Against the range-dependent accuracy of the tracking radar measurements including range, elevation and bearing angles, a new hybrid adaptive Kalman filter is proposed to enhance the performance of the radar aided strapdown inertial navigation system (INS/Radar). This filter involves the concept of residual-based adaptive estimation and adaptive fading Kalman filter and tunes dynamically the fil...

Transit agencies have never had an accurate indicator of the extent of their service area based on riders’ door-to-door travel time. This is an important gap in knowledge, because travel time is one of the most important factors determining whether or not people will use public transit. This paper presents a powerful new travel timebased method to visualize and analyze transit service coverage—...

Functional dyspepsia (FD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are common gastrointestinal (GI) diseases; however, there is frequent overlap between FD and IBS patients. Emerging evidence links the activation of corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) receptors with stress-related alterations of gastric and colonic motor function. Therefore, we investigated the effect of peripheral CRF peptide and w...

Background/Aims After exclusion of structural diseases, chronic constipation may be associated with normal or slow transit or rectal evacuation disorders. We evaluated: (1) clinical features and anorectal function, (2) difference of regional colonic transit according to the presence or absence of evacuation disorders, and (3) association of colonic transit with gender in patients with objective...

Historically, the visual manifestation of the “Black Drop effect,” the appearance of a band linking the solar limb to the disk of a transiting planet near the point of internal tangency, had limited the accuracy of the determination of the Astronomical Unit and the scale of the Solar System in the 18th and 19th centuries. This problem was misunderstood in the case of Venus during its rare trans...

We report new radial velocities of the TrES-4 transiting planetary system, including observations of a full transit, with the High Dispersion Spectrograph of the Subaru 8.2m telescope. Modeling of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect indicates that TrES-4b has closely aligned orbital and stellar spin axes, with λ=6.3±4.7. The close spin-orbit alignment angle of TrES-4b seems to argue against a migrat...

This study evaluates rail transit benefits based on a comprehensive analysis of transportation system performance in major U.S. cities. It finds that cities with large, wellestablished rail systems have significantly higher per capita transit ridership, lower average per capita vehicle ownership and annual mileage, less traffic congestion, lower traffic death rates, lower consumer expenditures ...

We appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today about mass transit safety and security in the United States. Over a year has passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, realigned our national priorities. While most of the early attention following the September 11 terrorist attacks focused on airport security, emphasis on the other modes of transportation has since grown. Mo...

Future high-precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the characteristics of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light curves. The large density gradients expected in planet atmospheres can offset the unfavorably large observer lens–to–source lens distance ratio and...

A new transit operating strategy is presented in which service vehicles operate in pairs with the lead vehicle providing an all-stop local service and the following vehicle being allowed to skip some stops as an express service. The underlying scheduling problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem with the objective of minimizing the total costs for both operators and passe...