The TRB Standing Technical Committee on Bicycle Transportation has been in existence for about 45 years, founded in 1974 as the Bicycling and Bicycles Committee. We had an early name change to the Committee on Bicycling and Bicycle Facilities shortly after our birth and became the Bicycle Transportation Committee in 1996. The committee's existence closely parallels the history of bicycle transportation research in the United States. Very little was done prior to the mid-1970s, when a surge of interest in...

The Alcohol and Other Drugs Committee's Centennial Paper to review what it has accomplished since its inception in the early 1970s, how it has evolved along with the field, and what challenges and opportunities it confronts going forward. To learn more about the history of impaired driving and the Standing Technical Committee on Alcohol, Other Drugs, and Transportation (ANB50), check out the Committee's Centennial Paper. As part of TRB's Centennial Celebration, the Technical Activities Council invited al...

Are you looking for specific phrases in transportation research? When submitting keywords or keyword phrases as part of any search in TRID , those words are now highlighted in yellow in both the results list and in individual records. You can turn this feature off in the Advanced Search Filters with the toggle just below the Keywords field.

The Effects of Left-Turn Traffic-Calming Treatments on Conflicts and Speeds in Washington, D.C. , released by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

The Trump administration has continued to weaken air pollution regulations despite warnings that long-term exposure to dirty air relates to higher COVID-19 death rates. Harvard researchers made the first statistical link between the two last month, just before the administration loosened some clean air regulations and failed to tighten others.

Are you looking for specific phrases in transportation research? When submitting keywords or keyword phrases as part of any search in TRID , those words are now highlighted in yellow in both the results list and in individual records. You can turn this feature off in the Advanced Search Filters with the toggle just below the Keywords field.

In 2017, when leadership at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) decided to build a new International Arrivals Facility (IAF), they knew they had to leverage airport resources in a cost-effective manner to enhance customer experience. At nearly 50 years old, the existing facility could no longer accommodate Sea-Tac’s demand for international travel, which grew 107 percent from 2007 to 2017. The latest issue of the  TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's (ACRP) Impacts on Practice serie...

Use of Surface Treatments to Extend Pavement Life: A Case Study on US 301, Sussex County, Virginia , released by the Virginia Department of Transportation

Standing Technical Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure got its start as the Task Force on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Security tied directly in response to the Presidential Decision Directive 63, Critical Infrastructure Protection (PPD-63). Soon after the task force was established, as a way to bring awareness to this topic, TRB published a special edition of TR News (211): Transportation Security: Protecting the System from Attack and Theft (November-December 2000). The editio...

The needs of airports may vary depending on the types of operations typically conducted at the airport, as well as the type of weather common to the airport. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Syntheis 105: Airport Surface Weather Observation Options for General Aviation Airports aims to provide the operators of general aviation (GA) airports a comprehensive source of information about airport-based weather observation options so they may make informed decisions to support the specific o...

Season two will exclusively stream on Amazon Prime Video in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.

It sizzles on the grill. But does it fizzle in terms of nutrition? That's the question when it comes to the new burgers made of plant-based meat substitutes that are flying off grocery store shelves and restaurant tables.

Most nuclear data measurements are performed at accelerators large enough to occupy a geologic formation a kilometer wide. But a portable device that can reveal the composition of materials quickly on-site would greatly benefit cases such as in archaeology and nuclear arms treaty verification. Research published this week in AIP Advances used computational simulations to show that with the right geometric adjustments, it is possible to perform accurate neutron resonance transmission analysis in a device just 5 meters long.

Just when it seemed like robots couldn't get any cooler, Cornell University researchers have created a soft robot muscle that can regulate its temperature through sweating.

For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of attention paid to work going into developing vaccines that could prevent Covid-19 infection, and drugs that could treat it. In particular, there has been some excitement about new animal trial data for remdesivir, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences. Gilead's share price rose nearly 10% on the day the trial data were announced.
It will be some time yet before the safety and efficacy of remdesvir is established, if ever (it's worth noting that it was tried, unsuccessfully, as a treatment for Ebola). And since I started work on this post…

The problem: if you publish any document as PDF, in print, etc. and the text contains URLs, there is a chance that one day those URLs won't work anymore. There's nothing to do about that, it happens.

Luckily, this is a solved problem. The solution is to link to a stable and trustworthy website, that is, one that you maintain and host (of course, you're trustworthy!). Then in the document you link to that website, and the website redirects visitors to the actual location.

An example: my book contains a link to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/matthiasnoback/read-with-the-author. When I moved that repository to a new organization on GitHub, this link resulted in a 404 Page not found error. The proper URL is now https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author. Chris from Gitstore was able to save the day by setting up a redirect on their site, but I wanted to make sure this kind of problem would never be a problem for me again.

The ingredients for the solution:

• A domain name (I registered advwebapparch.com)
• A simple website that can redirect visitors to the actual locations

I wanted to hook this new website into my existing Docker-based setup which uses Traefik to forward traffic to the right container based on labels. It turns out, with a simple Nginx image and some custom setup we can easily set up a website that is able to redirecting visitors.

The Dockerfile for such an image:

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
COPY default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Where default.conf looks like this:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    index index.html;
    root /srv;

    error_page 404 /404.html;

    rewrite /repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author redirect;
}

This already works, and when I deploying the resulting image to the server that receives traffic for advwebapparch.com, a request for /repository will indeed redirect a visitor to https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author using a temporary redirect.

Generating the Nginx configuration from a text file

When I'm working on my book, I don't want to manually update a server configuration file every time I'm adding a URL. Instead, I'd like to work with a simple text file. Let's name this file forwards.txt:

/repository https://enjoy.gitstore.app/repositories/read-with-the-author/read-with-the-author
/blog https://matthiasnoback.nl

And then I want the Docker image build process to add rewrite rules automatically, So I wrote a little PHP script that does this runs during the build. Here's what the Dockerfile looks like. It uses a multi-stage build:

FROM php:7.4-alpine as php
# This will copy build.php from the build context to the image
COPY . .
# This will generate default.conf based on template.conf
RUN php build.php

FROM nginx:stable-alpine
# Copy the default.conf from the php image to the nginx image
COPY --from=php default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

Here's what happens inside the PHP script:

function insertRewritesInNginxConf(string $conf): string
{
    $rewrites = [];

    foreach (file('forwards.txt') as $line) {
        $line = trim($line);
        if (empty($line)) {
            continue;
        }

        $rewrites[] = '    ' . 'rewrite ' . $line . ' redirect;';
    }

    return str_replace(
        '%INSERT_URL_REWRITES_HERE%',
        implode("
", $rewrites),
        $conf
    );
}

/*
 * Generate the Nginx configuration which includes all the actual
 * redirect instructions
 */
file_put_contents(
    'default.conf',
    insertRewritesInNginxConf(file_get_contents('template.conf'))
);

We should add a bit of validation for the data from the forwards.txt file so we don't end up with a broken Nginx configuration, but otherwise, this works just fine.

Generating an html page which can be crawled for broken links

I don't want to manually check that all the links that are inside the "link registry" still work. Instead, I'd like to use Oh Dear for that, which does uptime monitoring and checks for broken links as well.

For this purpose I added another function to the PHP script, which, based

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1844 bytes)

Back when T-Mobile and Sprint were trying to gain regulatory approval for their $26 billion merger, executives repeatedly promised the deal would create jobs. Not just a few jobs, but oodles of jobs. Despite the fact that US telecom history indicates such deals almost always trigger mass layoffs, the media dutifully repeated T-Mobile and Sprint executive claims that the deal would create "more than 3,500 additional full-time U.S. employees in the first year and 11,000 more people by 2024."

About that.

Before the ink on the deal was even dry, T-Mobile began shutting down its Metro prepaid business and laying off impacted employees. When asked about the conflicting promises, T-Mobile refused to respond to press inquiries. Now that shutdown has accelerated, with estimates that roughly 6,000 employees at the T-Mobile subsidiary have been laid off as the freshly-merged company closes unwanted prepaid retailers. T-Mobile says the move, which has nothing to do with COVID-19, is just them "optimizing their retail footprint." Industry insiders aren't amused:

"Peter Adderton, the founder of Boost Mobile in Australia and in the U.S. who has been a vocal advocate for the Boost brand and for dealers since the merger was first proposed, figures the latest closures affect about 6,000 people. He cited one dealer who said he has to close 95 stores, some as early as May 1.

In their arguments leading up to the merger finally getting approved, executives at both T-Mobile and Sprint argued that it would not lead to the kind of job losses that many opponents were predicting. They pledged to create jobs, not cut them.

“The whole thing is exactly how we called it, and no one is calling them out. It’s so disingenuous,” Adderton told Fierce, adding that it’s not because of COVID-19. Many retailers in other industries are closing stores during the crisis but plan to reopen once it’s safe to do so."

None of this should be a surprise to anybody. Everybody from unions to Wall Street stock jocks had predicted the deal would trigger anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 layoffs over time as redundant support, retail, and middle management positions were eliminated. It's what always happens in major US telecom mergers. There is 40 years of very clear, hard data speaking to this point. Yet in a blog post last year (likely to be deleted by this time next year), T-Mobile CEO John Legere not only insisted layoffs would never happen, he effectively accused unions, experts, consumer groups, and a long line of economists of lying:

"This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter. That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact....These combined efforts will create nearly 5,600 new American customer care jobs by 2021. And New T-Mobile will employ 7,500+ more care professionals by 2024 than the standalone companies would have."

That was never going to happen. Less competition and revolving door, captured regulators and a broken court system means there's less than zero incentive for T-Mobile to do much of anything the company promised while it was wooing regulators. And of course such employment growth is even less likely to happen under a pandemic, which will provide "wonderful" cover for cuts that were going to happen anyway.

Having watched more telecom megadeals like this than I can count, what usually happens is the companies leave things generally alone for about a year to keep employees calm and make it seem like deal critics were being hyperbolic. Then, once the press and public is no longer paying attention (which never takes long), the hatchets come out and the downsizing begins. When the layoffs and reduced competition inevitably arrives, they're either ignored or blamed on something else. In this case, inevitably, COVID-19.

In a few years, the regulators who approved the deal will have moved on to think tank, legal or lobbying positions at the same companies they "regulated." The same press that over-hyped pre-merger promises won't follow back up, because there's no money in that kind of hindsight policy reporting or consumer advocacy. And executives like John Legere (who just quit T-Mobile after selling his $17.5 million NYC penthouse to Giorgio Armani) are dutifully rewarded, with the real world market and human cost of mindless merger mania quickly and intentionally forgotten.

The EARN IT Act is dangerous. It threatens speech on the internet and tech companies' ability to provide secure communications for their users. There may not be anything about encryption in the dry text of the bill, but the threat is there all the same. No one knows what "best practices" the law will demand from online services, but the bill's focus on child porn strongly suggests any platform that "allows" this information to be transmitted using encrypted communications will be targeted by the government.

Bill Barr and Chris Wray have made it clear encryption is the enemy. Both have advocated for encryption backdoors, even if they're both too cowardly to use that term. No one thinks the government and service providers shouldn't do all they can to prevent the sharing of child porn, but undermining encryption isn't the solution. It may shield some child porn producers and consumers from detection, but the government's efforts in this area show encryption hasn't posed much of a problem to investigators and prosecutors.

Encryption protects people who aren't criminals. As Runa Sundvik explains for TechCrunch, targeting encryption via the EARN IT Act also threatens some of the foremost beneficiaries of the First Amendment: journalists.

[T]echnology experts warn the bill not only fails to meet the challenge, it creates new problems of its own. My job is to enable journalists to do their work securely — to communicate with others, research sensitive stories and publish hard-hitting news. This bill introduces significant harm to journalists’ ability to protect their sources.

Strip communications platforms of their encryption and you make it that much easier to expose journalists' sources and snoop on their communications. This isn't an existential threat. It's an actual threat. The FBI has spied on journalists and several successive presidential administrations have made rooting out leakers a priority.

But it does more than harm journalists. It also harms the people they're trying to reach: readers. Encryption protects readers who visit news sites utilizing HTTPS. That's almost all of them at this point. This ensures their connection is shielded from people trying to snoop on their web activity. More importantly, it ensures the sites they reach are legit and the content originating from the journalists the site says it is.

If EARN IT becomes law, whistleblowers and other sources will see their secure options disappear. Tor, Signal, etc. will be considered nothing more than aiders and abettors of criminal activity. Anything secured by encryption will be treated as a virtual dead drop for criminal content.

Protecting children from exploitation is important. But the tradeoff legislators are demanding isn't actually a tradeoff. The American public will receive no net benefit from this tangential attack on encryption. Very often we're first informed about serious government misconduct by journalists. Destroying this outlet works out well for the government so often exposed as untrustworthy, but it does nothing for the governed.

Microsoft, Cisco, Google etc gang up to form Open RAN Policy Coalition

Some of America’s super-corps have remembered how the US became the dominant global technology force it is, and have vowed to use innovation over threats to counter Chinese dominance in 5G markets.…

Even Exchange’s marketing bod reckons tests of new Reply-All-stopper could be a career-defining moment

Microsoft may just have made Reply All storms a thing of the past, by adding a suitable blocker to Exchange in Office 365 environments.…

-Album Details-   Title: Death Stranding Original Score Publisher: Sony Classical Catalog Number: 19439727722 Release Date: March 13th, 2020 Ripped by: Razakin -Info- Soundtrack to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, score by Ludvig Forssell. Purchase Link(s) Amazon