Natural fibers are emerging as low cost, lightweight and apparently environmentally superior alternatives to glass fibers in composites. We review select comparative life cycle assessment studies of natural fiber and glass fiber composites, and identify key drivers of their relative environmental performance. Natural fiber composites are likely to be environmentally superior to glass fiber comp...

The current design of database drivers – a necessary evil for interacting with a DBMS – imposes undue burdens on those who install, upgrade, and manage database systems and their applications. In this paper, we introduce Drivolution, a new architecture for DB drivers that reduces the cost, risk, and downtime associated with driver distribution, deployment and upgrade in large production environ...

results mean age was 41.6 ± 9.2 for the military truck drivers and 43.4 ± 10.9 for commercial truck drivers (p > 0.05). no significant difference between military and commercial drivers was found in terms of driving experience, number of mvcs, binocular va, frequency of color vision defects and cs scores. in contrast, the last ocular examination was significantly earlier in military drivers tha...

BACKGROUND United States health care spending rose rapidly in the 2000s, after a period of temporary slowdown in the 1990s. However, the description of the overall trend and the understanding of the underlying drivers of this trend are very limited. This study investigates how well historical hospital cost/revenue drivers explain the recent hospital spending trend in the 2000s, and how importan...

Nowadays, car navigation systems are widely used for providing directions to drivers’ destination. However, they do not always recommend a route that perfectly matches the driver’s intent. Even when drivers intentionally change the driving route from the recommended one to another, most of car navigation systems lead them back to the original recommended route. Such recommendations may not adeq...

Writing code to interact with external devices is inherently difficult, and the added demands of writing device drivers in C for kernel mode compounds the problem. This environment is complex and brittle, leading to increased development costs and, in many cases, unreliable code. Previous solutions to this problem ignore the cost of migrating drivers to a better programming environment and requ...