One of the problems facing the introduction of novel crops is the concerns about their spread into the natural environment. A long-term study of oilseed rape (canola) growing on the verges of one of Britain’s busiest motorways provides some encouragement that at least some crops find the going tough outside the field environment in which they are sown. Michael Crawley at Imperial College London...

The use of amphetamines in Brazil is common among truck drivers, which may be an important factor in the occurrence of traffic accidents. This article seeks to estimate the prevalence of amphetamine use among truck drivers. Drivers (N = 134) were stopped on two different highways in Sao Paulo state and they were asked to answer a questionnaire and provide a urine sample for toxicological analys...

A 55 year old driver left after Fajr prayer to the vegetable market to buy a few things for his daughter’s wedding lunch. While trying to avoid a big pothole in the middle of the road, he was hit by a truck without headlights coming from the opposite direction. The truck driver continued driving as if nothing had happened. None of the road users cared to help the victim but he was able to conta...

In November 2003, the City of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada equipped five solid waste collection trucks with Trimble Telvisant CrossCheck® GPRS 1900 Mobile data recorders. Three of the trucks are garbage packers, the fourth truck is a side-loading recycling truck, and the fifth vehicle is a 60/40-split co-collection truck equipped with a cart lifter. These trucks operated in a variety of situations...

A fuel-based method for estimating heavy-duty diesel truck emissions is described. In this method, emission factors are normalized to fuel consumption; vehicle activity is measured by the amount of diesel fuel consumed. For the San Francisco Bay Area during summer 1996, on-road heavy-duty diesel trucks were estimated at the upper bound to emit 110 × 103 kg/day of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and 3.7 ×...

A dynamic approach to truck scheduling using an intelligent distributed multi-agent architecture is presented. This paper presents an inherently distributed problem, the dynamic truck scheduling problem which has motivated the current study on an intelligent multi-agent architecture for optimal real time solutions. The .Net environment is critiqued for the proposed multi-agent architecture. A d...

We use a reinforcement learning approach to learn a real world control problem, the truck backer-upper problem. In this problem, a tractor trailer truck must be backed into a loading dock from an arbitrary location and orientation. Our approach uses the temporal difference algorithm using a neural network as the value function approximator. The novelty of this work is the simplicity of our impl...

Novel ambiguous N-N combinations were created that had both a thematic relation and a property mapping interpretation (e.g., a cheetah truck = a fast truck vs. a truck for transporting cheetahs). Experiment 1 asked people to generate their own interpretations, which were then classified as involving thematic relations, property mapping or other. Experiment 2 asked people to choose which of the ...

An analytical point-wise stationary approximation model is proposed to analyze time-dependent truck queuing processes with stochastic service time distributions at gates and yards of a port terminal. A convex nonlinear programming model is developed which minimizes the total truck turn time and discomfort due to shifted arrival times. A two-phase optimization approach is used to first compute a...

In September 2008 new regulations for managing heavy vehicle driver fatigue entered into force in Australia. According to the new regulations there is a chain of responsibility ranging from drivers to dispatchers and shippers and thus, carriers must explicitly consider driving and working hour regulations when generating truck driver schedules. This paper presents and studies the Australian Tru...