Access Mode Research Articles

Strategic Transportation Planning: Soft Mobility Network Planning Technical Report

This technical report presents a comprehensive approach to soft mobility network planning, focusing on assessing the potential for growth in bicycle infrastructure. Utilizing GIS-based analysis and multi-criteria decision-making, the study aims to identify and prioritize areas for new bike infrastructure development. The methodology involved defining influential factors, selecting variables from available datasets, assigning value levels, weighting parameters, and generating cycling infrastructure potential maps. Factors such as connectivity, safety, and attractiveness are considered, with each variable assessed and scored based on current conditions and ideal benchmarks. The results highlight high-potential areas for infrastructure improvement and propose desired lines to enhance the existing network. Limitations of the study, including data currency and grid dimensions, are acknowledged, suggesting avenues for future research and improvement. Overall, the study underscores the importance of integrated planning approaches and the utilization of spatial analysis tools in promoting cycling as a sustainable and accessible mode of transportation

A comparative MADM approach for prioritizing factors influencing service quality of Intermediate Public Transport as access mode to metro stations in Delhi, India

A comparative MADM approach for prioritizing factors influencing service quality of Intermediate Public Transport as access mode to metro stations in Delhi, India

Transport policies and their everyday impact on mobilities of older adults in Bengaluru

Background and objectives: Cities in the Global South are simultaneously witnessing wide-scale population ageing and rapid urbanisation. There is overwhelming pressure on policy makers to rapidly envision and provision age-friendly transport environments. In Indian cities, later-age mobilities face unique risks due to traffic congestion and inequities. However, the policy and transport research has treated congestion, equity and age-friendly mobilities as unrelated issues. This article goes a step ahead to understand how the policies to mitigate congestion can impact the provisioning of age-friendly infrastructure. Research design and methods: Bengaluru, once termed the ‘pensioners’ paradise’, is known for its ‘alarming’ levels of traffic congestion (Pucher et al, 2005; Pojani and Stead, 2017). We review Bengaluru’s transport policies and peer-reviewed articles concerning these policies to understand the positioning of age-friendly transport within this context. Results: Our findings recognise a shift from sufficientarianism to utilitarian orientations in Bengaluru’s policy making on easing congestion, which narrows the options for later-age transport users in terms of access and affordability. Some of the features not unique to Bengaluru – such as top-down planning, institutional fragmentation and distancing of users from policy making – have resulted in buses being inaccessible for passengers with mobility issues, metro rail being unaffordable for those on low incomes, lack of safe modes of transport and safe access to streets. Discussion and implications: The article is an initial foray into the ambiguity in the philosophical underpinning of transport policy making, which prioritises solving congestion ahead of providing age-friendly transport. We highlight specific challenges the cities of the Global South experience as they envision age-friendly transport policies amid the ascendance of congestion-solving policies.

Effect of early cannulation with metal needles on arteriovenous fistula patency in patients undergoing hemodialysis.

Autogenous arteriovenous fistula (AVF) is the preferred vascular access mode. However, the earliest possible time for AVF puncture and whether premature puncture affects the AVF patency rate remain unclear. In this multicenter retrospective cohort study, adult uremic patients who underwent AVF surgery for the first time at Taizhou Hospital or Enze Hospital of Zhejiang Province between September 1, 2018 and August 31, 2021 were enrolled. All patients were followed up for 1 year after puncture, and the status of fistula establishment and puncture, subsequent patency, loss to follow-up, renal transplantation, conversion to peritoneal dialysis, abandonment of the fistula, and death, were recorded. A total of 465 patients with AVFs were included in this study, including 59 (12.7%) patients with fistulas that were cannulated within 30 days. In the early puncture group, the levels of serum creatinine and urea nitrogen were higher, while the levels of hemoglobin and albumin were lower, suggesting that these patients needed urgent dialysis. Furthermore, the rate of non-cuffed catheter use was higher, while the rate of cuffed catheter use was lower, and femoral vein puncture was preferred over internal jugular vein puncture. The mean duration of catheter indwelling was shorter in the early puncture group (19 vs 70 days, p < 0.001). The estimated AVF primary and cumulative functional patency at 12 months was 81.1% versus 82.3% and 98.3% versus 98.7% in the early puncture and control groups, respectively. Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed no significant difference in AVF primary and cumulative functional patency between the two groups. In patients with an established fistula in urgent need of hemodialysis, to avoid new catheterization, a puncture can be performed within 30 days in those with well-developed blood vessels after adequate ultrasound and clinical evaluation without affecting the patency of the fistula.

An Ecological Approach to Dynamic and Static Camera Framing Techniques

Media practitioners and scholars have long pointed out that a camera’s angle, movement, and distance are a fundamental part of video communication, as they alter the message in meaningful ways that in turn affect the viewer’s experience. Drawing on J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, this paper argues that camera effects are not arbitrary, but are rooted in how video interplays with our perceptual and motor systems, rendering it a universally accessible mode of communication. Through a comprehensive review of empirical and experimental studies on camerawork, the ecological paradigm is proposed as a coherent framework capable of explaining seemingly unrelated camera effects, with great potential to drive future research in audiovisual communication.

Experimental Modalities: Crip Representation and Access with Electronic Arts Intermix

Abstract In collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), a nonprofit video arts distributor, the author has found videos in EAI’s collection that may reflect upon themes of disability and/or engage modes of access like captioning and audio description. The video/film works referenced in conceptual and performance practices have been broadly tethered to the word “experimental” and situated in this context to engage with accessibility even for works that resist and challenge the very nature of legibility. This essay is the author’s first attempt to explore an archive to identify video artworks that represent disability (whether deliberately or not) and present alternative modes of access (whether deliberately or not) with the intent of laying a groundwork for curations that tap into possibilities within accessibility formats.

L-NORM: Learning and Network Orchestration at the Edge for Robot Connectivity and Mobility in Factory Floor Environments

Robotic factory floors will revolutionize the future of manufacturing and the service industry by automating tasks. However, to fully supplement human effort, these robots will need low-latency, reliable connectivity throughout the work zone through links established by wireless access points (APs). This will allow the robot to assuredly respond to programming directives that rely on the real-time relaying of robot-generated sensor data to the Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) server. In this paper, we propose L-NORM, a multi-AP and multi-robot coordination framework, as a multi-tiered solution for such autonomous edge networks. First, multi-robot motion planning through reinforcement learning occurs at the MEC, using as input multi-modal robot sensor data. Second, multi-AP resource orchestration is performed using another reinforcement learning-based method that maps a subset of available APs to each robot toward meeting their sensor data delivery requirements. Furthermore, we suggest diversity combination of uplink channels with the 802.11ax scheduled access mode that will (i) support high reliability of multi-robot uplink sensor packets and (ii) enable multi-AP coordination, for optimized resource utilization. Through extensive simulation studies, we show that the probability of robot deviation to remain within 0.5 m from its optimal path, is 19% more in L-NORM compared to classical 802.11ax based edge network solution, considering <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 1 MB of sensor data per robot.

Deictic demonstrative variation in Jordanian Arabic: The role of visual prominence in encoding competing referents

This study aims to know the determinants of demonstrative selection in contexts where speakers of Jordanian Arabic (JA) use deictic demonstratives without aid from distinguishing descriptions or gestures to individuate a referent that exists with a similar entity in the same communicative situation. Data collection depended on a prolonged observation of JA use in natural settings. Our findings show that when multiple similar entities are in a status of competing referents in the same context, the speaker's selection of a demonstrative to individuate a specific entity is primarily determined by perceptions of the degree of visual prominence concerning that entity in relation to the similar entity. Visual prominence in our data involved the domains of more/less visibility, foreground/background, front side/back side, vertical/horizontal position, and more/less motion. Within each of these domains, ‘proximals’, were generally associated with the modes of access of high visibility, foreground, vertical position, and more motion; the opposite modes were associated with ‘distals’. As a cognitive consequence of the perceptions concerning the visual prominence of a referent in relation to these modes, entities that were encoded with ‘proximals’ can be considered as having high accessibility while those encoded with ‘distals’ can be considered as having low accessibility.

Craving for Knowledge: The Urge to Access Online Reading Materials by Students during Scientific Research Writing, a Case of Urban Universities of Uganda

Addressing concerns related to online reading materials is paramount as the internet establishes itself as the defining medium for literacy in higher education institutions among the current generation. Globally current debates consistently underscore the relevance of online reading materials to scientific research writing among university students. The current study explored the students’ urge to access online reading materials based on four selected universities in an urban geographical context of Uganda. Using a cross-sectional exploratory research design comprised of mixed approaches, we used descriptive statistics and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to investigate the disparity in accessed online reading materials across the universities. An ordinal logistic model established the factors that influence access to online reading materials. The study revealed that university students exhibited moderate utilisation of online resources, primarily accessing materials through platforms like MyLOFT, Google Scholar, University online catalogs, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). Additionally, the findings underscored notable variations in the mode of access across the studied universities, with access influenced by factors such as sex, type of degree pursued, availability of university ICT equipment, and the research level of students. These insights shed light on the need for tailored strategies to enhance online reading materials accessibility and to support diverse student populations in their academic pursuits, such as subscribing to the publishers of scientific journals. This may improve students’ scientific research writing skills and completion rate, which have remained a formidable challenge in higher education institutions in Uganda.

Social strategies to access land influence crop diversity in northwestern Morocco

Abstract Much evidence supports the ecological and agronomic benefits of diversity, of both crops and environments, for building resilience and sustainability in agroecosystems. Farmers' knowledge about crop diversity is well‐documented, but aside from studies on how farmers exchange seeds and knowledge through networks, the interactions of social factors and the diversity of crops and cultivated environments have been mainly overlooked. One factor receiving attention is farmers' access to land, but in only one of its dimensions, the security of access. Here we address the different strategies by which farmers gain access to land. How does the plurality of modes of access to land influence crop choices, and thereby crop diversity? How does this plurality influence the range of environments available to individual farmers for cultivating crop diversity? Analysing data from 51 interviews with farmers and 312 plots in agrosilvopastoral systems in northwestern Morocco, we described eight different modes of access. Each mode offers different opportunities and constraints concerning the kind of crops that can be grown on the plot. We found that an increase in the number of modes of access to land increases the crop diversity of farmers' holdings, regardless of the total area each farmer cultivates. Accessing additional plots contributed to both environmental heterogeneity and to crop diversity of farms. In striving to gain access to land and to grow diverse crops, farmers are motivated by their notion of what it means to be a ‘real farmer’, that is, the relation to their identity. Farmers mobilize not only their economic power but also their social relationships to gain access to plots of land. Their choices are also based on their relationships to tree crops such as olive, which are economic and cultural keystone species, as well as markers of land ownership and control. Multiple modes of access to land characterize many smallholder farming systems, which support a large fraction of the world's population. Recognizing diverse social practices of access to land that allow farmers to continue to mobilize multiple modes of access can increase resilience against unpredictable events and help maintain sustainable agroecosystems. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Crystallization and In Situ Room Temperature Data Collection Using the Crystallization Facility at Harwell and Beamline VMXi, Diamond Light Source.

Protocols for robotic protein crystallization using the Crystallization Facility at Harwell and in situ room temperature data collection from crystallization plates at Diamond Light Source beamline VMXi are described. This approach enables high-quality room-temperature crystal structures to be determined from multiple crystals in a straightforward manner and provides very rapid feedback on the results of crystallization trials as well as enabling serial crystallography. The value of room temperature structures in understanding protein structure, ligand binding, and dynamics is becoming increasingly recognized in the structural biology community. This pipeline is accessible to users from all over the world with several available modes of access. Crystallization experiments that are set up can be imaged and viewed remotely with crystals identified automatically using a machine learning tool. Data are measured in a queue-based system with up to 60° rotation datasets from user-selected crystals in a plate. Data from all the crystals within a particular well or sample group are automatically merged using xia2.multiplex with the outputs straightforwardly accessed via a web browser interface.

Are New Campus Mobility Trends Causing Health Concerns?

An influx of new mobility trends such as fare-free bus transportation, ride hail, and e-scooter services to improve access and affordability of transportation on campus may be shifting the travel behavior of campus patrons such that it affects their long-term health outcomes. The main research questions explored in this study are as follows: (1) why university patrons choose new modes of travel?; (2) what existing mode did the new modes of travel replace for the riders?; and (3) is the average body mass index (BMI) of users primarily using non-motorized transit options lower than those using motorized or both (referred to as hybrid) for on-campus travel needs? An online survey was administered to a campus community (n = 3309) including students (48%), faculty (15%), and staff (37%) in fall of 2018 when fare-free bus transportation and e-scooters became available on campus, and a gradual increase in ridership of ride-hail services was simultaneously observed. This study found that campus patrons were more inclined to replace active modes of travel with affordable and accessible modes of transportation, thereby substituting their walking or biking routine with app-based transportation services. The mean BMI among travelers who chose motorized transportation modes was more than active travelers, and the BMI was statistically significantly associated with age, gender, race, class standing (undergraduate/graduate), and residence on/off campus. This study concludes with suggestions to prevent substitution of active with non-active transport choices and provides policy guidelines to increase awareness on achieving physical activity levels through active modes of travel for university patrons.

Mode entanglement in fermionic and bosonic Harmonium

Mode entanglement in many-body quantum systems is an active area of research. It provides crucial insight into the suitability of many-body systems for quantum information processing tasks. Local super-selection rules must be taken into account when assessing the amount of physically accessible entanglement. This requires amending well-established entanglement measures by incorporating local parity and local particle number constraints. In this paper, we report on mode entanglement present in the analytically solvable system of N-Harmonium. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first analytic study of the physically accessible mode and mode-mode entanglement of an interacting many-body system in a continuous state space. We find that super-selection rules dramatically reduce the amount of physically accessible entanglement, which vanishes entirely in some cases. Our results strongly suggest the need to re-evaluate intra and inter-mode entanglement in other fermionic and bosonic systems.

How Rail Transit Access Mode Affects Airport Landside Traffic Sharing Rate: Evidence from Beijing, China

How Rail Transit Access Mode Affects Airport Landside Traffic Sharing Rate: Evidence from Beijing, China

Dossier—Negotiating Urban Spaces: Access, Care and Confinement in Contemporary Gendered Performance

This dossier explores the ways in which theatre and performance practitioners across the globe have addressed the deeply gendered modes of differential access to public spaces, institutional support, and resources through their creative as well as activist work, during the pandemic and its aftermath. In the last three years, the pandemic has transformed experiences of urban space globally. Access to public space has always been gendered as well as shaped by geographical location, race, caste, class and sexual identity. These traditional modes of differential access have been radically reorganized by the isolation and uncertainty engendered by the global pandemic. While ‘working from home’ was certainly not an option for everyone (most notably, care-workers in an overwhelmingly feminized profession), confinement to domestic space also meant escalating incidents of gendered violence for others. Additionally, the lack of sustainable income opportunities meant, as contributions to this dossier will demonstrate, the stripping away of roofs from over the heads of vulnerable citizens, whether impoverished artistes in want of state support or migrant workers on an uncertain daily wage. Staying at home was no longer an option, because ‘home’ often ceased to exist as a viable shelter, whether literally or by implication. For performers and theatre-workers all over the world, it was a time of intensified precarity: not only a loss of employment and income, but also a growing sense of artistic and professional purposelessness. While some were able to reorient this bewilderment through virtual and digital performances, for many grassroots performers, especially in the global South, access to these modes of public engagement were limited. In countries like India, street theatre activists felt unable and unwilling to switch to the digital space, while the prohibition on public assembly struck an irrevocable blow to women's protest movements.

A robust optimization approach for placement of applications in edge computing considering latency uncertainty

Edge computing brings computing and storage resources close to end-users to support new applications and services that require low network latency. It is currently used in a wide range of industries, from industrial automation and augmented reality, to smart cities and connected vehicles, where low latency, data privacy, and real-time processing are critical requirements. The latency of accessing applications in edge computing must be consistently below a threshold of a few tens of milliseconds to maintain an acceptable experience for end-users. However, the latency between users and applications can vary considerably depending on the network load and mode of wireless access. An application provider must be able to guarantee that requests are served in a timely manner by their application instances hosted in the edge despite such latency variations. This article focuses on the placement and traffic allocation problem faced by application providers in determining where to place application instances on edge nodes such that requests are served within a certain deadline. It proposes novel formulations based on robust optimization to provide optimal plans that protect against latency variations in a configurable number of network links. The robust formulations are based on two different types of polyhedral uncertainty sets that offer different levels of protection against variations in latency. Extensive simulations show that our robust models are able to keep the number of chosen edge nodes low while reducing the number of latency violations as compared to a deterministic optimization model that only considers the average latency of network links.

Extension VM: Interleaved Data Layout in Vector Memory

While vector architecture is widely employed in processors for neural networks, signal processing, and high-performance computing; however, its performance is limited by inefficient column-major memory access. The column-major access limitation originates from the unsuitable mapping of multidimensional data structures to two-dimensional vector memory spaces. In addition, the traditional data layout mapping method creates an irreconcilable conflict between row- and column-major accesses. Ideally, both row- and column-major accesses can take advantage of the bank parallelism of vector memory. To this end, we propose the Interleaved Data Layout (IDL) method in vector memory, which can distribute vector elements into different banks regardless of whether they are in the row- or column-major category, so that any vector memory access can benefit from bank parallelism. Additionally, we propose an Extension Vector Memory (EVM) architecture to achieve IDL in vector memory. EVM can support two data layout methods and vector memory access modes simultaneously. The key idea is to continuously distribute the data that needs to be accessed from the main memory to different banks during the loading period. Thus, EVM can provide a larger spatial locality level through careful programming and the extension ISA support. The experimental results showed a 1.43-fold improvement of state-of-the-art vector processors by the proposed architecture, with an area cost of only 1.73%. Furthermore, the energy consumption was reduced by 50.1%.

Shared E-Scooter Practices in Birmingham, Alabama: Analyzing Usage, Patterns, and Determinants

Shared micromobility has gained significant attention in the field of transportation engineering in recent years as an environmentally friendly, convenient, and easily accessible transportation mode. Like other medium-sized cities, Birmingham, Alabama implemented a shared micromobility pilot program in 2021 that captured the attention of local travelers. This study examined shared e-scooter usage and associated travel patterns in Birmingham using 2021–2022 field data. From these data, ArcGIS maps were used to showcase trip origins and destinations. To gain a further understanding of e-scooter travel patterns in the study area, zip code and block group densities were calculated. Additionally, a negative binomial regression model was constructed to identify determinants of shared e-scooter trips. The analysis results showed that the usage of shared e-scooters was the highest during the nighttime (9109 trips between 9 p.m. to 10 p.m.), on weekends (20,077 trips on Saturday), and in the fall season (a total of 29,024 trips). Furthermore, the research findings indicated that shared e-scooters experienced their highest utilization rates in areas with a higher proportion of educated and higher-income individuals. These findings suggest that travelers’ mode choice related to the use of micromobility modes is influenced by environmental and demographic factors. Overall, this case study offers valuable contributions to the understanding of the role of shared e-scooters in Birmingham’s transportation landscape and can guide transportation authorities in other medium-sized cities in their efforts to plan for micromobility options.

Let Us Build a MQTT Pub-Sub Client In C# For IoT Research

Purpose: MQTT stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport. It is a lightweight protocol specifically designed for IoT applications. Nowadays, most IoT projects exchange sensor data over the MQTT protocol. It is simple to integrate and can run on low hardware resources. To test MQTT, the researcher needs MQTT publisher subscriber client software. There are several free and paid software available on the web. But sometimes, researchers need some custom interface or functionality not available in the free version. The paid version demands vast amounts of money for customization. Occasionally, they want to avoid customization for specific projects. Here, we provide a procedure to create our MQTT pub-sub client software interface, which the researcher can easily customize. The project is available to download. Methodology/Approach: We installed Microsoft Visual Studio in our working system. Using C# language, we create a GUI (graphical user interface). Inside the GUI, we segregate the info into two. The left is for publishing clients, and the right is for subscribing clients. We installed the M2MQTT package using the NuGet package manager to communicate with the MQTT broker. Findings/Result: Using our built application, we test to exchange the sensor data between two clients. We found the data exchanged in almost real-time. In a couple of scenarios, we observed that the data propagation could have been faster when we set the update interval below 500 milliseconds. There may be a network delay, or the MQTT broker we used is a free service. It may be the limited capacity of the accessible mode of the server we used. If the application is not time-critical, we can utilize this communication route to exchange the sensor data. Originality/Value: Every day, new researchers are introduced to the IoT field and integrate MQTT into their projects. They feel one customizable software they can use according to their project requirements. So, using this project, the researcher can fulfill their need. The code is freely available on the web. And scope to customize. This project provides value to them. Type of Paper: Experimental-based Research.

Optimal planning of urban air mobility systems accounting for ground access trips

The concept of Urban Air Mobility (UAM), an on-demand aviation service using air vehicles for urban short-distance trips, such as electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL), has recently drawn public attention as one of possible solutions to traffic congestion in metropolitan areas. We present an optimal planning framework for fleet size and vertiport numbers using generalized cost models of UAM trip chains with two different ground access modes for first and last mile trips, including taxis and robotaxis (i.e. autonomous taxis or shared autonomous vehicles). As it is a relatively new and untested mode of transportation, our research aims to provide a decision-making tool for initial UAM system planning and analysis of its economic feasibility, appropriately considering its unique characteristics, such as high free-flow speed, low circuity, needs for ground access, and specific cost factors, such as vertiport and electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft costs. Through a parametric study, we quantitatively examine the necessary conditions for UAM, with or without ridesharing, to become more economically viable than other ground-only modes. The study confirms that UAM can have potential economic benefits especially in large cities with longer average trip lengths and severe traffic congestion, where the average ground vehicle speed is low.