Collaborating freight forwarding enterprises

The paper presents a model for the collaboration among independent freight forwarding entities. In the modern highly competitive transportation branch freight forwarders reduce their fulfillment costs by exploiting different execution modes (self-fulfillment and subcontraction). For self-fulfillment they use their own vehicles to execute the requests and for subcontracting they forward the orders to external freight carriers. Further enhancement of competitiveness can be achieved if the freight forwarders cooperate in coalitions in order to balance their request portfolios. Participation in such a coalition gains additional profit for the entire coalition and for each participant, therefore reinforcing the market position of the partners. The integrated operational transport problem as well as existing collaboration approaches are introduced. The presented model for collaboration is based on theoretical foundations in the field of combinatorial auctions and operational research game theory. It is applicable for coalitions of freight forwarders, especially for the collaboration of Profit Centres within large freight forwarding companies. The proposed theoretical approach and the presented collaboration model are suitable for a coalition of freight forwarding companies with nearly similar potential on the market.     

浅议朱提商业街规划设计中的文化传承

以朱提文化商业街为例，从地域文化分析、规划设计原则、人文环境设计、建筑造型四方面探讨了设计中的文化传承问题，以展示现代商业街街区的文脉，体现城市的文化。     

浅析建筑的生命力

时代赋予建筑可持续发展的概念,即有生命的建筑。建筑必须服从于总体空间环境,注重建筑的生态环境,重视建筑环境的物理条件,传承历史文脉,创作富有生命力的建筑作品。     

CONTEXTUALIZING LEARNING OBJECTS USING ONTOLOGIES

Educational research over the past three years has intensified such that the context of learning resources needs to be properly modeled. Many researchers have described and even mandated the use of ontologies in the research being conducted, yet the process of actually connecting one or more ontologies to a learning object has not been extensively discussed. This paper describes a practical model for associating multiple ontologies with learning objects while making full use of the IEEE LOM specification. The model categorizes these ontologies according to five major categories of context based on the most popular fields of study actively being pursued by the educational research community: Thematic context, Pedagogical context, Learner context, Organizational context, and Historical/Statistical context.     

Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer and Mobile Agent Security

The mobile agent is a fundamental building block of the mobile computing paradigm. In mobile agent security, oblivious transfer (OT) from a trusted party can be used to protect the agent’s privacy and the hosts’ privacy. In this paper, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer (VDOT), which allows us to replace a single trusted party with a group of threshold trusted servers. The design of VDOT uses a novel technique called consistency verification of encrypted secret shares. VDOT protects the privacy of both the sender and the receiver against malicious attacks of the servers. We also show the design of a system to apply VDOT to protect the privacy of mobile agents. Our design partitions an agent into the general portion and the security-sensitive portion. We also implement the key components of our system. As far as we know, this is the first effort to implement a system that protects the privacy of mobile agents. Our preliminary evaluation shows that protecting mobile agents not only is possible, but also can be implemented efficiently. This work was supported in part by the DoD University Research Initiative (URI) program administered by the Office of Naval Research under grant N00014-01-1-0795. Sheng Zhong was supported by ONR grant N00014-01-1-0795 and NSF grants ANI-0207399 and CCR-TC-0208972. Yang Richard Yang was supported in part by NSF grant ANI-0207399. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the DialM-POMC Joint Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing in 2003. Sheng Zhong received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in the year of 2004. He holds an assistant professor position at SUNY Buffalo and is currently on leave for postdoctoral research at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). His research interests, on the practical side, are security and incentives in data mining, databases, and wireless networks. On the theoretical side, he is interested in cryptography and game theory. Yang Richard Yang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. His research interests include computer networks, mobile computing, wireless networking, sensor networks, and network security. He leads the LAboratory of Networked Systems (LANS) at Yale. His recent awards include a Schlumberger Fellowship and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He received his B.E. degree from Tsinghua University (1993), and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (1998 and 2001).     

Implicit, long-term spatial contextual memory.

Learning and memory of novel spatial configurations aids behaviors such as visual search through an implicit process called contextual cuing (M. M. Chun & Y. Jiang, 1998). The present study provides rigorous tests of the implicit nature of contextual cuing. Experiment 1 used a recognition test that closely matched the learning task, confirming that memory traces of predictive spatial context were not accessible to conscious retrieval. Experiment 2 gave explicit instructions to encode visual context during learning, but learning was not improved and conscious memory remained undetectable. Experiment 3 illustrates that memory traces for spatial context may persist for at least 1 week, suggesting a long-term component of contextual cuing. These experiments indicate that the learning and memory of spatial context in the contextual cuing task are indeed implicit. The results have implications for understanding the neural substrate of spatial contextual learning, which may depend on an intact medial temporal lobe system that includes the hippocampus (M. M. Chun & E. A. Phelps, 1999). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modeling Effects of Rhythmic Context on Perceived Duration: A Comparison of Interval and Entrainment Approaches to Short-Interval Timing.

Relative merits of interval and entrainment conceptions of the internal clock were assessed within a common theoretical framework by 4 time-judgment experiments. The timing of tone onsets marking the beginning and ending of standard and comparison time intervals relative to a context rhythm were manipulated: onsets were on time, early, or late relative to the implied rhythm, and 2 distinct accuracy patterns emerged. A quadratic ending profile indicated best performance when the standard ended on time and worst performance when it was early or late, whereas a flat beginning profile (Experiments 1-3) indicated uniform performance for the 3 expectancy conditions. Only in Experiment 4, in which deviations from expected onset times were large, did significant effects of beginning times appear in time-discrimination thresholds and points of subjective equality. Findings are discussed in the context of theoretical assumptions about clock resetting, the representation of time, and independence of successive time intervals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

采用ZnO灭磁时阀片均流/均能的探讨

从ZnO电阻的非线性特性出发,对采用ZnO作为灭磁电阻时阀片的均流/均能进行理论论述,指出阀片均能性能的好坏主要依赖于阀片自身的特性;分析比较了ZnO阀片的不同选择方法对均流/均能的影响,指出阀片的均流/均能很大程度上取决于可供选择的阀片的库存量.该研究为发电机励磁系统的安全稳定运行提供了有力的保证.     

Distributed Context Retrieval and Consistency Control in Pervasive Computing

The challenge of saturating all phases of pervasive service provision with context-aware functionality lies in coping with the complexity of maintaining, retrieving and distributing context information. To efficiently represent and query context information a sophisticated modelling scheme should exist. To distribute and synchronise context knowledge in various context repositories across a multitude of administrative domains, streamlined mechanisms are needed. This paper elaborates on an innovative context management framework that has been designed to cope with free-text and location based context retrieval and efficient context consistency control. The proposed framework has been incorporated in a multi-functional pervasive services platform, while most of the mechanisms it employs have been empirically evaluated.