Exploring shippers' motivations to adopt collaborative truck-sharing initiatives

PurposeA seaport is an essential part of a supply chain, but many ports experience truck shortages, creating pressure for port authorities from shippers who need more trucks that move cargo. This study explores and ranks the motives for adopting a truck-sharing concept (where shippers share the same truck for delivery) as a mechanism to improve transport capacity.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a multi-method approach – both interviews and surveys. Interviews are first conducted with shippers to explore truck-sharing usage motives. Next, quantitative surveys of both shippers and carriers are conducted to rank those motives.FindingsThe study identifies five motives (operational efficiency goal, quick transport solution, sustainability policy, convenience-seeking behavior and secure transport process) for truck-sharing, four critical transport attributes (lower charges for freight, distance travelled, full capacity utilization and environmental recognition), four psychological consequences (monetary savings, greater safety, instant availability of trips and clarification of environmental values), and six core values (secure transport process, being careful of money, ease of doing business, sustainability, status in the community and recognition by customers of shippers).Research limitations/implicationsThe qualitative results will help researchers better understand how usage motives influence shippers' willingness to share a truck for transport needs. The quantitative results are useful for ranking truck-sharing motives by their importance.Practical implicationsBased on the findings, managers of carriers can categorize shippers according to their specific needs and thereby customize promotions to attract more shippers.Originality/valueThe findings provide the first, exploratory insights into shippers' motives.

Instantaneous Networking Service Availability for Disaster Recovery

Networking services may be broken down in a disaster situation while people in the disaster area(s) strongly demand networking services for both communication and information sharing among users. This requires the fast restoration of networking services to fulfil the demand–supply gap. Although there are a number of studies on restoring communication and networking in disasters, few studies have explicitly examined the service availability during the temporary and partial recovery process of network restoration. From the perspective of users in the disaster area, it is important to be able to communicate or share information with people whenever they want/need to do so. Therefore, partial and local recovery of the networking services also plays an important role for improving service availability in the disaster situations. To assess the restoration effectiveness of networking services with a measure of user satisfaction level, we propose to use instant networking service availability (I-NSA), a novel metric, and we examine the effectiveness of networking service restoration solutions using the metric. I-NSA allows us to clearly express the instant availability of networking services that drastically changes with the elapsed time from the disaster occurrence in disaster areas. This paper examines the effective improvement of I-NSA when Local-and-Instant Clouds (LI-Clouds) are applied to the disaster situation. LI-Cloud has been designed and practically developed to provide deployable networking services to users. We verify that LI-Cloud enables significant improvement on the I-NSA performance in the fast restoration of networking services.

Study of Reliability in a Repairable System by Markov Chains

In the industrial sector, maintenance of production facilities plays an important role to carry out production by increasing the reliability and availability of the production process. Predictive maintenance strategy seems adequate to anticipate the failure and degradation of the state of such equipment. A reliability study is needed to quantify indicators to describe the functioning of any system over time. In this paper, we present the results of a stochastic modeling conducted on the analysis of the availability of motor-pump system, installed in a cooling circuit in an industrial complex. The equipment considered in this study is composed of four subsystems. The proposed model is a dynamic Markovian approach, for the purpose of a comparison with the analytical calculation in terms of the indicators’ evaluation of the dependability of the studied system, including instant availability. The different states of the system components and the transition functions between these states have also been characterized. The results of availability obtained by the model are well correlated with those calculated analytically, confirming that the proposed model is very powerful, it will help predict the future states of the system, in order to predict any necessary preventive maintenance actions.

Applications of Personalised Phage Therapy highlighting the importance of Bacteriophage Banks against Emerging Antimicrobial Resistance

Emerging antibiotic resistance is one of the most important microbiological issues of the 21st century. This poses a query regarding the future use of antibiotics and availability of other promising therapeutic alternatives. The awareness about antibiotic misuse has improved insufficiently and is evident by the increased incidences of multidrug resistant infections globally. Amongst different antibacterial therapeutic approaches phage therapy has created a niche of its own due to continuous use for treatment of human infections in Eastern Europe. Synergistic compounds along with phages have also been proposed as a better alternative compared to antibiotics or phage alone for treatment of chronic cases and seriously debilitating diseases. As such, why not allow custom made phage therapy for treatment of chronic infections? However, the success of phage therapy will depend upon instant availability of characterised bacteriophages from bacteriophage banks which may serve as the major catalyst in bringing Phage Therapy to main stream treatment alternatives or in combination therapy at least. In the current article we present a glimpse of comprehensive approach about utility of bacteriophage banks and further present personalised phage therapy in a synergistic role with antibiotics to overcome emerging antimicrobial resistance.

Media and compassion after digital war: Why digital media haven't transformed responses to human suffering in contemporary conflict

There is a persistent belief in the power of media images to transform the events they depict. Yet despite the instant availability of billions of images of human suffering and death in the continuous and connective digital glare of social media, the catastrophes of contemporary wars, such as in Syria and Yemen, unfold relentlessly. There are repeated expressions of surprise by some in the West when the dissemination of images of suffering and wars, particularly in mainstream news media, does not translate into a de-escalation of conflict.In this article I consider today's loosening of the often presumed relationship between media representation, knowledge and response under the conditions of “digital war”. This is the digital disruption of the relationship between warfare and society in which all sides participate in the uploading and sharing of information on, and images and videos of, conflict.Is it the case that the capacity of images of human injury and death to bring about change, and the expectation that they would stir practical intervention in wars, is and has been exaggerated? Even if we are moved or shocked upon being confronted by such images, does this translate into some form of action, individual or otherwise? In this article I contend that the saturation of information and images of human suffering and death in contemporary warfare has not ushered in a new era of “compassion fatigue”. Rather, algorithmically charged outrage is a proxy for effects. It is easy to misconstrue the velocity of linking and liking and sharing as some kind of mass action or mass movement.Humanitarian catastrophes slowly unfold in an age of continuous and connective digital glare, and yet they are unseen. If the imploded battlefield of digital war affording the most proximate and persistent view of human suffering and death in history cannot ultimately mobilize radically effective forms of public response, it is difficult to imagine what will.

ON INTERVAL AND INSTANT AVAILABILITY OF THE SYSTEM

This article considers the interval availability and instant availability of the k-system. A certain relationship between the two types of availability is established. Some lower and upper bounds to interval availability are derived. It also provides a couple of conditions under which the availability of two systems can be compared. Several examples are given to show the complexity of comparisons of availability.

Microcirculation: Physiology, Pathophysiology, and Clinical Application

This paper briefly reviews the physiological components of the microcirculation, focusing on its function in homeostasis and its central function in the realization of oxygen transport to tissue cells. Its pivotal role in the understanding of circulatory compromise in states of shock and renal compromise is discussed. Our introduction of hand-held vital microscopes (HVM) to clinical medicine has revealed the importance of the microcirculation as a central target organ in states of critical illness and inadequate response to therapy. Technical and methodological developments have been made in hardware and in software including our recent introduction and validation of automatic analysis software called MicroTools, which now allows point-of-care use of HVM imaging at the bedside for instant availability of functional microcirculatory parameters needed for microcirculatory targeted resuscitation procedures to be a reality.

A Pipeline for Rapid Post-Crisis Twitter Data Acquisition, Filtering and Visualization

Due to instant availability of data on social media platforms like Twitter, and advances in machine learning and data management technology, real-time crisis informatics has emerged as a prolific research area in the last decade. Although several benchmarks are now available, especially on portals like CrisisLex, an important, practical problem that has not been addressed thus far is the rapid acquisition, benchmarking and visual exploration of data from free, publicly available streams like the Twitter API in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. In this paper, we present such a pipeline for facilitating immediate post-crisis data collection, curation and relevance filtering from the Twitter API. The pipeline is minimally supervised, alleviating the need for feature engineering by including a judicious mix of data preprocessing and fast text embeddings, along with an active learning framework. We illustrate the utility of the pipeline by describing a recent case study wherein it was used to collect and analyze millions of tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shootings in 2017.

Programming to Promote Information Literacy in the Era of Fake News

Given the instant availability of information and the proliferation of questionable news, the ability to critically examine information before consuming it, is of increasing importance. The need for excellent information literacy skills is evident but lacking. This article highlights reasons as to resistance to existing information literacy efforts and suggests components for information literacy programming with a focus on fake news.