Terry Takewell was a young diabetic. Gasping for breath, he was taken by ambulance to the only local hospital in Fayette County, Tennessee. Takewell was not treated, but instead was carried out the door by a hospital administrator and set on the edge of the parking lot. He was picked up by neighbors and brought home. He died the next day. Terry had no insurance and owed the hospital a lot of mo...

When crimes occur-when a ghetto teenager is shot to death in a gang war, when an elderly woman is mugged for her social security check, when a nurse is raped in a hospital parking lot, when one driver is punched by another in a dispute over a parking place, when a black family's new home is vandalizedsociety's attention is naturally focused on the victims and their material losses. Their wounds...

Recent works by Newell [13] and Coffman et al. [2] have studied a queuing or storage model which is most easily visualized as the process of parking cars in a parking lot where customers park as close as they can to some fixed point. This paper describes several space-time processes which arise as heavy-traffic limits in this model, and which seem interesting in their own right. M/M/a queue * d...

Despite much speculation, the principal factors controlling concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in settled house dust (SHD) have not yet been identified. In response to recent reports that dust from pavement with coal-tar-based sealcoat contains extremely high concentrations of PAH, we measured PAH in SHD from 23 apartments and in dust from their associated parking lots, on...

GPS-based applications have become very popular during the last years, specially among drivers, who use them to find the best way to their destination. However, their use is still far from taking advantage of the wide range of possibilities that GPS offers. The SIAPAS application goes one step further by adding new functionality to the typical GPS-based map. SIAPAS runs on a PDA and it allows d...

The battery of electric vehicles (EV) can be charged from the power grid or discharged back to it. Parking lots can aggregate hundreds of EVs which makes them a significant and flexible load/generation component in the grid. In a smart grid environment, the smart parking lot (SPL) can benefit from the situation of the simultaneous connection to the EVs and power grid. This paper proposes a new ...

We consider real-life smart parking systems where parking lot occupancy data are collected from field sensor devices and sent to backend servers for further processing and usage for applications. Our objective is to make these data useful to end users, such as parking managers, and, ultimately, to citizens. To this end, we concoct and validate an automated classification algorithm having two ob...

This paper aims to present an intelligent system for parking space detection based on image processing technique. The proposed system captures and processes the rounded image drawn at parking lot and produces the information of the empty car parking spaces. In this work, a camera is used as a sensor to take photos to show the occupancy of car parks. The reason why a camera is used is because wi...

We present a methodology for the synthesis of controllers, which exploits (explicit) model checking techniques. That is, we can cope with the systematic exploration of a very large state space. This methodology can be applied to systems where other approaches fail. In particular, we can consider systems with an highly nonlinear dynamics and lacking a uniform mathematical description (model). We...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a ubiquitous contaminant in urban environments. Although numerous sources of PAHs to urban runoff have been identified, their relative importance remains uncertain. We show that a previously unidentified source of urban PAHs, parking lot sealcoat, may dominate loading of PAHs to urban water bodies in the United States. Particles in runoff from parking...