A cross impact methodology for the assessment of US telecommunications system with application to fiber optics development, volume 2

The appendices for the cross impact methodology are presented. These include: user's guide, telecommunication events, cross impacts, projection of historical trends, and projection of trends in satellite communications

Ecodriving and Carbon Footprinting: Understanding How Public Education Can Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Use

Ecodriving is a collection of changes to driving behavior and vehicle maintenance designed to impact fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in existing vehicles. Because of its promise to improve fuel economy within the existing fleet, ecodriving has gained increased attention in North America. One strategy to improve ecodriving is through public education with information on how to ecodrive. This report provides a review and study of ecodriving from several angles. The report offers a literature review of previous work and programs in ecodriving across the world. In addition, researchers completed interviews with experts in the field of public relations and public message campaigns to ascertain best practices for public campaigns. Further, the study also completed a set of focus groups evaluating consumer response to a series of websites that displayed ecodriving information. Finally, researchers conducted a set of surveys, including a controlled stated-response study conducted with approximately 100 University of California, Berkeley faculty, staff, and students, assessing the effectiveness of static ecodriving web-based information as well as an intercept clipboard survey in the San Francisco Bay Area. The stated-response study consisted of a comparison of the experimental and control groups. It found that exposure to ecodriving information influenced people’s driving behavior and some maintenance practices. The experimental group’s distributional shift was statistically significant, particularly for key practices including: lower highway cruising speed, driving behavior adjustment, and proper tire inflation. Within the experimental group (N = 51), fewer respondents significantly changed their maintenance practices (16%) than the majority that altered some driving practices (71%). This suggests intentionally altering driving behavior is easier than planning better maintenance practices. While it was evident that not everyone modifies their behavior as a result of reviewing the ecodriving website, even small shifts in behavior due to inexpensive information dissemination could be deemed cost effective in reducing fuel consumption and emissions

The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s

In the late 1960s, video recorders became portable, leaving the television studio for the art gallery, the psychiatric hospital, and the streets. The technology of recording moving images on magnetic tape, previously of use only to broadcasters, became a tool for artistic expression, psychological experimentation, and political revolution. Video became portable not only materially but also culturally; it could be carried by an individual, but it could also be carried into institutions from the RAND Corporation to the Black Panther Party, from psychiatrists’ offices to art galleries, and from prisons to state-funded media access centers. Between 1967 and 1973, American videographers across many of these institutional contexts participated in a common discourse, sharing not only practical knowledge about the uses and maintenance of video equipment, but visions of its social significance, psychological effects, and utopian future. For many, video was a technology which would bring about a new kind of awareness, the communal consiousness that—influenced by the evolutionary philosophy of Henri Bergson—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the noosphere and Marshall McLuhan as the global village. Experimental videographers across several fields were also influenced by the psychedelic research of the 1950s and early 1960s, by the development of cybernetics as a science of both social systems and interactions between humans and machines, by anthropology and humanistic psychology, and by revolutionary political movements in the United States and around the world

An Ecological Framework to Assess Sustainability Impacts for an Evolving Consumer Electronic Product System

Consumer electronics have revolutionized the manner in which we work, read, and entertain ourselves. However, this transformation comes at a high cost, with significant energy input and emissions releases across all stages of the electronic product life cycle. The limited success of per product efficiency improvements, often formulated in the field of industrial ecology, does not address the electronic product system as a whole because escalating consumption may actually offset any individual impact reductions. Additionally, existing industrial ecology models fail to effectively capture energy, material, and waste flows associated with real consumption patterns, as consumers purchase, use, and discard a group of interrelated devices such as desktops, laptops, printers, mobile phones, and digital cameras. To address this challenge, this dissertation develops and applies novel industrial ecology methodologies to more effectively characterize changes to rapidly evolving and interrelated product systems. Notably, these approaches borrow heavily from underutilized biological ecology concepts from community ecology and optimal foraging theory, but adapted for use as applied to a complex product system like consumer electronics. These approaches can lead to more effective design, production, green purchasing decisions, and end of life practices and policies, while at the same time expand industrial ecology\u27s traditional focus on the ecosystem metaphor and ‘per product’ approaches and strengthen its connection to the source science: biological ecological roots

Social Television Viewing with Second Screen Platforms: Antecedents and Consequences

This study investigates the causal relationship between antecedents and consequences of social television viewing combining the television screen and concurrent use of a mobile, “second screen” media platform. The results indicate that social television viewing is a complex process driven by the viewers’ program affinity, motives, interpersonal interaction, and the perceived media characteristics of alternative platforms. The social television viewing behavior also has a positive influence on loyalty to television programs, time-shifted viewing, and product purchase intention. The implications of these findings and recommendations for future research are discussed

Image data processing system requirements study. Volume 1: Analysis

Digital image processing, image recorders, high-density digital data recorders, and data system element processing for use in an Earth Resources Survey image data processing system are studied. Loading to various ERS systems is also estimated by simulation

The times they are a-changin’

Dem wachsenden Energieverbrauch von Haushalten werden technologischen Neuheiten als Lösung entgegen gehalten. Allerdings sind weder deren Auswirkungen auf das Verhalten der Menschen noch auf die Umwelt klar. Diese Diplomarbeit hat es sich daher zum Ziel gesetzt, ausgehend von einer Diskussion über KonsumentInnenverhalten und Rebound Effekte, Veränderungen im Energieverbrauch von Haushalten zu untersuchen. Hierfür wurde eine die Veränderungen in der Zeit ins Zentrum stellende, auf der Analyse von Aktivitäten basierende Methode angewandt. Zeitallokationen werden hierbei als ein Weg gesehen, Verhaltensmuster zu beschreiben und ihre Veränderungen, beispielsweise durch die Einführung einer neuen Technologie, abzubilden. Im Rahmen dieser Diplomarbeit wurde der Einfluss des Personal Computers (PC) auf UK-Haushalte in den Jahren von 1999 bis 2001 untersucht. Umweltdaten und Zeitverwendungsstatistiken wurden verknüpft, um die Unterschiede zwischen einer Gruppe von Menschen, die einen PC in den Haushalt neu integrieren, und einer Kontrollgruppe zu analysieren. Hierdurch konnten einerseits die Substitutionseffekte zwischen einzelnen Aktivitäten, sowie andererseits die Auswirkungen auf den Energieverbrauch beschrieben und der Einfluss neuer Technologien herausgearbeitet werden. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass sich die Einführung eines PCs positiv auf die Energieintensitäten auswirkt, da Aktivitäten mit niedriger und mittlerer Energieintensität Aktivitäten mit hoher Intensität ersetzen und den Energieverbrauch dadurch verringern. Die Ergebnisse sind allerdings nicht allgemein gültig, da sich zwischen verschiedenen Subgruppen unterschiedliche Bilder ergeben.Technological innovation is promoted as one way to cope with increasing energy consumption in the household sector. The behavioral and environmental consequences caused by the introduction of new technological devices in the household are, however, unclear at best. Starting from a discussion on consumer behavior and rebound effects, the purpose of this study was to analyze changes in households‘ energy consumption by adopting a temporal, activity based method. Time use patterns are seen as a way to describe behavioral patterns, opening up the possibility to model changes happening after the adoption of new technology as changing time use. The study analyzed the impact of the personal computer on UK households in the period 1999 to 2001. Combining environmental data with statistics on time use, it was possible to model short term changes in time use patterns comparing a group of pc adopters and a group not adopting a personal computer. This allowed for an analysis of substitution effects between different household activities as well as the consequences on energy consumption, focusing on the possible influences triggered by the new technology. The results indicates that the adoption of a personal computer has a beneficial environmental effect as low and middle intensity activities are substitutes for high-intensity activities, resulting in a decreasing energy demand. However the results are inconclusive as further analysis distinguishing between different subgroups (age, gender, and household size) seems to suggest different trends

Historical review of Sony's innovations and future steps

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).This thesis reviews Sony's successes and failures in product innovations from the 1950s into the 2000s. It analyzes key success factors in Sony's significant sales and profit growth in each decade. Sony's first business success-the transistor radio and TV business in the 1950s and 1960s-was based on a process that combined new technologies to improve affordability and create new markets. During the video product development of the 1970s, Sony created three core competences: a knowledge-sharing culture, a knowledge management system for tuning technology, and a "waterfall" strategy, which increased market value and maximized opportunities for Sony and its partners. As a result, Sony became competitive in new businesses and technology idea generation, resource utilization, and cost reduction and premium pricing. This contributed to rapid revenue and profit growth during the 1970s and the 1980s. The turning point was the 1990s when Sony's knowledge-sharing culture disintegrated, and the R&D organization structure became a divisional self-supporting system. As a result, Sony lost its key advantages and subsequently delayed development of its core hardware and PC software-the keys to maintaining competitive advantage in the digital consumer electronics industry. Thus, from the mid-1990s, Sony began to lose market share even in areas where it had held a dominant position since the 1980s. By analyzing these successes and failures, I determined six key factors of success: (1) value capturing (cost) advantage, (2) strong leadership, (3) strong technology advantage, (4) efficient use of HR, internal/external know-how, (5) a rich flow of business/ technology ideas, and (6) incentives for suppliers. These factors meant the difference between success and failure, and they are now what Sony should focus on in order to succeed in the future. Finally, I propose two solutions that will enable Sony to fulfill the six success factors and regain its knowledge-sharing culture. These solutions are: (1) unification of the microprocessor platform, and (2) development of an open application aggregation platform. Both are practical and strong solutions, which Sony should aggressively adopt in order to revive its corporate culture and R&D structure of the Golden Decades.by Masanori Hachiya.M.B.A