Aspects of family and kinship in a North Carolina coastal community: a comparative study

The almost total absence of social-science data on North Carolina coastal fishing communities has provoked this preliminary study of the role played by family and kinship ties among fishermen and boat builders in such a community, with a view to developing new fisheries management strategies from an assessment of the social and economic impacts of those which already exist.     

Estimating bus component failure distributions from censored samples

A technique is developed and demonstrated which can be used to estimate bus component failure distributions in an operational setting. The advantage of the described method is that it estimates the distribution of an entire population when only a portion of that population has experienced a failure (censored samples). Further, in an operational setting, components in a population do not age at the same rate and thus, their ages (in miles) are not ordered with respect to time. A sampling technique is derived to draw an ordered, censored sample from a population that has been aged in an operational setting. The resulting sample is used to estimate the life distribution of the component of interest.     

U.S. ports: evolution and structure

U.S. ports are facing competitive pressures similar to those being felt by ports elsewhere around the world. Despite the public enterprise nature of U.S. port authorities, they tend to function as 'business-like' organizations. This enterprise-like approach stems from their evolution from being primarily private railroad ports in the 19th century to public competitive port authorities in the 20th century. This paper provides an overview of the evolution of U.S. ports and the ongoing effect of earlier legislation, the varied resulting institutional structures, and current national and regional level issues. Although there is no national ports plan or strategy in the U.S.A. (the Constitution limits federal actions in the ports field) the federal government is involved in providing dredging services through the Army Corps of Engineers, navigation aids via the Coast Guard and other minor port-related services. U.S. ports typically come under the jurisdiction of state or local governments. Increasing competition coupled with other port issues (growing financial constraints, difficulties in obtaining dredging permits, environmental concerns and restricted landside access) is forcing some U.S. ports to enter into strategic alliances with others at a regional level.     

Institutional structure of Canadian ports

Canada's federal government is responsible for ports. Despite this, an integrated national ports system has not been established. The Canadian system includes: the Canada Ports Corporation; Harbour Commissions; and Transport Canada's Public Harbours. These are historic divisions. Following a failed 1970s attempt to place all ports within Transport Canada, in 1983 parliament opted for a Crown corporation model in establishing the Canada Ports Corporation for Canada's major ports. This paper addresses the question of whether, in today's increasingly competitive environment, a more integrated and businesslike national system of ports is required. Alternative systems range from centralization to regionalization and enhanced 'commercialization' of local ports to privatization. A suggested alternative for Canada includes incorporating all commercial ports within the Canada Ports Corporation, using a regional system for planning, and augmenting local autonomy of financially self-sufficient ports by making them crown corporations. Eventual privatization of the expanded Canada Port Corporation is also considered.     

Development of a telematics evaluation environment based on a driving simulator and its application

For developing telematics devices, traditional development methods include the unit function test, compatibility test and T-Car, which have some limitations. Telematics devices have various functions that require accounting for the interactions among three major elements of automotive electronics: the vehicle, the device unit and driver. The KAAS (KATECH Advanced Automotive Simulator) system is a virtual-reality-based test environment designed to test and analyze the three elements in one place. One of the difficult functions when constructing such VR (Virtual Reality)-based telematics test environment is to develop a test method for the LBS (Location-Based Service) function such as a car navigation demanding the GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite signals because KAAS is in a fixed laboratory. To overcome these problems, a real-time GPS simulation system, which can be integrated with KAAS, is needed because the location of the vehicle in virtual space is determined purely by the driver’s personal intention while driving virtually. This paper presents new concepts needed to construct a VR-based telematics test environment to generate a GPS RF signal, which reflects the continuously changing vehicle location during virtual driving in real-time. To construct this system, the coordinate transform must be conducted from a rectangular coordinate system that is compatible with a virtual 3D DB that is used to construct a 3D image for KAAS using a WGS84 and a longitude-latitude coordinate system compatible with a GPS simulator. Moreover, the real-time HILS (Hardware In Loop Simulation) systems and the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) simulation system are developed to evaluate telematics devices. Finally, we show its applications and results.