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Municipal Consolidation and Organizational Realities: A Case from New York City
Get PDFConsolidation in the public sector has always been conceptualized as a tool for enhancing service provision and fiscal responsibility. The evidence is dubious in both front. Using self-administered questionnaire and follow-up interviews, this study attempts to explain why the merger of two NYC agencies (DJJ into ACS) is incomplete after six years based on employees’ perception. The paper contends that a well-designed and carefully-negotiated merger can lead to harmony while meeting the intended goals of the new organization. The study concludes that because of insufficient efforts in the three phases of merger (pre-merger, during and post-merger), employees were oblivious to the agency’s new mission and confused by contradicting policies
Assessing determinants of continuance intention towards personal cloud services: Extending utaut2 with technology readiness
Get PDFIn addition to the rapid development of global information and communications technology (ICT) and the Internet, recent rapid growth in cloud computing technology represents another important trend. Individual continuance intention towards information technology is a critical area in which information systems research can be performed. This study aims to develop an integrated model designed to explain and predict an individual’s continuance intention towards personal cloud services based on the concepts of technology readiness (TR) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2), moderated by gender, age, and experience of personal cloud services. The key results of the partial least square test largely support the proposed model’s validity and the significant impact of effort expectancy, social influence, hedonic motivation, price value, habit, and technology readiness on continuance intention towards personal cloud services. In addition to providing symmetric theoretical support with the proposed model and transforming the individual characteristics of TR into UTAUT2, this study could be used to enhance and analyze users’ adoption of personal cloud services and also increase the symmetry of the model’s explanation and prediction. The findings from this research contribute to providing practical implications and academic resources as well as improving our understanding of personal cloud service applica-tions
Signal timing and geometric design at contraflow left-turn lane intersections
Get PDFAs a type of innovative intersection, Contraflow left-turn lane (CLL) intersection, has been increasingly implemented at the signalized intersections for increasing the leftturn capacity. This study developed a systematic method for determining the length of CLL and the signal timing plan for implementing CLL at signalized intersections. At first, the signal timing and geometric design requirements in the implementation of CLL were analyzed. Then, these requirements were thoroughly considered in the development of the proposed method. A case study was conducted for evaluating the operational benefits of redesigning a real-world CLL intersection using the recommended signal timing plan and CLL lengths. The results of the case study show that the redesigned CLL intersection outperforms the existing CLL intersection in terms of the average traffic delay, average vehicle travel time, and average queue length, and the CLL intersection can achieve its best performance at the recommended CLL lengths. These results indicate that the proposed method can provide useful guidelines to traffic engineers in the implementation of this innovative intersection design
The Impact of Air Pollution on Housing Prices.
Get PDFAir pollution has been considered as an influential environmental factor affecting both local government policies and the general public’s decisions on housing within large metropolitan areas. In the past few decades, the United States achieved excellent results on a large scale. However, in some major industrial metropolitan areas, air pollution still stays at relatively high levels. In related environmental studies, environmental justice is often emphasized to eliminate or mitigate social imbalance among urban communities. However, fewer studies have adopted quantitative methods to assess the effectiveness of existing environmental policies. Taking the Houston region as an empirical case, this study examines the impact of air pollution on local housing prices and racial distributions, as well as the impact of regional environmental protection policies on local housing prices. This study adopts the Hedonic price model and employs housing prices in the Houston area to quantify the impact of urban ozone pollution on local communities and populations, as well as to test the responses of housing prices to governmental environmental policies. First, it finds that housing prices in Harris County are negatively correlated with house age, and positively correlated with variables such as floor area, school district quality, transportation accessibility, and household incomes, which are consistent with the general principles of urban economics. Second, accessibility analysis shows that housing prices are inversely related to the urban centers, which reflects the spatial pattern of urban development in the United States. In addition, this study finds that air pollution has an unbalanced impact on the urban communities where ethnic minorities concentrate. Finally, the evaluation of the environmental standards released by the EPA in three different years (1997, 2008, and 2015) shows that the environmental policies have two major impacts. First, the policies have lagged effects on housing prices; second, the implementation of the new environmental policies, in general, there has significant positive effects on local housing prices. This study explores the relationship between air pollution and the housing market in the Houston area, and in-depth discusses the effectiveness of local environmental policies
Freeman Honors Newsletter, Fall 2021 Issue
Get PDFFall 2021 Newsletterhttps://digitalscholarship.tsu.edu/freeman_honors/1005/thumbnail.jp
Effects of vehicle load on emissions of heavy-duty diesel trucks: A study based on real-world data
No full textVehicle loads have significant impacts on the emissions of heavy-duty trucks, even in the same traffic conditions. Few studies exist covering the differences in emissions of diesel semi-trailer towing trucks (DSTTTs) with different loads, although these vehicles have a wide load range. In this context, the operating modes and emission rates of DSTTTs were analyzed under varying loads scenarios to understand the effect of vehicle loads on emission factors. First, second-by-second field speed data and emission data of DSTTTs with different loads were collected. Then, the methods for calculating the scaled tractive power (STP) and the emissions model for DSTTTs were proposed to evaluate the effect of different loading scenarios. The STP distributions, emission rate distributions, and emission factor characteristics of different loaded trucks were analyzed and compared. The results indicated that the STP distributions of DSTTTs that under the unloaded state were more narrow than those under fully loaded or overloaded conditions. The emission rates of carbon diox-ide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and total hydrocarbon (THC) for DSTTTs under a fully loaded state were significantly higher than those under an unloaded state. However, due to the influence of exhaust temperature, the emission rates of nitrogen oxides (NOx) among fully loaded trucks were lower than those under the unloaded state when STP bin was above 4 kW/ton. The emission factors of CO2, CO, THC, and NOx for fully loaded trucks demonstrated the largest increases at low-speed intervals (0–30 km/h), which rose by 96.2%, 47.9%, 27.8%, and 65.2%, respectively
Surviving Interlocutory Appeals: Trial Lawyer Edition
Get PDFThis presentation provides an overview of Supreme Court caselaw regarding qualified immunity and government officials’ right to interlocutory appeal from denials of qualified immunity, and provides a brief discussion of ways trial lawyers can overcome interlocutory appeals to provide their injured plaintiffs with an opportunity to be heard and vindicated at trial by a jury
Factors influencing physicians’ continuous blogging: A survey
Get PDFBackground: Health information can be more easily transmitted and diffused through the Internet, but questionable online health information often misinforms patients. Physicians have a duty to inform patients how to achieve positive health outcomes. Many physicians often write blogs to provide patients with the right health information. However, most articles available on this sub-ject only describe the blog phenomena without providing a theoretical background and an empirical analysis of doctors using blogs. Methods: This study based on social cognitive theory (SCT) explores the factors influencing physicians’ intention of continuously blogging. A total of 887 physician blog-gers were invited to participate in an online survey and 128 valid responses were received. Results: The SCT was proven to be useful in explaining 36.8% of the variation in physicians’ continuous intention to blog. Conclusions: We provide references for platform developers with different strategies to motivate doctors to blog, and the implications and limitations of this study are discussed
Impacts of thermal environments on health risk: A case study of harris county, texas
Get PDFThe loss of green spaces in urbanized areas has triggered a potential thermal risk in the urban environment. While the existing literature has investigated the direct relationship between urban temperatures and health risks, little is known about causal relationships among key components of urban sustainability and health risks, through a pathway involving urban temperature. This study examined the multiple connections between urbanized land use, urban greenery, urban temperatures and health risks in Harris County, Texas. The census tract-level health data from the 500 Cities Project (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is used for analysis. Structural equation model analyses showed that the urban temperature played a mediating role in associations between urbanized land use, urban greenery and health risk. Urban vegetation is associated with a decrease in health risks, while urban land use has associations with an increase in health risks. Findings suggest that proactive policies tailored to provide rich urban greenery in a neighborhood can alleviate urban land use effects on health risks
Plague vaccines: new developments in an ongoing search
Get PDFAbstract: As the reality of pandemic threats challenges humanity, exemplified during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 infections, the development of vaccines targeting these etiological agents of disease has become increasingly critical. Of paramount concern are novel and reemerging pathogens that could trigger such events, including the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis. Y. pestis is responsible for more human deaths than any other known pathogen and exists globally in endemic regions of the world, including the four corners region and Northern California in the USA. Recent cases have been scattered throughout the world, including China and the USA, with serious outbreaks in Madagascar during 2008, 2013–2014, and, most recently, 2017–2018. This review will focus on recent advances in plague vaccine development, a seemingly necessary endeavor, as there is no Food and Drug Administration–licensed vaccine available for human distribution in western nations, and that antibiotic-resistant strains are recovered clinically or intentionally developed. Progress and recent development involving subunit, live-attenuated, and nucleic acid–based plague vaccine candidates will be discussed in this review. Key points: • Plague vaccine development remains elusive yet critical. • DNA, animal, and live-attenuated vaccine candidates gain traction