Assessing the representativeness of a smartphone-based household travel survey in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

The household travel survey (HTS) finds itself in the midst of rapid technological change. Traditional methods are increasingly being sidelined by digital devices and computational power—for tracking movements, automatically detecting modes and activities, facilitating data collection, etc.. Smartphones have recently emerged as the latest technological enhancement. FMS is a smartphone-based prompted-recall HTS platform, consisting of an app for sensor data collection, a backend for data processing and inference, and a user interface for verification of inferences (e.g., modes, activities, times, etc.). FMS, has been deployed in several cities of the global north, including Singapore. This paper assesses the first use of FMS in a city of the global south, Dar es Salaam. FMS in Dar was implemented over a 1-month period, among 581 adults chosen from 300 randomly selected households. Individuals were provided phones with data plans and the FMS app preloaded. Verification of the collected data occurred every 3 days, via a phone interview. The experiment reveals various social and technical challenges. Models of individual likelihood to participate suggest little bias. Several socioeconomic and demographic characteristics apparently do influence, however, the number of days fully verified per individual. Similar apparent biases emerge when predicting the likelihood of a given day being verified. Some risk of non-random, non-response is, thus, evident.     

Optimal Threshold Policies for Robust Data Center Control

With the simultaneous rise of energy costs and demand for cloud computing, efficient control of data centers becomes crucial. In the data center control problem, one needs to plan at every time step how many servers to switch on or off in order to meet stochastic job arrivals while trying to minimize electricity consumption. This problem becomes particularly challenging when servers can be of various types and jobs from different classes can only be served by certain types of server, as it is often the case in real data centers. We model this problem as a robust Markov decision process (i.e., the transition function is not assumed to be known precisely). We give sufficient conditions (which seem to be reasonable and satisfied in practice) guaranteeing that an optimal threshold policy exists. This property can then be exploited in the design of an efficient solving method, which we provide. Finally, we present some experimental results demonstrating the practicability of our approach and compare with a previous related approach based on model predictive control.     

Research on Web Page Classification Method Based on Query Log

Web page classification is an important application in many fields of Internet information retrieval, such as providing directory classification and vertical search. Methods based on query log which is a light weight version of Web page classification can avoid Web content crawling, making it relatively high in efficiency, but the sparsity of user click data makes it difficult to be used directly for constructing a classifier. To solve this problem, we explore the semantic relations among different queries through word embedding, and propose three improved graph structure classification algorithms. To reflect the semantic relevance between queries, we map the user query into the low-dimensional space according to its query vector in the first step. Then, we calculate the uniform resource locator (URL) vector according to the relationship between the query and URL. Finally, we use the improved label propagation algorithm (LPA) and the bipartite graph expansion algorithm to classify the unlabeled Web pages. Experiments show that our methods make about 20% more increase in F1-value than other Web page classification methods based on query log.     

Modeling and simulation of a counter-rotating turbine system for underwater vehicles

The structure of a counter-rotating turbine of an underwater vehicle is designed by adding the counter-rotating second-stage turbine disk after the conventional single-stage turbine. The available kinetic energy and the absorption power of the auxiliary system are calculated at different working conditions, and the results show that the power of the main engine and auxiliary system at the counter-rotating turbine system matches well with each other. The experimental simulation of the lubricating oil loop, fuel loop, and seawater loop are completed right before the technology scheme of the counter-rotating turbine system is proposed. The simulation results indicate that the hydraulic transmission system can satisfy the requirements for an underwater vehicle running at a steady sailing or variable working conditions.     

Real-Time Fault Diagnosis for Gas Turbine Blade Based on Output-Hidden Feedback Elman Neural Network

In order to remotely monitor and maintain large-scale complex equipment in real time, China Telecom plans to create a total solution that integrates remote data collection, transmission, storage, analysis and prediction. This solution can provide manufacturers with proactive, systematic, integrated operation and maintenance service, and the data analysis and health forecasting are the most important part. This paper conducts health management for the turbine blades. Elman neural network, and improved Elman neural network, i.e., outputhidden feedback (OHF) Elman neural network are studied as the main research methods. The results verify the applicability of OHF Elman neural network.     

The role of perceived environment,neighbourhood characteristics,and attitudes in walking behaviour: evidence from a rapidly developing city in China

Transportation - The associations between objective and subjective dimensions of the built environment and walking behaviour have been examined extensively in existing studies. However, the...     

基于框架结构的双曲拱桥加固方法探讨

文章针对郭家沟双曲拱桥,对其病害状况和产生的原因进行了分析,并结合双曲拱桥受力特点,探讨了常规加固方案存在的不足,同时从改善主拱圈整体性出发,提出了一种新的加固措施——框架加固法,该法采用U型肋与横系梁形成的框架结构加固原桥拱肋,具有增加重量小、施工简便、受力明确等优点,可为同类工程参考。