Las Positas College

We present a Software Defined Radio (SDR)-based IEEE 802.11p testbed for distributed Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. The platform bridges the gap between network simulation and deployment by providing a modular codebase configured for cost-effective ADALM-Pluto SDRs. Any device capable of running a Docker with ROS, executing Matlab and interface with a Pluto via USB can act as a communication node. To demonstrate collaborative sensing, we share LiDAR point clouds between nodes and fuse them into a collective perception environment. We evaluated a theoretical model for leveraging decentralized storage systems (IPFS and Filecoin), analyzing constraints such as node storage convergence, latency, and scalability. In addition, we provide a channel quality study.

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) problems necessitate a methodology that is able to produce reliable and defendable decisions. This is especially the case when it comes to safety system analyses. This study constructs an integrated model, CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) - Multi-Objective Optimization on the basis of Ratio Analysis (MOORA) - Spectral Clustering (SC) (i.e., CRITIC-MOORA-SC), which seamlessly incorporates three stages of MCDM (weighting, aggregating, and grouping) with decomposing into one process, with the capacity to deal with decision difficulties while maintaining a high level of reliability. The model is designed to support the transport safety analyses of 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as Timor-Leste, including measuring road safety development, ranking and grouping safety performances, deconstructing safety performance indicators, decomposing overall achievement, quantifying safety changes over the past decade, and benchmarking approved practices. Enhanced comparisons of the results indicate the reliability and practicability of the proposed model, verifying its applicability for realworld decision activities. By doing so, this study provides policymakers and managers in the ASEAN region, as well as other parts of the world, with a support tool for creditable analyses in transport safety, strengthening their institutional capacity in decision-making activities.

“There is no present or future—only the past, happening over and over again—now,” Eugene O’Neill writes in A Moon for The Misbegotten. This theme is reiterated throughout his autobiographical canon and rings true in his rarely performed The First Man.The First Man is curiously contemporary for a play written in 1922 as it explores what it means to find ourselves through our past and our future. Curtis, an egotistic anthropologist, learns of his wife-cum-secretary’s pregnancy on the eve of a five-year trip abroad to discover the origin of man. He is enraged. After the devastating loss of their two children to pneumonia, Martha’s vow to have no more children has been broken. Her reimagined self and her future necessitate a withdrawal from the life that Curtis imagined. His anger and dismay are selfish, as he is primarily concerned with how his work will suffer with her inconvenient condition upon them. (Spoiler alert: his work does not suffer, though his wife and child do.)But Curtis is not the only character to respond negatively to Martha’s pregnancy, and so we find ourselves in the familiar O’Neillian small town, rife with gossip and rumor-mongering. Curtis and Martha’s relatives and neighbors maliciously impute the pregnancy to an imagined affair between Martha and her and Curtis’s close friend, Edward Bigelow. Small-minded gossip of this sort would have been exhausting to O’Neill, and its presence here buttresses the motif of oppressive small towns seen in many of his plays and personal reflections.Presented as a script-in-hand reading at the Museum of San Ramon Valley, about two miles from the Tao House wherein O’Neill penned Long Day’s Journey Into Night, director Eric Fraisher Hayes’s production aimed to explore the “complicated and challenging relationships … [and] power dynamics that are at work within a town.” Hayes altered the play’s focus through editing as well as creative and expressionist staging, for example by eliminating most of the female supporting characters. The production, then, was less about the town as a broad social unit and more about its patriarchal underpinnings.In doing this, Hayes might have missed his initial mark, at least to some small degree. O’Neill’s imagined town is represented by Curtis’s brothers, fathers, sisters, aunts, lawyer, and wife, and finally a nurse and maid. While Hayes’s edit allows the audience to access the recurring nightmare of blunt-force patriarchy, it also lets the women who benefit from, agree with, and perpetuate this system off the hook. Women, and their gossip, play an important role in The First Man; gossip pits Martha against her family, her town, and even her gender. Martha is a woman who tries to forge her own path in a town that does not value strong, independent, and progressive women; and the wagging tongues of the women are at least partially responsible for her failure. Omitting the smaller women’s roles not only removes some delicious, albeit abhorrent, lines that sting a little more strongly when said from one woman to another, but also absolves them of their shared responsibility in the demise of one of the more beautifully written O’Neill female characters.At a talk-back after one of the performances, an audience member asked the question, “is Curtis selfish for leaving his child behind to follow his career?” The implication by this audience member, an older gentleman, was that perhaps Curtis was more sympathetic in his choice to leave his newborn child in the care of a gossipmonger in town (female in the script; male in the production) after his wife’s gruesome death during childbirth, which family and friends had overheard, bored, irritated, and worn down by her cries. Perhaps, as the audience member posits, there is little wrong in a man wanting to leave his family to follow his career. As the woman sitting next to me frustratingly uttered, “That’s a hot take.”Again, this sort of disdain for the futures of women or children is expected in a patriarchal space—which Hayes’s edits ultimately explores—but O’Neill originally gave those lines and that disdain, to the other women … and there is something especially brutal in that.The play, in the Hayes production and in the original script, is underrated. The characters’ narratives, hopes, and relationships remain intriguing and distressing, in the way that only O’Neill’s plays can be. The performances, and the direction of them, were fully and winningly realized.Tim Holt Jones (Curtis Jayson) and Emily Keyishian (Martha Jayson) excelled in their roles as the main characters; their relationship and work with each other dramatized a recognizable marital dynamic, full of joy and heartbreak. Keyishian brought levity, warmth, and contemporariness to her Martha. The freedom in her movement and physicality echoed the confidence in Martha’s decisions and her identity as a free woman, untethered by the expectations of the society and town surrounding her. Jones was thoroughly likable at the beginning, when Curtis’s enthusiasm for his upcoming research trip is palpable and charming. He slides from an everyman into being unbearably selfish in such an apologetic way that you almost forgive him, at least until the second half of the play.Supporting primary characters Lily Jayson (Adrian Deane) and Edward Bigelow (Craig Eychner) supplied an outside perspective on the marriage, bridging the gap between unbearable townsfolk and a career-consumed couple. Deane’s Lily wrestles with her place in the town. Her dismay upon realizing that she is more like the townsfolk than like Martha provided a particularly strong moment. Eychner’s Bigelow was a reformed parent, reveling in the newfound joys of fatherhood. It was easy to appreciate the bond between Martha and Bigelow, who had both reoriented their true north to their children at a time when no one else was doing so. After all, it is Martha who says (of Curtis), “his work has taken the place of his children.” For Bigelow, and Martha, the opposite is true.The ensemble, or townspeople/family/friends, are played by a stellar cast of performers, working together as a Greek chorus to criticize Martha and misdirect Curtis in order to sustain their fantasies of moral superiority. For them, the unproven infidelity is more problematic than anything else that could happen. John Tessmer, Michael Sally, Lyle Goldman, Cynthia Lagodzinski, and John Blytt made the most of their limited space and short time on stage, sometimes speaking in unison. Relegated primarily to chairs on stage left, they brought forth the energy and antagonism needed to propel the script. Their collective work and relationship dynamics were clear, precise, and effective for the most part, with only one or two places in which the effect was lightheartedly received with a gentle giggle by the audience.On a rainy winter night, it was nice to see such fine performers enact this underperformed play. The clatter of the raindrops on the roof, and the single light switch plunging the entire museum into darkness between acts, lent a certain charm to the night. The simplicity of the performance allowed the audience to focus on the text and the story, which may have been swallowed in a less intimate space.Between acts, one could enjoy the historical artifacts and murals of the San Ramon Valley and imagine the early to mid-twentieth-century California town that would have been so very present for O’Neill. With only three rehearsals, a few folding chairs, and a taxidermized bobcat or two in the room, The First Man was made real again, and an audience of about 100 people were reminded that in this historical space, smack dab in the middle of a small town, O’Neill’s works can still entertain and captivate an audience.

IntroductionThe role of quantitative target setting has become an important topic in debates on the improvement of road safety performance. Specifically, there are questions regarding the relationship between quantitative safety targets and their actual effects. Although previous studies have provided important insights into this subject, their empirical findings have largely been equivocal, and research on this topic remains inadequate.MethodsBased on panel data representing 20 years of observations from 34 OECD member states, we employed nonlinear and linear panel models to investigate whether and how the attributes of quantitative road safety targets (i.e., target ambition and duration) influence their success (i.e., target completion status and rate).ResultsThe results indicate that a quantitative target with a higher level of ambition is associated with a lower likelihood and rate of completion, whereas there is no support for a connection between target duration and final completion rate. This suggests that an excessively ambitious target does not necessarily result in better road safety performance and is detrimental to achieving expected fatality reductions.ConclusionFrom an empirical perspective, this study revealed a potential interaction effect between quantitative road safety targets and practical fatality reduction performance, providing government officials and policymakers with essential references for future practices on target setting and governance planning in regard to public health.

The emergency life-history stage (ELHS) can be divided into two subcategories that describe distinct, coordinated responses to disease- or non-disease-related physiological challenges. Whether an individual can simultaneously express aspects of both subcategories when faced with multiple challenges is poorly understood. Emergency life-history theory suggests that disease- and non-disease-related responses are coordinated at the level of the whole organism and therefore cannot be expressed simultaneously. However, the reactive scope and physiological regulatory network models suggest that traits can be independently regulated, allowing for components of both disease- and non-disease-related responses to be simultaneously expressed within a single organism. To test these ideas experimentally, we subjected female zebra finches to food deprivation, an immune challenge, both, or neither, and measured a suite of behavioural and physiological traits involved in the ELHS. We examined whether the trait values expressed by birds experiencing simultaneous challenges resembled trait values of birds experiencing a single challenge or if birds could express a mixture of trait values concurrently. We find that birds can respond to simultaneous challenges by regulating components of the behavioural and immune responses independently of one another. Modularity within these physio-behavioural networks adds additional dimensions to how we evaluate the intensity or quality of an ELHS. Whether modularity provides fitness advantages or costs in nature remains to be determined.