This article explores economic aspects of the market for long-term care (LTC) in Japan. As the world's most rapidly aging nation, it is of interest to understand that country's current LTC system and projections of LTC utilization patterns and costs, as well as their potential drivers. Since Japan appears likely to experience important shortfalls in LTC in the future, the authors also discuss a...

The increasing availability of large-scale trajectory data provides us great opportunity to explore them for knowledge discovery in transportation systems using advanced data mining techniques. Nowadays, large number of taxicabs in major metropolitan cities are equipped with a GPS device. Since taxis are on the road nearly twenty four hours a day (with drivers changing shifts), they can now act...

The role of the statistical model-based voice activity detector (SMVAD) is to detect speech regions from input signals using the statistical models of noise and noisy speech. The decision rule of SMVAD is based on the likelihood ratio test (LRT). The LRT-based decision rule may cause detection errors because of statistical properties of noise and speech signals. In this article, we first analyz...

Although WS-BusinessActivity and BPEL4WS Long-Running Transaction (LRT) are conceptually very similar and are both designed to support the execution of complex business transactions, they differ in a large number of aspects. This is particularly true because BPEL4WS, unlike WSBusinessActivity, was not designed to support distributed coordination. This paper comprehensively discusses the similar...

A major research gap is the relative ridership performance of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), Light Rail Transit (LRT), and streetcar (SC). This paper assesses ridership influences of 101 routes in Australia, Europe, and North America using multiple regression examining the influence of transit mode, vehicle capacity, service level, employment/residential density, car ownership, speed, stop spacing, r...