Objectives To estimate the prevalence of tobacco consumption and secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure in private cars, commercial vehicles and taxis in the city of Barcelona in Spain. Design setting and participants We carried out an observational cross-sectional study in 2011. We selected a systematic sample of 2442 private cars, commercial vehicles and taxis on 40 public roads regulated by traffi...

GPS-equipped taxis can be considered as pervasive sensors and the large-scale digital traces produced allow us to reveal many hidden facts about the city dynamics and human behaviors. In this paper we present a novel GPS-based taxi system which can detect ongoing anomalous passenger delivery behaviors leveraging our proposed iBOAT method. To achieve real time monitoring, we reduce the response ...

The phenylacetic acid (PAA) degradation pathway is a widely distributed funneling pathway for the catabolism of aromatic compounds, including the environmental pollutants styrene and ethylbenzene. However, bacterial chemotaxis to PAA has not been studied. The chemotactic strain Pseudomonas putida F1 has the ability to utilize PAA as a sole carbon and energy source. We identified a putative PAA ...

This paper presents a real-time dispatching model for electric autonomous vehicle (EAV) taxis that combines mathematical programming and machine learning. The EAV taxi problem is formulated solved as an integer linear program maximizes the total reward serving customers. optimal dispatch solutions are generated by simulating dispatched optimization model. artificial-neural-network-(ANN)-based w...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa was shown to be attracted to phosphate. The chemotactic response was induced by phosphate starvation. The specificity of chemoreceptors for phosphate was high so that no other tested phosphorus compounds elicited a chemotactic response as strong as that elicited by phosphate. Competition experiments showed that the chemoreceptors for phosphate appeared to be different fro...

With the introduction of the Bus Rapid Transport system in South Africa, existing public transport organisations, particularly buses and minibus taxis, will have to adapt to the changes or else they will inevitably fail. In general, public transport organisations are being forced to move from a traditionally operations-driven orientation to a more marketdriven orientation, which means that they...

In this paper, we use numerical simulations to demonstrate a half-soliton interaction of waves in a mathematical model of a "prey-predator" system with taxis when of two colliding waves, one annihilates and the other continues to propagate. We show that this effect depends on the "ages" or, equivalently, "widths" of the colliding waves. In two spatial dimensions we demonstrate that the type of ...

The location of Helicobacter pylori in the gastric mucosa of mammals is defined by natural pH gradients within the gastric mucus, which are more alkaline proximal to the mucosal epithelial cells and more acidic toward the lumen. We have used a microscope slide-based pH gradient assay and video data collection system to document pH-tactic behavior. In response to hydrochloric acid (HCl), H. pylo...