Commuting times increase as cities grow, and then fall as areas mature

With more than 80 percent of Americans now living in urban areas, the consequences of city growth are more important than ever. But how does the growth of cites affect the way people commute? In order to investigate how this ‘commuting transition’ works, Selima Sultana and Joe Weber examined commuting times across 50 U.S. metropolitan areas. They find that, across time, commuting times are highest in new neighborhoods or in booming housing areas. As cities grow, these areas become more mature, and commuting times fall, with new areas again experiencing longer commutes

Stellar rotation, binarity, and lithium in the open cluster IC4756

An important aspect in the evolutionary scenario of cool stars is their rotation and the rotationally induced magnetic activity and interior mixing. Stars in open clusters are particularly useful tracers for these aspects because of their known ages. We aim to characterize the open cluster IC4756 and measure stellar rotation periods and surface differential rotation for a sample of its member stars. Thirty-seven cluster stars were observed continuously with the CoRoT satellite for 78 days in 2010. Follow-up high-resolution spectroscopy of the CoRoT targets and deep Str\"omgren $uvby\beta$ and H$\alpha$ photometry of the entire cluster were obtained with our robotic STELLA facility and its echelle spectrograph and wide-field imager, respectively. We determined high-precision photometric periods for 27 of the 37 CoRoT targets and found values between 0.155 and 11.4 days. Twenty of these are rotation periods. Twelve targets are spectroscopic binaries of which 11 were previously unknown; orbits are given for six of them. Six targets were found that show evidence of differential rotation with $\Delta\Omega/\Omega$ in the range 0.04-0.15. Five stars are non-radially pulsating stars with fundamental periods of below 1d, two stars are semi-contact binaries, and one target is a micro-flaring star that also shows rotational modulation. Nine stars in total were not considered members because of much redder color(s) and deviant radial velocities with respect to the cluster mean. H$\alpha$ photometry indicates that the cluster ensemble does not contain magnetically over-active stars. The cluster average metallicity is -0.08$\pm$0.06 (rms) and its logarithmic lithium abundance for 12 G-dwarf stars is 2.39$\pm$0.17 (rms). [...]Comment: A&A, in pres

Detecting regulatory compliance for business process models through semantic annotations

A given business process may face a large number of regulatory obligations the process may or comply with. Providing tools and techniques through which an evaluation of the compliance degree of a given process can be undertaken is seen as a key objective in emerging business process platforms. We address this problem through a diagnostic framework that provides the ability to assess the compliance gaps present in a given process. Checking whether a process is compliant with the rules involves enumerating all reachable states and is hence, in general, a hard search problem. The approach taken here allows to provide useful diagnostic information in polynomial time. The approach is based on two underlying techniques. A conceptually faithful representation for regulatory obligations is firstly provided by a formal rule language based on a non-monotonic deontic logic of violations. Secondly, processes are formalized through semantic annotations that allow a logical state space to be created. The intersection of the two allows us to devise an efficient method to detect compliance gaps; the method guarantees to detect all obligations that will necessarily arise during execution, but that will not necessarily be fulfilled

Enhancing the contribution of Export Processing Zones to Sustainable Development Goals: an analysis of 100 EPZs and a framework for sustainable economic zones

Over the past decade, the popularity of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) has grown in many countries across the global south. There are now over 4,000 EPZs, which is over 3,000 more than 20 years ago. Some countries have made the promotion of such zones central to their economic development strategies, while others have questioned their contribution to national development. Meanwhile, the increasing implementation of international trade rules mean that some of the traditional incentives for EPZs, such as tax breaks for exports, are no longer in line with WTO rules. In that context EPZs, also called Special Economic Zones (SEZs), need to innovate new means of maintaining and developing their competitiveness

Virtuelle Inbetriebnahme und die Nutzung von Extended Reality und Automatisiertem Testen: eine Umfrage in der Industrie

Virtual Commissioning (VC) is seen as an important technology for managing the complexity of production systems. While it is demonstrated that VC can reduce commissioning time, defect rates and costs, the rate of industrial adoption is below expectations. In this paper, we present the results of a survey conducted to investigate the use, expectations, and barriers to the use of VC with an additional focus on Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Test Automation (TA) in this context. The survey results reveal that just over half of the respondents use VC, albeit rarely to occasionally. Barriers to the use of VC are not technological. VR and AR technologies are used in many companies, but not frequently. The results indicate that the potential benefits of using these technologies are not clear enough to justify further investment in what is seen as a somewhat immature technology. TA can only be found in large companies. The main barriers are the amount of effort required to create and maintain automated tests and a general lack of know-how and resources. Respondents agree that all three technologies will become more important in the future

An Online Survey on Identification of Evaluation Capacity, Needs and Current Practice of Programme Evaluation in Community-based Rehabilitation

Purpose: Evaluation of Community-based Rehabilitation (CBR) is important for developing good practice and providing a foundation for evidence of efficacy of practice. Since not much is known about the extent to which monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are carried out within CBR programmes, this study aimed to enhance knowledge by focussing on current M&E activities, the need and capacity of programmes to conduct evaluations and the challenges experienced. Method: An online survey of 15 questions was developed, field-tested and sent out to 236 CBR managers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Results: The majority (86%) of the respondents indicated that their programmes had been evaluated in the past.While this was mainly done by international donors (87%), around half of the respondents reported programme participants as the main audience. Just over half of the programmes (54%) included people with disabilities, their families and community members in evaluation processes. Insufficient financial resources were considered the most important challenge to conducting evaluations, particularly in the African region and among smaller programmes. The complexity of CBR was also indicated as an important barrier to evaluation. Conclusions and Recommendations: Although evaluations have been widely implemented in CBR programmes, many of them are not locally owned, and people with disabilities and their families are often not included in the evaluation process. The issues of limited financial resources and CBR complexity reflect current discussions in other areas of mainstream development. It is therefore recommended that models for evaluation in CBR should learn from, and be embedded in, ongoing developments in mainstream evaluation in international development