Expository Device Research Articles

Optimal variable vehicle scheduling strategy for a network of electric buses with fast opportunity charging

The introduction of battery-powered electric buses (EBs) presents promising prospects for greener and more sustainable public transit. However, recharging activities of EBs to extend the total daily operation range, enabled by fast opportunity charging approach, create a significant challenge for attaining better, or equivalent, operational efficiency than conventional diesel buses. We propose a novel variable vehicle scheduling strategy of a transit EB network with multiple depots to meet this challenge by right shifting trip departure times. A numerical example is used as an expository device to illustrate the variable EB-scheduling methodology, followed by an empirical case study in the city of Dalian, China. The results show how the optimised variable EB scheduling strategy can reduce the impact of recharging activities on the operation’s efficiency. It has been found that by inserting a small schedule delay it is possible to save operational costs, especially through a reduction of the fleet size.

The Spiritual Exercises of John Rawls

In this article I interpret John Rawls’s concept of the original position as a spiritual exercise. In addition to the standard interpretation of the original position as an expository device to select principles of justice for the fundamental institutions of society, I argue that Rawls also envisages it as a “spiritual exercise”: a voluntary personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of the self. To make this argument, I draw on the work of Pierre Hadot, a philosopher and classicist, who introduced the idea of spiritual exercises as central to ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy. By reading Rawls alongside Hadot, this article portrays Rawls as a thinker deeply concerned with the question of how subjects can lead more just and fulfilling lives. It also proposes that the original position as a spiritual exercise can help defend liberalism as a social and political doctrine.

An Examination of the Catalyst for Tapping into Mobile Financial Services in the Post-COVID-19 World

Amid the widespread impact of COVID-19, mobile financial services (MFS) have experienced extensive requests due to the failure to perform physical installments and the need for secure transactions. This trend cannot end the utility of cash but it may promote portable monetary administration toward a cashless world. MFS is anticipated to have a bright future as m-commerce increasingly becomes widely known. This study proposes the choice of making a trial and assessment research facility by using a fuzzy model as the most expository device. General forms of a triangular fuzzy number are subjective categories for a linguistic variable. Linguistic variables take on values defined in their term set, that is, the set of linguistic terms. The essential components, including personal innovativeness, transaction completeness, user-friendliness, anonymity, and privacy, are causal competitive advantages of the mobile payment system framework and may play a critical part in reacting to MFS. This study shows that transaction completeness, innovative interface design, privacy, and security facilitate MFS adoption. Furthermore, reliability is necessary to enhance trust in the MFS technology. This study draws on the outcomes of administrative suggestions and recommends a few observational strategies to improve the monetary administration in the MFS industry.

Realistic genetic architecture enables organismal adaptation as predicted under the folk definition of inclusive fitness.

A fundamental task of evolutionary biology is to explain the pervasive impression of organismal design in nature, including traits benefiting kin. Inclusive fitness is considered by many to be a crucial piece in this puzzle, despite ongoing discussion about its scope and limitations. Here, we use individual-based simulations to study what quantity (if any) individual organisms become adapted to maximize when genetic architectures are more or less suitable for the presumed main driver of biological adaptation, namely cumulative multi-locus evolution. As an expository device, we focus on a hypothetical situation called Charlesworth's paradox, in which altruism is seemingly predicted to evolve, yet altruists immediately perish along with their altruistic genes. Our results support a recently proposed re-definition of inclusive fitness, which is concerned with the adaptive design of whole organisms as shaped by multi-locus evolution, rather than with selection for any focal gene. They also illustrate how our conceptual understanding of adaptation at the phenotypic level should inform our choice of genetic assumptions in abstract simplified models.

Battery-electric transit vehicle scheduling with optimal number of stationary chargers

Because of zero emissions and other social and economic benefits, electric vehicles (EVs) are currently being introduced in more and more transit agencies around the world. One of the most challenging tasks involves efficiently scheduling a set of EVs considering the limited driving range and charging requirement constraints. This study examines the battery-electric transit vehicle scheduling problem (BET-VSP) with stationary battery chargers installed at transit terminal stations. Two equivalent versions of mathematical formulations of the problem are provided. The first formulation is based on the deficit function theory, and the second formulation is an equivalent bi-objective integer programming model. The first objective of the math-programming optimization is to minimize the total number of EVs required, while the second objective is to minimize the total number of battery chargers required. To solve this bi-objective BET-VSP, two solution methods are developed. First, a lexicographic method-based two-stage construction-and-optimization solution procedure is proposed. Second, an adjusted max-flow solution method is developed. Three numerical examples are used as an expository device to illustrate the solution methods, together with a real-life case study in Singapore. The results demonstrate that the proposed math-programming models and solution methods are effective and have the potential to be applied in solving large-scale real-world BET-VSPs.

Animated GIFs as Expressive Visual Narratives and Expository Devices in Archaeology

Animated GIFs as Expressive Visual Narratives and Expository Devices in Archaeology

Determining Optimal Strategies for Single-Line Bus Operation by Means of Smartphone Demand Data

Passenger demand along an urban bidirectional bus line is usually neither uniform nor symmetric. In practice, buses are operated along such routes without efficient use of operational routing-related strategies. This work focused on the design of two routing-related strategies, given that fluctuating passenger demand could be estimated with the use of smartphones. In this way, a better match between supply and demand can be attained, and the operational cost involved can be reduced. Optimization formulation was used in this work for the design of routing changes through four possible strategies: full-route operation, short-turn, limited-stop, and a combination of the latter two strategies. The objective function was to minimize the fleet size required to handle the expected demand comfortably by using the onboard loading criterion. This is a practical objective, especially from the operator’s perspective. The expected origin–destination demand of a single bus line was constructed on the basis of the existing demand data and potential changes in demand, given service improvement in travel time, waiting time, and seat availability. The potential demand, whether overt or obscure, was assumed to be determinable with the use of smartphone apps, including online service information. A detailed example is used as an expository device for explaining the methodology developed, along with a case study from Dalian, China. The results of the case study show that, by applying the proposed methodology, the fleet size of the single-line bus operation can be reduced by four buses on the basis of the anticipated passenger demand.

Optimal Synchronized Transfers in Schedule-Based Public Transport Networks Using Online Operational Tactics

Synchronized transfers in schedule-based public transport (PT) networks are used to reduce interroute or intermodal passenger transfer waiting time and provide a well-connected service. However, in practice, synchronized transfers do not always materialize because of some stochastic and uncertain factors, such as traffic disturbances and disruptions, fluctuations in passenger demand, and erroneous behavior of PT drivers. As a result, missed direct transfers not only frustrate existing users but also discourage potential passengers from using PT service. This work presents an optimization procedure based on a model predictive control (MPC) to increase the actual occurrence of synchronized transfers in schedule-based PT networks. The procedure aims to reduce the uncertainty of meetings between PT vehicles. MPC uses selected online operational tactics based on real-time data, such as skip stop, speed change, and holding. First a library of operational tactics was built to serve as a basis for the sequential receding horizon control process in the MPC. Then, an event activity network with dynamic moving elements was constructed to represent the logical process of the PT transfer synchronization problem. The MPC procedure for a real-time deployment of operational tactics was explicated. A detailed example was used as an expository device to illustrate the procedure developed, along with a real-life example from Auckland, New Zealand.

Fair Equality of Opportunity Critically Reexamined: The Family and the Sustainability of Health Care Systems

A complex interaction of ideological, financial, social, and moral factors makes the financial sustainability of health care systems a challenge across the world. One difficulty is that some of the moral commitments of some health care systems collide with reality. In particular, commitments to equality in access to health care and to fair equality of opportunity undergird an unachievable promise, namely, to provide all with the best of basic health care. In addition, commitments to fair equality of opportunity are in tension with the existence of families, because families are aimed at advantaging their own members in preference to others. Because the social-democratic state is committed to fair equality of opportunity, it offers a web of publicly funded entitlements that make it easier for persons to exit the family and to have children outside of marriage. In the United States, in 2008, 41% of children were born outside of wedlock, whereas, in 1940, the percentage was only 3.8%, and in 1960, 5%, with the further consequence that the social and financial capital generated through families, which aids in supporting health care in families, is diminished. In order to explore the challenge of creating a sustainable health care system that also supports the traditional family, the claims made for fair equality of opportunity in health care are critically reconsidered. This is done by engaging the expository device of John Rawls's original position, but with a thin theory of the good that is substantively different from that of Rawls, one that supports a health care system built around significant copayments, financial counseling, and compulsory savings, with a special focus on enhancing the financial and social capital of the family. This radical recasting of Rawls, which draws inspiration from Singapore, is undertaken as a heuristic to aid in articulating an approach to health care allocation that can lead past the difficulties of social-democratic policy.

Introduction

Documentary films are inherently subjective: they construct a recognizable likeness of the world, speak for the interests of others, and make a case for a particular view of the evidence they present to an audience. A filmmaker consciously or unconsciously shapes the construction of a documentary through his or her attitude toward a subject, who expects the filmmaker to represent him or her in a responsible way, and the viewer adopts specific intellectual and emotional outlooks when making sense and meaning of a documentary. Subjectivity-which assumes the mediated nature of any visual representation-is thus inseparable from the processes of making, appearing in, and consuming documentaries. If documentary filmmakers attempt to satisfy the audience's desire for and pleasure in knowledge, they do so by turning upon their subjects what Don Alan Pennebaker describes as the fearsome machinery of the camera. Given the inherent subjectivity of documentary filmmaking, a question arises: what ethical obligations do documentary filmmakers have to their subjects and audience?Ethics becomes a measure of the moral implications that arise from negotiations between filmmaker, subject, and audience. Sometimes, the interests of filmmakers and subjects are at odds with each other. As a representative of the group he or she films, or of the institution that sponsors him or her, the filmmaker wants to make a compelling documentary. As an individual, the subject wants his or her social rights and personal dignity respected before an audience. Viewers of a documentary assume that the text's sounds and images have an indexical relationship to the historical world we share. The tension that often arises from the interdependent expectations of this triad of participants raises the question of ethical rights and responsibilities in documentary filmmaking.Postmodernists argue that this question of ethical rights and responsibilities is interwoven with the concept of identity politics. Various identifications (in addition to class) now serve as key determinants of identity: feminism, sexual politics, national liberation, and black struggle. Paralleling this rise of a politics of identity have been debates about the indexical relationship between truth and reality and about how to represent the pride and integrity of marginalized or ostracized groups.Different modes of documentary filmmaking provide means of establishing frameworks within which individual filmmakers may address the politics of identity. The desire to find different ways of representing the world contributes to the formation of each mode, as does a changing set of circumstances. New modes arise partly in response to perceived shortcomings in previous ones, but the perception of deficiency stems partly from a sense of what it takes to represent the historical world from a particular perspective at a given moment in time. The following essays consider the ethical strengths and weaknesses of the expository, performative, and reflexive modes (Nichols, 33- 34).The expository mode assembles fragments of the historical world into a rhetorical or argumentative frame. Images serve a supporting role by illustrating, illuminating, evoking, or acting in counterpoint to what is said. Exposition can accommodate elements of interviews, but these tend to be subordinated to an argument offered by the film itself. Any sense of give and take between filmmaker and subject is minimal. The voices of others are woven into a textual logic that subsumes and orchestrates them. Witnesses thus give their testimony within a frame they cannot control and may not understand.In Contra Queer, Alice Liao explores how gay and lesbian affirmation documentaries that rely on expository devices such as talking head interviews and an argumentative style of narrative logic and verbal commentary construct the process of coming out in narrow and constricting terms. She argues that the claim of an essential queer identity, undertaken for political purposes, limits a more inclusive definition of gay and lesbian selfhood. …

Public-transport vehicle scheduling with multi vehicle type

The public-transport (transit) operation planning process commonly includes four basic activities, usually performed in sequence: (1) network route design, (2) timetable development, (3) vehicle scheduling, and (4) crew scheduling. The purpose of this work is to address the vehicle scheduling problem, while taking into account the association between the characteristics of each trip (urban, peripheral, inter-city, etc.) and the vehicle type required for the particular trip. The problem is based on given sets of trips and vehicle types, where the categories are arranged in decreasing order of vehicle cost. Therefore, each trip can be carried out by its vehicle type, or by other types listed in prior order. This problem can be formulated as a cost-flow network problem with an NP-hard complexity level. Thus, a heuristic algorithm is developed in this work, based on the Deficit Function theory. Two examples are used as an expository device to illustrate the procedures developed, along with a real-life example of a bus company.

Finding New Wine in Old Bottles: What Historians Must Do When Leontief Coefficients Are No Longer the Designated Drivers of Economics

I Brute Facts Antiseptically Free of Institutional Context In 1951, Nobel Laureate Wassily put his finger on what was wrong with economics. It had remained a deductive system resting upon a static set of premises, when what was needed was an economics that would combine economic and theory. The new economics would be called interindustry or input-output analysis (Leontief 1966: 14). According to it is easy to compute complete table of input requirements at any given level of output, provided we know its input These input ratios could be calculated from engineering data on design and operating procedure (ibid., 24-26). For and, I suspect, a large number of economists in 1951, technological dependent only on chemical and physical laws of nature--what I shall call Leontief coefficients--were indisputable. It would take so many units of coke to produce a ton of pig iron whether or not there was a human being alive on earth to witness that transformation. The coefficients were bedrock of subsequent economic analysis. They were analogous to what philosopher John R. Searle has termed facts (Searle 1995: 27). These brute about (unlike facts I shall discuss later on in this lecture) do not depend for their existence on human speech or human ritual. For same reason tree will make a sound in forest even if no one were there to listen, coke will smelt iron into steel even if no one is there to comprehend spectacle (ibid.). A few years later, another distinguished economist of post-war period, Francis M. Bator, demonstrated his commitment to an alternative version of the neo-Walrasian research program by preparing a concise review of what he called simple analytics of welfare maximization. The review appeared in American Economic Review in 1957 (Bator 1957). Unlike Leontief, Bator allowed for substitution among factors of and hence for variable input ratios. The degree of variation, or elasticity of factor substitution, was still regulated by certain brute about technology, however. These brute were part of state of art of current technology, which was assumed to change slowly and to be less obviously dependent on incentives. Bator nicely summarized three necessary equilibrium that all rational economic systems had to satisfy if social welfare were to be at a maximum (ibid.). Although Bator's three equilibrium by themselves did not completely solve problem of maximizing social welfare, they did reappear as part of final maximum-welfare solution once so-called Bergsonian social welfare function had been defined. The three equilibrium were also used as a scientific justification for government intervention in settings. Bator made it clear that these were antiseptically independent of institutional context (ibid.). II Brute Facts and Austrian School Not all economists were enamored with neoWalrasian research program. According to several authorities, modern Austrian school moved in other directions and rejected general equilibrium for a market process approach (Vaughn 1994). Still, despite methodological disagreements, modern Austrians joined with neoWalrasians on at least one point that I wish to emphasize in this paper: Austrians accepted priority of brute about in form of the given technological background conditions that inform economic analysis. The Austrian economists generally agreed with and other neoWalrasians that brute of technology set objective limits on outcomes available to any economic system. Indeed, it was Austrian Gottfried Haberler who succeeded in organizing fledgling field of international economics around concept of production possibilities frontier, which itself became a favorite expository device among text book writers (Haberler 1936). …

Emil Lederer and Joseph Schumpeter on Economic Growth, Technology and Business Cycles

This paper compares Joseph Schumpeter and Emil Lederer with respect to their visions concerning the notions of economic growth, technology and business cycles. Their theoretical investigations in a number of thematic areas seem to converge to similar views. More precisely, both Schumpeter and Lederer regard the capitalist economy as a dynamic system where the introduction of innovations is its distinctive characteristic. In such a system, static analysis based on the concept of equilibrium is useful as an expository device to describe the adjustment mechanisms of the economic system. They also paid attention to the emergence of large oligopolistic firms and considered this development as being interwoven with technological progress. Both economists used similar arguments to emphasize the link between economic development and technological change. In their analyses, Schumpeter and Lederer referred to psychological factors motivating the entrepreneur, in order to explain the forces that set in motion the process of innovation and thus economic development. The concept of technological unemployment is also described in a similar manner by both of them. Regarding the issue of business cycles, Schumpeter and Lederer considered them to be a result of endogenous processes within a capitalist economy. Lederer in his late works, argued in a way analogous to Schumpeter, that economic fluctuations are caused from the disruptions created by innovations, which are introduced discontinuously into the economic system. Conclusively, Schumpeter and Lederer delivered theses which are similar in scope and conclusions probably because they were developed in the same social, political, theoretical and ideological environment and were also well acquainted with each other’s ideas.

A quantum chemical dialogue mediated by textbooks: Pauling's The nature of the chemical bond and Coulson's Valence

In this paper I look at Coulson's Valence not as the textbook that ended the hegemonic reign of Pauling's The nature of the chemical bond , but as the outcome of an ongoing conversation, either literal or metaphorical, between Pauling and Coulson, in which each scientist was responding to the other, agreeing or disagreeing with him, in the process revising his ideas, and writing the successive editions of his textbook. Far from merely expository devices, these textbooks were central pieces in an intellectual dialogue involving their authors about scientific theories and the status of concepts and, to a certain extent, about their competing philosophies of science.

Industrial Relations Concepts in the USA

This paper is an effort at a synthesis of industrial relations concepts in the United States. Labor's human essence and employment equity are seen as the defining themes of industrial relations. The leading concepts are structured in a sort of logic or sequence of propositions which are summarily stated in the form of a syllabus as an expository device.

Underlying Counterfactual Conditionals in Rawls' 'Justice as Fairness' - How the Overlapping Consensus Becomes Functional to the Original Position

Since A Theory of Justice came up in 1971, the metaphor of the Original Position has brought up not only a nurturing debate but also enduring criticism. Rawls himself contended that the Original Position was merely an hypothetical expository device to build up a foundational environment where a fair agreement could be settled for the best principles of justice to obtain. He even took great pains to improve upon his basic arguments. However, as he humbly acknowledged many times, there remained unwieldy issues at the core of A Theory of Justice in need of further diligence.

WHEN IS BRITAIN'S TAX ‐ FREEDOM DAY ?

The concept of the nation's ‘tax‐freedom day’ is a brilliantly simple expository device and always attracts media attention when it is announced. However, the calculation of tax‐freedom day is more difficult than it appears at first sight, because of the problems involved in defining, let alone measuring, both a nation's taxes and its income. Equally plausible measures of tax‐freedom day can differ by several weeks. However, the underlying concept remains one of the most vivid ways available of bringing home to ordinary citizens the costs of today's welfare state.

The Profiler's Question And The Treacherous Traveler: Narratives of Belonging in Commercial Aviation.

Although criticized as potentially invasive, profiling has recently been promoted as a means for finding potential terrorists, and particularly airplane hijackers. Based upon sophisticated data-mining technologies, new forms of profiling have seemed, whatever the privacy issues that they raise, to offer more objective alternatives to earlier airline profiling systems, which appear to have been based on nothing more than a sense that certain groups of people are not proper passengers, that they are out of place on an airplane. But in fact, the example of geodemographic systems suggests that an inevitable element of profiling is the appeal to sets of simple narratives. Indeed, far from being merely expository devices, such narratives are central to the profile's analytical structure; as a consequence, while their promoters laud the profiling systems as neutral analytical devices, embedded within them is a sorting system that might more accurately be described as encoding an unstable world of Foucauldian similitudes.

The simple IS-LM model with credit rationing

The simple IS-LM model with credit rationing

Rational Markets: Yes or No? The Affirmative Case

With the recent flurry of articles declaiming the death of the rational market hypothesis, it is well to pause and recall the very sound reasons this hypothesis was once so widely accepted, at least in academic circles. Although academic models often assume that all investors are rational, this assumption is clearly an expository device not to be taken seriously. What is in contention is whether markets are “rational” in the sense that prices are set as if all investors are rational. Even if markets are not rational in this sense, abnormal profit opportunities still may not exist. In that case, markets may be said to be “minimally rational.” I maintain that not only are developed financial markets minimally rational, they are, with two qualifications, rational. I contend that, realistically, market rationality needs to be defined so as to allow investors to be uncertain about the characteristics of other investors in the market. I also argue that investor irrationality, to the extent that it affects prices, is particularly likely to be manifest through overconfidence, which in turn, is likely to make the market “hyper-rational.” To illustrate, the article reexamines some of the most serious historical evidence against market rationality.