of the lessons learned and best practices developed in other countries, once distributed to law enforcement, first responders, and rail- and subway-operating transit agencies, could result in the saving of American lives. This monograph focuses on the terrorist risks confronting public transportation in the United States—especially urban mass transit—and explores how different forms of passenger screening, and in particular, selective screening, can best be implemented to reduce those risks
Wright-Fisher diffusion bridges
{\bf Abstract} The trajectory of the frequency of an allele which begins at
at time and is known to have frequency at time can be modelled
by the bridge process of the Wright-Fisher diffusion. Bridges when are
particularly interesting because they model the trajectory of the frequency of
an allele which appears at a time, then is lost by random drift or mutation
after a time . The coalescent genealogy back in time of a population in a
neutral Wright-Fisher diffusion process is well understood. In this paper we
obtain a new interpretation of the coalescent genealogy of the population in a
bridge from a time . In a bridge with allele frequencies of 0 at
times 0 and the coalescence structure is that the population coalesces in
two directions from to and to such that there is just one
lineage of the allele under consideration at times and . The genealogy
in Wright-Fisher diffusion bridges with selection is more complex than in the
neutral model, but still with the property of the population branching and
coalescing in two directions from time . The density of the
frequency of an allele at time is expressed in a way that shows coalescence
in the two directions. A new algorithm for exact simulation of a neutral
Wright-Fisher bridge is derived. This follows from knowing the density of the
frequency in a bridge and exact simulation from the Wright-Fisher diffusion.
The genealogy of the neutral Wright-Fisher bridge is also modelled by branching
P\'olya urns, extending a representation in a Wright-Fisher diffusion. This is
a new very interesting representation that relates Wright-Fisher bridges to
classical urn models in a Bayesian setting
Implementation and Development of Vehicle Tracking and Immobilization Technologies
Since the mid-1980s, limited use has been made of vehicle tracking using satellite communications to mitigate the security and safety risks created by the highway transportation of certain types of hazardous materials. However, vehicle-tracking technology applied to safety and security is increasingly being researched and piloted, and it has been the subject of several government reports and legislative mandates.
At the same time, the motor carrier industry has been investing in and implementing vehicle tracking, for a number of reasons, particularly the increase in efficiency achieved through better management of both personnel (drivers) and assets (trucks or, as they are known, tractors; cargo loads; and trailers).
While vehicle tracking and immobilization technologies can play a significant role in preventing truck-borne hazardous materials from being used as weapons against key targets, they are not a & ”silver bullet.” However, the experience of DTTS and the FMCSA and TSA pilot projects indicates that when these technologies are combined with other security measures, and when the information they provide is used in conjunction with information supplied outside of the tracking system, they can provide defensive value to any effort to protect assets from attacks using hazmat as a weapon.
This report is a sister publication to MTI Report 09-03, Potential Terrorist Uses of Highway-Borne Hazardous Materials. That publication was created in response to the Department of Homeland Security´s request that the Mineta Transportation Institute´s National Transportation Security Center of Excellence provide research and insights regarding the security risks created by the highway transportation of hazardous materials
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