Growth in e-commerce has led to increasing use of light goods vehicles for parcel deliveries in urban areas. This paper provides an insight into the reasons behind this growth and the resulting effort required to meet the exacting delivery services offered by e-retailers which often lead to poor vehicle utilisation in the last-mile operation, as well as the duplication of delivery services in urban centres as competitors vie for business. A case study investigating current parcel delivery operations in central London identified the scale of the challenge facing the last-mile parcel delivery driver, highlighting the importance of walking which can account for 62% of the total vehicle round time and 40% of the total round distance in the operations studied. The characteristics of these operations are in direct conflict with the urban infrastructure which is being increasingly redesigned in favour of walking, cycling and public transport, reducing the kerbside accessibility for last-mile operations. The paper highlights other pressures on last-mile operators associated with managing seasonal peaks in demand; reduced lead times between customers placing orders and deliveries being made; meeting delivery time windows; firsttime delivery failure rates and the need to manage high levels of product returns. It concludes by describing a range of initiatives that retailers and parcel carriers, sometimes in conjunction with city authorities, can implement to reduce the costs associated with last-mile delivery, without negatively impacting on customer service levels.

Bicycle sharing systems exist in hundreds of cities around the world, with the aim of providing a form of public transport with the associated health and environmental benefits of cycling without the burden of private ownership and maintenance. Five cities have provided research data on the journeys (start and end time and location) taking place in their bicycle sharing system. In this paper, we employ visualization, descriptive statistics and spatial and network analysis tools to explore system usage in these cities, using techniques to investigate features specific to the unique geographies of each, and uncovering similarities between different systems. Journey displacement analysis demonstrates similar journey distances across the cities sampled, and the (out)strength rank curve for the top 50 stands in each city displays a similar scaling law for each. Community detection in the derived network can identify local pockets of use, and spatial network corrections provide the opportunity for insight above and beyond proximity/popularity correlations predicted by simple spatial interaction models.

Big Data has begun to create significant impacts in urban and transport planning. This paper covers the explosion in data-driven research on cycling, most of which has occurred in the last ten years. We review the techniques, objectives and findings of a growing number of studies we have classified into three groups according to the nature of the data they are based on: GPS data (spatio-temporal data collected using the global positioning system (GPS)), live point data and journey data. We discuss the movement from small-scale GPS studies to the 'Big GPS' data sets held by fitness and leisure apps or specific cycling initiatives, the impact of Bike Share Programmes (BSP) on the availability of timely point data and the potential of historical journey data for trend analysis and pattern recognition. We conclude by pointing towards the possible new insights through combining these data sets with each other -and with more conventional health, socio-demographic or transport data.

In this paper, we present how mobile electroencephalography, or mobile EEG, is becoming a relevant tool of urban studies, including among others, spatial cognition, architecture, urban design and planning. Mobile EEG is a research methodology that requires tightly controlled experiments and complicated analytical tools, but it is increasingly used beyond the clinical and research context to monitor brain function and cognition in real world. It is used to unravel our understanding of the neural processes that enable spatial perception and cognition, while is also applied to the study of psychological transactions between people and the environment, for example to gauge the effects of urban or natural environments on the emotional state of pedestrians. In the near future, mobile EEG could be integrated in the research on cities as a tool to understand the cognitive foundations of urban movement, assess the psychological impact of environments on individuals, or target interventions to improve the quality of the urban environment. In this paper we review relevant research with mobile EEG, as well as the background and methodological issues arising in such projects.

There is increasing interest into how horizontal collaboration between parcel carriers might help alleviate problems associated with last-mile logistics in congested urban centres. Through a detailed examination of parcel logistics literature pertaining to collaboration, along with practical insights from carriers operating in the UK, this paper examines the challenges that will be faced in optimising multi-carrier, multi-drop collection and delivery schedules. We propose the concept of the 'Freight Traffic Controller' (FTC) who would be a trusted third-party, assigned to equitably manage the work allocation between collaborating carriers and the passage of vehicles over the last mile where joint benefits to the parties were achievable. Creating this FTC requires a combinatorial optimisation approach to evaluate the many combinations of hub locations, network configuration and vehicle/walking routing options in order to find the true value of each potential collaboration, whilst at the same time, considering the traffic, social and environmental impacts of these activities. Cooperative game theory is a way to investigate the formation of collaborations (or coalitions) and our analysis identifies a significant shortfall in current applications of this theory to last-mile parcel logistics. Specifically, we identify that application of theory to urban freight logistics has, thus far, failed to account for critical concerns including: i) the mismatch of vehicle parking locations relative to actual delivery addresses; ii) the combination of deliveries with collections, the latter often being received in real-time during the round; and iii) the variability in travel times and route options due to traffic and road network conditions. Allen, Bektas, Cherrett, Friday, McLeod, Piecyk, Piotrowska, Zaltz Austwick 3 INTRODUCTIONThe parcel distribution sector is a crowded and highly competitive marketplace characterised by low profit margins and a proliferation of operators, with carriers typically operating independently from each other, leading to poor vehicle utilisation rates and delivery rounds that overlap (1). With this duplication of effort, as 'everyone delivers everywhere', and the need to reduce CO 2 in urban centres, driven by EU legislation (2), there is a need to fundamentally reinvestigate the efficiency of 'customer-focused' last-mile city logistics operations. We make three contributions in this paper: firstly, we offer a detailed examination of the literature pertaining to collaboration in last-mile parcel logistics; secondly, using our survey along with practical insights from two carrier operations in the UK, we identify key challenges that will be faced in attempting to best optimise multi-carrier, multi-drop collection and delivery schedules whilst maintaining an equitable distribution of work between the parties in the collaboration; finally, we highlight the significant gap between current theory and practice in this regard and introduce the concept of the Freight Traffic Controller as a ...

Big changes to the way in which research funding is allocated to UK universities were brought about in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), overseen by the Higher Education Funding Council, England. Replacing the earlier Research Assessment Exercise, the purpose of the REF was to assess the quality and reach of research in UK universities–and allocate funding accordingly. For the first time, this included an assessment of research ‘impact’, accounting for 20% of the funding allocation. In this article we use a text mining technique to investigate the interpretations of impact put forward via impact case studies in the REF process. We find that institutions have developed a diverse interpretation of impact, ranging from commercial applications to public and cultural engagement activities. These interpretations of impact vary from discipline to discipline and between institutions, with more broad-based institutions depicting a greater variety of impacts. Comparing the interpretations with the score given by REF, we found no evidence of one particular interpretation being more highly rewarded than another. Importantly, we also found a positive correlation between impact score and [overall research] quality score, suggesting that impact is not being achieved at the expense of research excellence.

Maps are currently experiencing a paradigm shift from static representations to dynamic platforms that capture, visualize and analyse new data, bringing different possibilities for exploration and research. The first objective of this paper is to present a map that illustrates, for the first time, the real flow of casual cyclists and bike messengers in the city of Madrid. The second objective is to describe the development and results of the Madrid Cycle Track initiative, an online platform launched with the aim of collecting cycling routes and other information from volunteers. In the framework of this initiative, different online maps are presented and their functionalities described. Finally, a supplemental video visualizes the cyclist flow over the course of a day. ARTICLE HISTORY

Abstract.A novel method for rapidly detecting metastatic breast cancer within excised sentinel lymph node͑s͒ of the axilla is presented. Elastic scattering spectroscopy ͑ESS͒ is a point-contact technique that collects broadband optical spectra sensitive to absorption and scattering within the tissue. A statistical discrimination algorithm was generated from a training set of nearly 3000 clinical spectra and used to test clinical spectra collected from an independent set of nodes. Freshly excised nodes were bivalved and mounted under a fiber-optic plate. Stepper motors rasterscanned a fiber-optic probe over the plate to interrogate the node's cut surface, creating a 20ϫ 20 grid of spectra. These spectra were analyzed to create a map of cancer risk across the node surface. Rules were developed to convert these maps to a prediction for the presence of cancer in the node. Using these analyses, a leave-one-out crossvalidation to optimize discrimination parameters on 128 scanned nodes gave a sensitivity of 69% for detection of clinically relevant metastases ͑71% for macrometastases͒ and a specificity of 96%, comparable to literature results for touch imprint cytology, a standard technique for intraoperative diagnosis. ESS has the advantage of not requiring a pathologist to review the tissue sample.