Issues and concerns of microscopic calibration process at different network levels : case study of Pacific Motorway

Calibration process in micro-simulation is an extremely complicated phenomenon. The difficulties are more prevalent if the process encompasses fitting aggregate and disaggregate parameters e.g. travel time and headway. The current practice in calibration is more at aggregate level, for example travel time comparison. Such practices are popular to assess network performance. Though these applications are significant there is another stream of micro-simulated calibration, at disaggregate level. This study will focus on such microcalibration exercise-key to better comprehend motorway traffic risk level, management of variable speed limit (VSL) and ramp metering (RM) techniques. Selected section of Pacific Motorway in Brisbane will be used as a case study. The discussion will primarily incorporate the critical issues encountered during parameter adjustment exercise (e.g. vehicular, driving behaviour) with reference to key traffic performance indicators like speed, lane distribution and headway; at specific motorway points. The endeavour is to highlight the utility and implications of such disaggregate level simulation for improved traffic prediction studies. The aspects of calibrating for points in comparison to that for whole of the network will also be briefly addressed to examine the critical issues such as the suitability of local calibration at global scale. The paper will be of interest to transport professionals in Australia/New Zealand where micro-simulation in particular at point level, is still comparatively a less explored territory in motorway management

Variable speed limits: conceptual design for Queensland practice

Variable Speed Limits (VSL) is an Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) control tool which can enhance traffic safety and which has the potential to contribute to traffic efficiency. Queensland's motorways experience a large volume of commuter traffic in peak periods, leading to heavy recurrent congestion and a high frequency of incidents. Consequently, Queensland's Department of Transport and Main Roads have considered deploying VSL to improve safety and efficiency. This paper identifies three types of VSL and three applicable conditions for activating VSL on for Queensland motorways: high flow, queuing and adverse weather. The design objectives and methodology for each condition are analysed, and micro-simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of VSL

Living In the KnowlEdge Society (LIKES) Initiative and iSchools' Focus on the Information Field

In this poster, we describe the similarities between the Living In the KnowlEdge Society (LIKES) project and iSchools – both focus on the information field. This might lead to future collaborations between the two. One of the LIKES objectives is to spread computational thinking, fundamental CS/IT paradigms, key computing concepts and ICT paradigms across the Knowledge Society. This is analogous to iSchools’ vision of education for thorough understanding of information, IT and their applications. In the previous three LIKES workshops, participants from various disciplines had an intense discussion about grand challenges to incorporate computing/IT in their disciplines. All iSchools have courses that teach computing and information-related topics. If those courses can be expanded for other non-computing disciplines on their campuses with support from experiences of LIKES, it would further empower professionals in the iField

The contemporary role of guanxi in Chinese entrepreneurship.

This thesis explores the contemporary role of guanxi in Chinese entrepreneurship. Although previous research has considered the subject of guanxi and Chinese entrepreneurship, this study aims at providing a deeper and richer understanding of its roles and nature. The study focuses on the relationship between guanxi and Chinese entrepreneurs and specifically deals with the question, Has the importance of guanxi been diminishing in Chinese entrepreneurship? In order to deepen the understanding of guanxi, its nature, characteristics, benefits, advantages, disadvantages, process and applications are explored. Furthermore, as there are many commonalities between networking and guanxi, the study also distinguishes the differences between the two subject matters. In many aspects, it is important to understand the attitude and behaviour of Chinese entrepreneurs. As Chinese entrepreneurs are affected by traditional Chinese heritage, the study also uses different approaches to explain the difference between western and eastern entrepreneurship. The specific qualitative and quantitative technique used for data generation is the adoption of case studies, surveys and telephone interviews. A total of two in-depth case studies, two surveys and thirty telephone interviews have been conducted. From these findings, respondents and interviewees expressed their view points on how guanxi related to their businesses. The findings are used to identify the relationship between guanxi and modern Chinese entrepreneurs, the changing nature of guanxi, and in turn how the changing business environment affects guanxi. The findings from this study conclude that although guanxi is important in China, it is only a tool to implement business strategies but never a substitution, and its importance has been diminishing in Chinese entrepreneurship

The anodic dissolution of tin in acidic chloride solutions

The anodic dissolution of Sn in acidic chloride solutions (pH = -2.0 to 2.9) was studied at 25ºC. The apparent valence of the dissolving ions varied from about 0.4 to 2.4, a function of both electrolyte and c.d. The complexing of Sn⁺² by Cl⁻ had an important influence with SnCl₃⁻ apparently being the dominant products. A reaction sequence is proposed involving the step-wide oxidation of Sn accompanied by reaction with Cl⁻ --Abstract, page 1

Picturing Everyday Life: Politics and Aesthetics of Saenghwal in Postwar South Korea, 1953-1959

Following the collapse of the Japanese Empire (1945) and the devastation of the Korean War (1950-1953), the question of how to represent and imagine “everyday life” or “way of life” (saenghwal, 生活) became a focal point of post-colonial and Cold War contestations. For example, President Syngman Rhee’s administration attempted to control the discourse of “New Life” (shinsaenghwal) by linking the spatio-temporality of the everyday to reconstruction and modernization. “Everyday life” was also a concept of strategic interest to the United States, whose postwar hegemonic ambitions in East Asia meant spreading “the truth” about an idealized vision of American way of life through government agencies such as the United States Information Service (USIS). These ideas and representations were designed to interpellate the South Korean people into a particular kind of regulatory relationship with their bodies and minds, their conduct of their day-to-day lives, their vision of themselves within the nation and the “Free World.” “Everyday life” became, in other words, part-and-parcel of Cold War governmentality’s mechanism of subjectification. Overly privileging these top-down discourses and techniques, however, can foreclose a nuanced understanding of a rich and complex set of negotiations over the meaning of saenghwal underway in both elite intellectual and popular imagination. Through my examination of literature, criticism, reportage, human-interest stories, government bulletins, philosophical essays, photography (artistic, popular, journalistic, archival, exhibition), cartoons, and educational and feature films, I characterize this period broadly in terms of “postwar crisis of modernity.” If “colonial modernity” in Korea had consisted of tensions and collaborations between colonialism, enlightenment, and modernization, then the emergent neocolonial order of the Cold War would give rise to a reconfiguration of this problematic: national division, South Korea’s semi-sovereignty vis-à-vis the U.S. and the denial of decolonization accompanied by the false promise of democratic freedom and American-style prosperity. Negotiations of this crisis can be found across urban and rural space, contesting the representation and dissemination of universalist and developmentalist “everyday life,” which was linked to the postwar restoration of the enlightenment subject. The stakes of these contestations through the framework of saenghwal could be ontological, aesthetic, economic, affective or universalist, and were articulated across popular and intellectual registers. While works of recent English-language scholarship in modern Korean history have productively explored the question of everyday life during the colonial period and in DPRK after liberation, no work thus far has examined the significance of the relationship between intermediality and saenghwal in the cultural field of ROK in the postwar 1950s. In addition to building on the current trend of scholarship that emphasizes the continuity between colonial and post-colonial cultural formations, my analysis of literature opens up future avenues of research for those interested in understanding literature’s intersection with modes of reportage, photography, and mass visuality. The chapter on the countryside draws from a diverse array of cultural productions to analyze a space that has traditionally been discussed within the limited geopolitical context of U.S. aid and development; no scholar to my knowledge has undertaken medium-specific inquiry to think through ontological and aesthetic negotiations unfolding in the countryside. My chapter on film culture reads the postwar debates around plagiarism/imitation, melodrama/sinp’a, and realism/neorealism through the gendering discourse of “everyday feelings” (saenghwal kamjŏng), and analyzes understudied films of the era with particular attention paid to their exploration of postwar sentiment. Finally, the last chapter intervenes on the wealth of existing scholarship on The Family of Man in visual studies by situating it within a broader formation of the postwar enlightenment subject as a democratic modernizing ideal. By focusing on the affective premise of this ideal, I contribute to the existing scholarship on theories of everyday life, sovereignty, and Cold War culture, which have tended to neglect the role of intermediation and affective interpellation in the governmentality of everyday life

A Primal-Dual Algorithm for Link Dependent Origin Destination Matrix Estimation

Origin-Destination Matrix (ODM) estimation is a classical problem in transport engineering aiming to recover flows from every Origin to every Destination from measured traffic counts and a priori model information. In addition to traffic counts, the present contribution takes advantage of probe trajectories, whose capture is made possible by new measurement technologies. It extends the concept of ODM to that of Link dependent ODM (LODM), keeping the information about the flow distribution on links and containing inherently the ODM assignment. Further, an original formulation of LODM estimation, from traffic counts and probe trajectories is presented as an optimisation problem, where the functional to be minimized consists of five convex functions, each modelling a constraint or property of the transport problem: consistency with traffic counts, consistency with sampled probe trajectories, consistency with traffic conservation (Kirchhoff's law), similarity of flows having close origins and destinations, positivity of traffic flows. A primal-dual algorithm is devised to minimize the designed functional, as the corresponding objective functions are not necessarily differentiable. A case study, on a simulated network and traffic, validates the feasibility of the procedure and details its benefits for the estimation of an LODM matching real-network constraints and observations