Freight mode choice and adaptive stated preferences

This paper presents empirical results from a survey of determinants of mode choice for freight in India. The Leeds Adaptive Stated Preference software was used for the main survey which was carried out in summer 1998 on the Delhi to Bombay corridor. The survey results show that frequency of service is an important attribute determining mode choice. Valuation of reliability is generally lower than expected. Value of time is quite similar across different product segments. Given prevailing costs, the results suggest that intermodal services can be viable for high value and finished goods

Review on Facial Recognition

Generally face recognition perform many operations in our daily life such as security purpose identification of people and verification purpose. The basic aim of my project is to design an effective and secure technique for authentication using face recognition that can search or recognize a human face among the thousands of persons and improve the performance of face recognition system in low light conditions and also evaluate the performance of the designed framework by comparing the performance of existing face recognition system. This study also provides a automatic system through which a given still image or video of a scene, identify one or more persons in this scene by using a stored database of facial images

Comparative efficacy of polyethylene glycol 3350 monotherapy against polyethylene glycol 3350 plus sodium picosulfate combined therapy in treating fecal impaction in pediatric functional constipation patients

Background: Functional constipation (FC) is a common pediatric problem worldwide. The management of FC comprises of a short initial disimpaction phase followed by long-term maintenance phase. Currently, polyethylene glycol (PEG) is considered as standard disimpaction therapy in pediatric FC patients. The aim of our study was to compare the efficacy of polyethylene glycol 3350 monotherapy with polyethylene glycol 3350 and sodium picosulfate combined therapy in treating fecal impaction in pediatric FC patients. Methods: All children (aged >1 year) diagnosed with FC as per ROME IV criteria and presenting to the out-patient department of pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition unit of a tertiary health centre in north Indian Himalayan state were randomized into two open label, prospective, parallel groups, namely group A (receiving PEG 3350 monotherapy) and group B (receiving combined PEG 3350 plus sodium picosulfate therapy), over a period of 13 months. The outcome was evaluated as successful disimpaction with onset of loose/watery stools (Type-7 of Bristol stool chart scale). The success rates and mean time to disimpaction for two groups were computed and compared. Results: Eighty-one patients were randomized into two groups. The mean time to disimpaction was found to be significantly lower (p<0.001) for group B (2.37±1.16 days) when compared to group A (4.00±1.43 days). There was successful resolution of impaction in both groups.  No adverse events were reported in either group. Conclusions: Combined PEG 3350 and sodium picosulfate therapy significantly reduces the disimpaction time when compared with PEG 3350 monotherapy in pediatric population, however both the therapies appear similar in achieving successful disimpaction

An application of stated preference methods to the study of intermodal freight transport services in India

The Indian Railways (IR) have, over the past four decades, been steadily losing market share, in both passenger and freight markets. In the case of freight, they have gone from being the dominant mode to being carriers of bulk traffic only. Most of the general goods, high value, traffic has shifted to road. In line with the pattern of economic growth, the manufactured goods sector is the fastest growing sector of the economy. This leads on one hand, to exclusion of JR from an important, and growing, sector of the economy and on the other hand to heavy strains on the already saturated road network, higher environmental dis-benefits and higher costs of petroleum imports. The Container Corporation of India (CONCOR), a subsidiary of IR, is now attempting to enter the domestic freight market, to recapture some of this freight traffic. The present work has been taken up, with the final objective of developing a methodology, for identifying sectors where viable intermodal services can be offered, in comparison to road, as well as rail, services and to determine the price and service levels required for the same. In the absence of any revealed preference (RP) data, as well as any previous work on valuation of attributes for the different sectors, we have used an Adaptive Stated Preference (SP) design for our work. The Leeds Adaptive Stated Preference (LASP) software has been modified and used for the work. Various alternatives have also been examined, with regard to the approach to be used for analysis of the survey data and we have finally decided to use individual level models aggregated using weighted averages as these appear to provide the most robust estimates. We have developed models for costing of, door to door, freight movement by road, rail and intermodal services. These models have been used in conjunction with the demand model to assess the viability of the different services for the sectors considered. Our findings indicate that, using fully allocated door to door costs, rail is a clear leader for distances over about 500 Km, on cost basis alone. However, when the service quality factors are taken into account, intermodal services become more attractive for the high value, damage prone, products while road services are more attractive for the lower value products. Rail services break even under 1500 Km only in a few of the situations considered by us and Intermodal service break even under 1500 Km for a large number of the situations (in case of use of new high speed wagons this breakeven shifts to between 500 to 1000 Km). Rail services would need to match the quality of road services, or be priced on marginal cost basis, to be competitive, as compared to road services. Intermodal services can be quite profitable, with presently attained transit times using the older (BFK) wagons, if they are offered at least thrice a week. The larger firms also appear to be more likely to go for intermodal services, than smaller firms. In case of the newer, high speed wagons, the increased capital costs are offset by the gains due to faster turn-around and there is a substantial improvement in the quality of service (time & reliability) that can be provided. This provides an opportunity for a highly profitable service to be provided with the induction of the new wagons

Li-Fi Based Helping Stick

Li-Fi stands for Light Fidelity that is transmitting data through visible light. Li-Fi is a 5th Generation Communication system of Visible Light having a light-emitting diodes as a medium to high-speed communication as that in a Wi-Fi. In the days where internet has become a major demand, people are in a search for Wi-Fi hotspots. The main idea of the paper is to create internal navigation systems for the bigger areas to create automatic navigation for the visually impaired using Li-Fi technology, as visible light is present everywhere

Information Resources: Modelling, Cataloging and Searching

Existing search systems exhibit uneven selectivity when used in seeking information resources on the Internet. This problem has prompted a number of researchers to turn their attention to the development and implementation of matadata models for use in indexing and searching on the WWW and Internet. In this paper, we present our results of a simple query on a number of existing search systems and then discuss a proposed metadata structure. Modelling the expertise of librarians for cataloging, user entry and search using a rule-based system is also discussed

CINDI: A System for Cataloguing, Searching, and Annotating Electronic Documents in Digital Libraries

This paper describes a system called CINDI for cataloguing, searching, and annotating electronic documents in a digital library, the library being distributed over a computer communication network. A document is catalogued both on its syntactic and semantic content. This makes later searching for the document easier and more precise. On accessing a document, one can write annotations on the document, Such annotations can be read by people who access the document later. Graphical user interfaces are provided for each of cataloguing, searching, and annotating. The user of CINDI is helped by an expert system that mimics the expertise of professional librarians