the new field of research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of scientific and technological developments (ElSa) is rapidly becoming a professional field with grants, research programmes and university departments devoted to it. at first glance, ElSa seems to be a new development intended to address questions and challenges that arise from advances in the natural sciences. the professio...

Workstation processing power and the number of available workstation application tools have increased dramatically in the last five years. Sophisticated users now find that "real work" can be accomplished on CAD/CAE workstations. In "Conversion of an IC Design Capability from a Mainframe to a Workstation Environment," Dave Palmer and John Wisniewski from Sandia National Laboratories recount the...

Hima Vangapandu1, Walden Ai1* Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, University of South Carolina School of Medicine, 6439 Garners Ferry Road, Building 2, Room B18, Columbia, SC 29209, USA __________________________________________________________________________________________________ *Correspondence: Dr. Walden Ai, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, Microbiology and...

Ferries and other passenger vessels provide a crucial mode of transportation for many in the developing world, especially in archipelagic nations like Indonesia and in river delta nations like Bangladesh. However, this dependence on passenger vessels coincides with a high rate of accidents and fatalities in many countries, linked to purchase of old, substandard, and/or inappropriate vessels in ...

Ferry-based networks provide a means of bringing extremely low-cost Internet access to remote rural areas, where conventional access technologies, e.g., dial-up, DSL and CDMA, are currently economically infeasible. We present an architecture for ferry-based networks and identify downlink scheduling as a difficult open problem. We argue that opportunistic scheduling policies that take ferry sche...

Recent studies in the assessment of risk in maritime transportation systems have used simulation-based probabilistic techniques. Amongst them are the San Francisco Bay (SFB) Ferry exposure assessment in 2002, the Washington State Ferry (WFS) Risk Assessment in 1998 and the Prince William Sound (PWS) Risk Assessment in 1996. Representing uncertainty in such simulation models is fundamental to qu...

Ferry accidents often occur the result of ship handling difficulty which interfacing human, machine and environment. Therefore, a decision tool model as a comprehensive information system, based on the ship handling difficulty, needs to be developed through the combination of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Logic System. The Fuzzy Logic System part consists of ship condition, ship ha...

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are special case of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with predictable mobility constraints. In VANETs, non real-time applications are appreciated as compared to real time applications because of very frequent network partitions caused by high node mobility. The focus of this paper is on Delay tolerant networks (DTNs). DTNs are special type of networks which fol...

In this paper we focus on a class of polling systems encountered while modeling a class of ferry based wireless local area networks (FWLAN). A ferry facilitates local communication between the nodes (or users) as well as the communication between the nodes and a base station (BS) that serves as the gateway with the external world. The ferry, while walking in a predetermined cyclic path, communi...