Capturing in-situ Feelings and Experiences of Public Transit Riders Using Smartphones

High-density urban environments are susceptible to ever-growing traffic congestion issues, which speaks to the importance of implementing and maintaining effective and sustainable transportation networks. While transit oriented developments offer the potential to help mitigate traffic congestion issues, transit networks ought to be safe and reliable for ideal transit-user communities. As such, it is imperative to capture meaningful data regarding transit experiences, and deduce how transit networks can be enhanced or modified to continually maintain ideal transit experiences. Historically speaking, it has been relatively tricky to measure how people feel whilst using public transportation, without leaning on recall memory to explain such phenomena. Recall memory can be vague and is often less detailed than recording in-situ observations of the transit-user community. This thesis explores the feasibility of using smartphones to capture meaningful in-situ data to leverage the benefits of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), while also addressing some limitations. Students travelled along Grand River Transit bus routes in Waterloo, Ontario from Wilfrid Laurier University to Conestoga Mall and back using alternate routes. The mobile survey captured qualitative and quantitative data from 145 students to explore variations in wellbeing, and the extent to which environmental variables can influence transit experiences. There were many findings to consider for future research, especially the overall role anxiety played on transit experiences. In addition, the results indicate that the methodology is appropriate for further research, and can be applied to a wide range of research topics. In particular, it is recommended that a similar study be applied to a much larger, and more representative sample of the transit-user community. Future considerations are discussed as key considerations to leverage the benefits of ESM research, and the promise it can bring towards the enhancement of transit experiences and the cohesion of transit-user communities

The grammar of traditional Malay long-roof type houses

In this paper, the grammar of the traditional Malay houses (TMH) built in the past century is presented. The basic unit structures that form the shape of the TMH are first derived. Evidences of the basic unit structures or their combinations were documented by previous researchers and are used as a way of explaining the physical, spatial and functional relationships of the built forms of the TMH. The scope of the study is currently limited to the original TMH of the bumbung panjang (long roof) type in which the key features of the houses were easily discernible from the side view. The shape addition rules for generating these structures are used to characterize the compositional aspects of TMH style

A random string with reflection in a convex domain

We study the motion of a random string in a convex domain $O$ in $\R^d$, namely the solution of a vector-valued stochastic heat equation, confined in the closure of $O$ and reflected at the boundary of $O$. We study the structure of the reflection measure by computing its Revuz measure in terms of an infinite-dimensional integration by parts formula. Our method exploits recent results on weak convergence of Markov processes with log-concave invariant measures

A note on non-Robba pp-adic differential equations

Let $\mathcal{M}$ be a differential module, whose coefficients are analytic elements on an open annulus $I$ (\subset \bR_{>0}) in a valued field, complete and algebraically closed of inequal characteristic, and let $R(\mathcal{M}, r)$ be the radius of convergence of its solutions in the neighbourhood of the generic point $t_r$ of absolute value $r$, with $r\in I$. Assume that $R(\mathcal{M}, r)<r$ on $I$ and, in the logarithmic coordinates, the function $r\longrightarrow R(\ mathcal{M}, r)$ has only one slope on $I$. In this paper, we prove that for any $r\in I$, all the solutions of $\mathcal{M}$ in the neighborhood of $t_r$ are analytic and bounded in the disk $D(t_r,R(\mathcal{M},r)^-)$.Comment: 4 page