State legislatures often rely on existing text when drafting new bills. Resource and expertise constraints, which often drive this copying behavior, can be taken advantage of by lobbyists and special interest groups. These groups provide model bills, which encode policy agendas, with the intent that the models become actual law. Unfortunately, model legislation is often opaque to the public–bot...

The procedural steps for developing an expert system for designing signals at isolated intersections are described and the most important development issues for each step are discussed. The steps include problem analysis and definition, preliminary prototype specification, knowledge acquisition strategy development, prototype development plan, knowledge extraction, knowledge representation, too...

The current computing and communication services provide convenience and functionality. The creation of these services is however not an easy task. Service development is still mainly technical oriented, where service creation tools are meant for serving and assisting the professional developers. In other words, service creation is not seen as a task for end-users. In our research, we wish to e...

...................................................................................................................... i ................................................................................................ii Table of

Interoperability of medical devices, and their interface to clinicians and patients, are critical issues for the safety and effectiveness of patient care. Ongoing efforts strive at establishing standards for integrated clinical environments, which may connect and co-ordinate several medical devices and interface them to patients, clinicians, and hospital information systems. In this paper, an a...

In air traffic management, a pairwise conflict is a predicted loss of separation between two aircraft, referred to as the ownship and the intruder. A conflict prevention bands system displays ranges of maneuvers for the ownship that characterize regions in the airspace that are either conflict-free or “don’t go” zones that the ownship has to avoid. Errors in the calculation of prevention bands ...

Background: Consumption of fast food, as a consequence of the modern industrial society, has increased in recent years among teenagers and young people. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of fast food consumption on female students in Yazd University of Medical Sciences based on the Prototype/Willingness Model. Methods: In this descriptive-analytic study, 245 female dormito...

Today, due to the limited supply and rapid consumption of fossil fuels, transitioning towards renewable energy supplies has become more important than ever.. The purpose of this paper is to present a new linear permanent magnet vernier machine structure which is designed to capture wave energy and improve the performance of the prototype vernier machine. By halving the proposed vernier machine,...