An international review of experiences from on-demand public transport services

The aim of this report is to contribute to develop knowledge about what the developments in positioning and smartphone technology bring to the table for the public transport sector. The overarching question in the report is: can new technology improve demand-responsive transport (DRT)? The cases analysed in this report were selected using a number of criteria to delimit the sample and distinguish the cases from “traditional” DRT and from ride-hailing services. A total of 35 different services were identified that met the criteria for what this report refers to as on-demand public transport. The identified cases are located in nine different countries and 23 different cities or regions, and includes services that have been or are operating in major urban areas, smaller towns, suburbs, semi-rural and rural areas. Nine services, most of which are subsidised by the public sector, have been analysed in more detail. The comparison of the cases reveal differences and similarities concerning aspects such as vehicles and fleet sizes, and service partnerships. Different variants are also described regarding operational policies of the services. This includes origin-destination policies, areas covered by the services, where to pick up and drop off passengers, operating hours, booking method, time of booking, payment and pricing. For the nine cases that are the focus of the report a comparison of patronage, productivity and production costs are also made. A main conclusion from this part of the study is that so far there is scant evidence that new technology improves the productivity of DRT. This suggests that new technology is no panacea for fixing the problems of DRT and the study shows that thus far, at least, on-demand public transport hardly represents a transport revolution

Using the Go Programming Language in Practice

When developing software today, we still use old tools and ideas. Maybe it is time to start from scratch and try tools and languages that are more in line with how we actually want to develop software. The Go Programming Language was created at Google by a rather famous trio: Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer. Before introducing Go, the company suffered from their development process not scaling well due to slow builds, uncontrolled dependencies, hard to read code, poor documentation and so on. Go is set out to provide a solution for these issues. The purpose of this master's thesis was to review the current state of the language. This is not only a study of the language itself but an investigation of the whole software development process using Go. The study was carried out from an embedded development perspective which includes an investigation of compilers and cross-compilation. We found that Go is exciting, fun to use and fulfills what is promised in many cases. However, we think the tools need some more time to mature

POPE—a tool to aid high-throughput phylogenetic analysis

Summary: POPE (Phylogeny, Ortholog and Paralog Extractor) provides an integrated platform for automatic ortholog identification. Intermediate steps can be visualized, modified and analyzed in order to assess and improve the underlying quality of orthology and paralogy assignments

Rationales for transitioning to electric buses in Swedish public transport

Public transport systems in different parts of the world are currently undergoing a change characterised by the introduction of battery-powered electric buses in everyday operations. The introduction of electric buses brings new challenges such as high investment costs and technology concerns, as well as new forms of collaboration between both established and new actors. The aim of this paper is to disentangle different actors’ rationale for the transition, identifying underlying interests in and expectations of the electric bus system. With a focus on the Swedish context, we found that whilst common rationales exist, these are influenced by collective expectations and different underlying interests for the actor groups. We found that the interests of the actors are grounded in expectations of future developments, but also relate to the experience that the transition is occurring faster than previously anticipated. The results show a high degree of consensus regarding the transition to electric buses, although the actors have varying resources and action spaces with which to influence the transition, which is largely determined by the institutional and local context

UPPAAL in 1995

UPPAAL is a tool suite for automatic verification of safety andbounded liveness properties of real-time systems modeled as networks of timed automata[12, 9, 4], developed during the past two years. In this paper, we summarizethe main features of UPPAAL in particular its various extensions developed in 1995as well as applications to various case-studies, review and provide pointers to thetheoretical foundation

Sequence signature analysis of chromosome identity in three Drosophila species

BACKGROUND: All eukaryotic organisms need to distinguish each of their chromosomes. A few protein complexes have been described that recognise entire, specific chromosomes, for instance dosage compensation complexes and the recently discovered autosome-specific Painting of Fourth (POF) protein in Drosophila. However, no sequences have been found that are chromosome-specific and distributed over the entire length of the respective chromosome. Here, we present a new, unbiased, exhaustive computational method that was used to probe three Drosophila genomes for chromosome-specific sequences. RESULTS: By combining genome annotations and cytological data with multivariate statistics related to three Drosophila genomes we found sequence signatures that distinguish Muller's F-elements (chromosome 4 in D. melanogaster) from all other chromosomes in Drosophila that are not attributable to differences in nucleotide composition, simple sequence repeats or repeated elements. Based on these signatures we identified complex motifs that are strongly overrepresented in the F-elements and found indications that the D. melanogaster motif may be involved in POF-binding to the F-element. In addition, the X-chromosomes of D. melanogaster and D. yakuba can be distinguished from the other chromosomes, albeit to a lesser extent. Surprisingly, the conservation of the F-element sequence signatures extends not only between species separated by approximately 55 Myr, but also linearly along the sequenced part of the F-elements. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that chromosome-distinguishing features are not exclusive to the sex chromosomes, but are also present on at least one autosome (the F-element) in Drosophila

An impedimetric study of DNA hybridization on paper-supported inkjet-printed gold electrodes

In this study, two different supramolecular recognition architectures for impedimetric detection of DNA hybridization have been formed on disposable paper-supported inkjet-printed gold electrodes. The gold electrodes were fabricated using a gold nanoparticle based ink. The first recognition architecture consists of subsequent layers of biotinylated self-assembly monolayer (SAM), streptavidin and biotinylated DNA probe. The other recognition architecture is constructed by immobilization of thiol-functionalized DNA probe (HSDNA) and subsequent backfill with 11mercapto1undecanol (MUOH) SAM. The binding capacity and selectivity of the recognition architectures were examined by surface plasmon resonance (SPR) measurements. SPR results showed that the HSDNA/MUOH system had a higher binding capacity for the complementary DNA target. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements showed that the hybridization can be detected with impedimetric spectroscopy in picomol range for both systems. EIS signal indicated a good selectivity for both recognition architectures, whereas SPR showed very high unspecific binding for the HSDNA/MUOH system. The factors affecting the impedance signal were interpreted in terms of the complexity of the supramolecular architecture. The more complex architecture acts as a less ideal capacitive sensor and the impedance signal is dominated by the resistive elements

Intrinsic differences between backward and forward vehicle simulation models

Two common methods for predicting the energy usage in vehicles through mathematical\ua0simulation, the `backward\u27 and the `forward\u27 schemes, are discussed and compared in terms\ua0of what longitudinal vehicle behaviour they predict. In the backward scheme, the input driving\ua0cycle is initially assumed to be followed perfectly and therefore the vehicle speed is not a dynamic\ua0state. In the forward scheme, a driver model controls the vehicle in an attempt to follow the\ua0input driving cycle, and the vehicle speed is intrinsically a dynamic state. A theoretical study is\ua0made with a simple mathematical vehicle model, where it is shown that the two methods neither\ua0predict the same expected energy use nor energy variation. Next, the simulation model that isused for the CO2 rating of heavy-duty trucks in Europe, VECTO, is used as an example of the\ua0backward method, and an equivalent implementation in a forward scheme is attempted. Two\ua0numerical experiments are made with these models: a detailed study of the longitudinal vehicle\ua0behaviour on a reference mission; and a study of the predicted CO2 emissions on a family of\ua0stochastically generated missions. The conclusion is that the backward method is easier to use\ua0but the forward method has a greater potential to predict realistic behaviour