This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the geographical labour mobility of employees in Sweden. The analysis employs a difference-indifference (DiD) approach to compare the mobility patterns of employees in treated municipalities with higher COVID-19 infectious rates to those in controlled municipalities with lower infectious rates. The study utilizes two primary datasets: population-wide micro-level data on COVID-19 infectious rates provided by the Swedish Public Health Agency, and aggregate data on employed commuters from Statistics Sweden. The latter dataset includes information on the residential and employed municipalities of individuals aged 16 and above between 2014 and 2021. The analysis focuses on the geographical mobility ratio which represents the proportion of employed commuters with different residential and employed municipalities. Regression models are used to estimate the treatment effect of COVID-19 on geographical labour mobility, controlling for municipality-specific factors and potential confounding variables. The results indicate that the treated municipalities with higher COVID-19 infectious rates exhibit significantly higher geographical labour mobility than the controlled municipalities. However, the main effect of time, representing the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, is found to be statistically non-significant, suggesting that the pandemic did not have a direct effect on workers' geographical mobility. Gender is found to have an equal influence on commuters' mobility patterns, irrespective of the impact of COVID-19. The study contributes to the understanding of labour mobility dynamics during a pandemic and highlights the importance of considering contextual factors such as infection rates and demographic characteristics. It also underscores the need for further research to explore the nuanced factors influencing remote work preferences among different demographic groups.

Emerging technologies and business models have contributed to the improvement of transportation systems and services towards a more sustainable approach to mobility. Shared mobility has become widespread as a viable solution to the increasing demand for transportation. Many cities worldwide have implemented shared mobility service and demonstrated that it could offer numerous environmental and operational benefits. However, their implementation in rural and suburban areas that feature lower population density and dispersed travel demand is not receiving the same attention. This research considers four suburban communities to evaluate the operation of a fleet of shared mobility as a potential substitute for the currently fix-route public transportation services. For each area, four scenarios were defined to consider different powertrain technologies. These scenarios include the Internal Combustion Engine, Battery Electric, and two Autonomous Electric Vehicles scenarios. While assessing the efficiency of the fleet composition system, four vehicle sizes are considered. Further, an optimized routing solution for serving the known travel demand is utilized to calculate the total cost of fleet ownership, which accounts for the purchase price, energy consumption, CO2, and driver labour costs. The results highlight potential benefits of adopting a fleet of shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles for the case studies and show approximately 67-68% and 69-70% savings compared to a shared fleet of conventional and Battery Electric vehicles, respectively, mainly due to the omission of the driver costs. In the absence of operationally safe Autonomous Electric Vehicles, the more conservative scenario of employing a fleet of shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles with the presence of safety attendants could result in 6-8% and 13-14% savings compared to a shared fleet of conventional and Battery Electric vehicles. Nevertheless, the results indicate low utilization rates for the fleet attributed to the inconsistency in demand throughout the day. The results provided in this research can inform policymakers and service providers and be used for further evaluations of such transportation services. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc) / In pursuit of more equitable, sustainable, and connected transportation services in rural and suburban areas, this research investigates the quantitative benefits and costs of operating a ride-sharing service for four suburban areas located in Hamilton, Ontario. The study considers and compares several options in vehicle sizes and technologies to provide a better ground of knowledge for service providers and policymakers.

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The problem of this study is to determine the extent of the mobility of pupil population in the East Van Zandt School, Fort Worth, Texas, and the relationship of this mobility to pupil achievement and progress.

Cloud Computing has started to become a viable option for computing centers and mobile consumers seeking to reduce cost overhead, power consumption, and increase software services available within their platform. For instance distributed memory constrained mobile devices can expand their ability to share real time data by utilizing virtual memory located within the cloud. Cloud memory services can be configured to restrict read and write access to the shared memory pool on a partner by partner basis. Utilization of such resources in turn reduces hardware requirements on mobile devices while lessening power consumption for each physical resource. Within the Cloud Computing paradigm, computing resources are provisioned to consumers on demand and guaranteed through service level agreements. Although the idea of a computing utility is not new, its realization has come to pass as researchers and corporate companies embark on a journey of implementing highly scalable cloud environments. As new solutions and architectures are proposed, additional use cases and consumer concerns have been revealed. These issues range from consumer security, adequate service level agreements and vendor interoperability, to cloud technology standardizations. Further, the current state of the art does not adequately address these needs for mobile consumers, where services need to be guaranteed even as consumers dynamically change locations. Due to the rapid adoption of virtualization stacks and the dramatic increase of mobile computing devices, cloud providers must be able to handle logical and physical mobility of consumers. As consumers move throughout geographical regions, there exists the probability that a consumer’s new locale may hinder a producer’s ability to uphold service level agreements. This inability is due to the fact that a producer may not have physical resources located relatively close to a mobile consumer’s new locale. As a consequence, producers must either continue to provide degraded resource consumption or migrate workloads to third party producers in order to ensure service level agreements are maintained. The goal of this report is to research existing architectures that provide the ability to adequately uphold service level agreements as mobile consumers move from locale to locale. Further we propose an architecture that can be implemented along with existing solutions in order to ensure consumers receive adequate service levels regardless of locality. We believe this architecture will lead to increased cloud interoperability and decreased consumer to producer platform coupling. / text

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The selectivity and sensitivity of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) to explosives was first demonstrated by Karasek in 1974.1 Airport security has always been a concern in the United States, especially since September 11th, 2001, and as a result IMS is commonly used to screen airline passengers and their luggage at all major airports. Portable IMS systems are now widely available for a variety of applications, but as the overall size of the IMS instrumentation decreases, the sensitivity typically decreases as well. A new ion detector read out technology, a capacitive trans-impedance amplifier (CTIA), coupled to a traditional Faraday plate has shown increased sensitivity over a Faraday plate read by a conventional current to voltage converter when used in mass spectrometry. Sandia National Laboratories sponsored a project to determine whether the CTIA technology could be coupled to an IMS, and to determine the potential increase in sensitivity that could be provided to a miniature IMS equipped with the new read out technology.Sandia first provided a full size IMS, a Phemto-Chem PCP-110, which was modified to support the first generation of CTIA (CTIA1). The CTIA1 was coupled to the IMS and was successfully used to detect explosives. Next, Sandia provided miniature IMS drift tubes, but incompatibilities necessitated the design of new miniature systems. At first, only the drift tube itself was redesigned, but eventually a complete miniature IMS, including the ionizer, circuitry, and read out, was designed and built. During the design phase a new ion-beam shutter capable of increased resolution was also implemented. The second generation of CTIA was coupled to a custom drift tube and the system demonstrated increased resolution and drastically increased sensitivity to the common explosives TNT and RDX when compared to the sensitivity of the system provided by Sandia. A custom miniature drift tube coupled to a CTIA will be placed into the peripheral equipment for Sandia's MicroHound II instrumentation to provide a portable IMS with sensitivity equal to or better than bench top IMS systems.

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