Estimation of Vehicle Damage Cost Involved in Road Traffic Accidents in Karachi, Pakistan: A Geospatial Perspective

AbstractRoad Traffic Accidents (RTAs) are serious but ignored problem in Pakistan. Now this problem is under limelight due to disastrous impacts over society in general and over economy in particular. Karachi is considered to be the most income generating city of Pakistan. This city holds a typical feature of most road traffic accidents facing in the country and the fourth highest RTA fatalities in the world. More than 26,000 road accidents occur on the arteries of Karachi every year making it a worrisome place. Outcome of RTAs could be measured in tangible manner i.e., in term of number of life loss but intangible losses are very difficult to measure. In this paper an attempt has been made to capture the potential flaws in road geometry through Remote Sensing and embedding the land use data through the inventory of Geographic Information Systems. Moreover, overlay analysis techniques helps in identifying the high accident cost areas. In Karachi, over 35,000 vehicles are involved in crashes every year, resulting in loss of life as well as wealth. The overall repair cost over the vehicles involved in all types of RTAs in year2012 is more than 20,000,000 PKR with Landhi Town showing the highest cost. Shah Faisal Town showed the minimum repair cost of over 300,000 due to its small aerial extent and lesser number of economic land use making it a safer place for vehicle users. Moreover, map of Karachi showing the spatial pattern of vehicle repair cost. It is suggested that the serious measures need to be undertaken to combat this problem

Distance Distributions in Regular Polygons

This paper derives the exact cumulative density function of the distance between a randomly located node and any arbitrary reference point inside a regular \el-sided polygon. Using this result, we obtain the closed-form probability density function (PDF) of the Euclidean distance between any arbitrary reference point and its $n$-th neighbour node, when $N$ nodes are uniformly and independently distributed inside a regular $\ell$-sided polygon. First, we exploit the rotational symmetry of the regular polygons and quantify the effect of polygon sides and vertices on the distance distributions. Then we propose an algorithm to determine the distance distributions given any arbitrary location of the reference point inside the polygon. For the special case when the arbitrary reference point is located at the center of the polygon, our framework reproduces the existing result in the literature.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Impact of Body Mass Index on the Association of Ankle-Brachial Index With All-Cause and Cardiovascular Mortality Results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

A grant from the One-University Open Access Fund at the University of Kansas was used to defray the author's publication fees in this Open Access journal. The Open Access Fund, administered by librarians from the KU, KU Law, and KUMC libraries, is made possible by contributions from the offices of KU Provost, KU Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research. For more information about the Open Access Fund, please see http://library.kumc.edu/authors-fund.xml.Objective To assess the influence of body-mass index (BMI) on the association of ankle-brachial index (ABI) with mortality. Patients and Methods We conducted a prospective study of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey participants enrolled from January 1, 1999 to December 31, 2002 with BMI and ABI data available. ABI categories were 1.3 (high). BMI categories were <30 kg/m2 (nonobese) and ≥30 kg/m2 (obese). Cardiovascular (CV) and all-cause mortality were assessed by National Death Index records. Cox proportional-hazards models and Kaplan-Meier survival estimates were used to compare groups. Results In total, 4614 subjects were included, with mean age 56±12 years and BMI 28±6 kg/m2. Median follow-up was 10.3 years (interquartile range [IQR]: 9.3 to 11.4 years). Low and high ABI were present in 7% and 8%, respectively. After adjustment, low ABI was associated with increased all-cause and CV mortality in nonobese (hazard ratio [HR] 1.5, 95% CI, 1.1-2.1 for all-cause and 3.0 [1.8-5.1] for CV mortality) and obese individuals (1.8 [1.2-2.7] and 2.5 [1.2-5.6], respectively) compared with reference. High ABI was associated with increased CV mortality in nonobese (2.2 [1.1-4.5]) but not obese patients; it was not associated with all-cause mortality overall or when stratified by BMI. Conclusion In a US cohort, weight influenced the prognostic significance of high ABI. This may be related to technical factors reducing compressibility of the calf arteries in obese persons compared with those who are nonobese.The University of Kansas (KU) One University Open Access Author Fund sponsored jointly by the KU ProvostKU Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate StudiesKUMC Vice Chancellor for Research and managed jointly by the Libraries at the Medical Center and KU - Lawrence.KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research and managed jointly by the Libraries at the Medical Center and KU - Lawrenc

Fast directional spatially localized spherical harmonic transform

We propose a transform for signals defined on the sphere that reveals their localized directional content in the spatio-spectral domain when used in conjunction with an asymmetric window function. We call this transform the directional spatially localized spherical harmonic transform (directional SLSHT) which extends the SLSHT from the literature whose usefulness is limited to symmetric windows. We present an inversion relation to synthesize the original signal from its directional-SLSHT distribution for an arbitrary window function. As an example of an asymmetric window, the most concentrated band-limited eigenfunction in an elliptical region on the sphere is proposed for directional spatio-spectral analysis and its effectiveness is illustrated on the synthetic and Mars topographic data-sets. Finally, since such typical data-sets on the sphere are of considerable size and the directional SLSHT is intrinsically computationally demanding depending on the band-limits of the signal and window, a fast algorithm for the efficient computation of the transform is developed. The floating point precision numerical accuracy of the fast algorithm is demonstrated and a full numerical complexity analysis is presented.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Impacts of signal free corridors on the incidence of road traffic accidents in Karachi

Increase in road Traffic Accidents is a global phenomenon and Pakistan is no exception. In Karachi, this problem becomes severe due to rapid growth of population. This menace is ruining the lives of thousands of people and making Karachi a worrisome place to live. Recent road geometrical transitions in the city with insufficient accessories have been reducing the problem of traffic congestion to a limited extent. On the contrary, this has erupted as a problem of Road Traffic Accidents which is reaching out of proportions. Recently, induction of a unique feature named, Signal Free Corridor in Karachi has cost many precious lives. In this paper GIS based analysis has been employed by using buffer technique to document the number of Road Traffic Accidents on four Signal Free Corridors, evaluated for five different years. It was revealed that the minor injury accidents were highest in all four Signal Free Corridors. However, in some cases number of severe and fatal road accident cases showed the emerging trend as well. Four types of road users were identified on these corridors out of which riders/pillion and pedestrians were the most vulnerable to Road Traffic Accidents. There is an emergent need to enforce the vehicle speed rules and regulations that would provide breathing time to traffic as well as reduce the incidents of consistent traffic blockages and rising Road Traffic Accidents

Automatic Feature Recognition of Chamfer and Fillet for Turning Part Model by Volume Decomposition Method / Ahmad Faiz Zubair and Mohd Salman Abu Mansor

The present paper illustrates the development of generative feature recognition of cylindrical part model that emphasize on recognition of chamfer and fillet.Without automation, manual work on recognizing these features are tedious and time consuming. Chamfers were recognized by conical surface while constant radius fillets on concave and convex edges were recognized by circular faces and edges. Cylindrical stock model, sub-delta volume for finishing (SDVF) of feature’s recognized and sub-delta volume for roughing of the part model were generated. The resulted volume decomposition in term of delta volume were then compared with manual calculation of feature’s delta volume to achieve the differential error. Two examples of part model were tested and the results show less than zero differential error. These prove that the algorithm is able to recognize cylindrical part model chamfers and fillets feature

On the construction of low-pass filters on the unit sphere

ABSTRACT This paper considers the problem of construction of low-pass filters on the unit sphere, which has wide ranging applications in the processing of signals on the unit sphere. We propose a design criterion for the construction of strictly bandlimited low-pass filters in the spectral domain with optimal concentration in the specified polar cap region in the spatial domain. Our approach uses the weighted sum of the first optimally concentrated eigenfunctions from appropriately formulated Slepian concentration problems on the sphere. Furthermore, in order to reduce the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm, we develop a closed-form expression to accurately model these eigenfunctions. We illustrate the construction of low-pass filters using the proposed approach and demonstrate the advantage of our method approach compared to a diffusion based approach in the literature in terms of control over both bandwidth in the spectral domain and concentration in the spatial domain