Attitudes towards old age and age of retirement across the world: findings from the future of retirement survey

The 21st century has been described as the first era in human history when the world will no longer be young and there will be drastic changes in many aspects of our lives including socio-demographics, financial and attitudes towards the old age and retirement. This talk will introduce briefly about the Global Ageing Survey (GLAS) 2004 and 2005 which is also popularly known as “The Future of Retirement”. These surveys provide us a unique data source collected in 21 countries and territories that allow researchers for better understanding the individual as well as societal changes as we age with regard to savings, retirement and healthcare. In 2004, approximately 10,000 people aged 18+ were surveyed in nine counties and one territory (Brazil, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, UK and USA). In 2005, the number was increased to twenty-one by adding Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey and South Korea). Moreover, an additional 6320 private sector employers was surveyed in 2005, some 300 in each country with a view to elucidating the attitudes of employers to issues relating to older workers. The paper aims to examine the attitudes towards the old age and retirement across the world and will indicate some policy implications

Generalized Classes of Distributions with Applications to Income and Lifetime Data

In this thesis, new classes of distributions namely: exponentiated Kumaraswamy-Dagum (EKD), Log-exponentiated Kumaraswamy-Dagum (Log-EKD), McDonald Log-logistic (McLLog) and Gamma-Dagum (GD) distributions are presented. A thorough and comprehensive investigation of these classes of distributions is conducted. Mathematical properties of these classes of distributions including series expansion, hazard and reverse hazard functions, moments, generating functions, mean and median deviations, Bonferroni and Lorenz curves, distribution of order statistics, moments of order statistics and entropies are presented. Estimation of parameters of these distributions via maximum likelihood technique, Fisher information and asymptotic confidence intervals are given. Maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of the exponentiated Kumaraswamy-Dagum distribution for censored data is constructed. Real data examples are presented to illustrate the usefulness and applicability of these proposed classes of distributions

Time-domain simulations of marine operations and their application to the offshore renewable energy sector

In the coming decades, offshore renewable energy is expected to play a crucial role in the decarbonisation of global electricity supply essential for limiting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to an acceptable level. The cost of utilising expensive vessels to install and maintain these marine energy devices represents a significant proportion of their life-cycle cost and one of the major barriers to their continued development. It is vitally important to estimate accurately these costs and attempt to reduce them as much as possible. This thesis investigates the use of time-domain simulations of marine operations to estimate the likely duration and manage the inherent risks of an offshore project. The development and application of an original time-domain simulation software are described through a case study that supported construction of a Round 3 offshore wind farm. Analysis completed in advance of the project identified the most suitable installation strategy with a potential reduction in indicative cost of up to $6m. Simulations performed during the project enabled the early identification of significant deviations from initial estimates; such as the mean observed duration of a critical activity midway through the project being approximately 30% lower than initially specified, eventually leading to a 10.8% reduction in the estimated project duration. Detailed analysis of the operational data after project completion identified the importance of the learning phenomenon associated with repetitions of identical operations and the accurate representation of random delays and stoppages. Implementing the learning factor had the effect of reducing mean project duration by 10%, while accounting for technical downtime increased this estimate by 15%. The thesis shows that time-domain simulations are well-suited to the development of optimal strategies for the execution of marine operations and the subsequent minimisation of the duration and cost of offshore projects

Attitudes towards old age and age of retirement across the world: findings from the future of retirement survey

The 21st century has been described as the first era in human history when the world will no longer be young and there will be drastic changes in many aspects of our lives including socio-demographics, financial and attitudes towards the old age and retirement. This talk will introduce briefly about the Global Ageing Survey (GLAS) 2004 and 2005 which is also popularly known as “The Future of Retirement”. These surveys provide us a unique data source collected in 21 countries and territories that allow researchers for better understanding the individual as well as societal changes as we age with regard to savings, retirement and healthcare. In 2004, approximately 10,000 people aged 18+ were surveyed in nine counties and one territory (Brazil, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, UK and USA). In 2005, the number was increased to twenty-one by adding Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey and South Korea). Moreover, an additional 6320 private sector employers was surveyed in 2005, some 300 in each country with a view to elucidating the attitudes of employers to issues relating to older workers. The paper aims to examine the attitudes towards the old age and retirement across the world and will indicate some policy implications

Endless Data

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), as well as micro teams, face an uphill task when delivering software to the Cloud. While rapid release methods such as Continuous Delivery can speed up the delivery cycle: software quality, application uptime and information management remain key concerns. This work looks at four aspects of software delivery: crowdsourced testing, Cloud outage modelling, collaborative chat discourse modelling, and collaborative chat discourse segmentation. For each aspect, we consider business related questions around how to improve software quality and gain more significant insights into collaborative data while respecting the rapid release paradigm

Augmenting Functional Adaptation: Does Obesity have a Systemic Effect on Bone Strength Properties in Humans?

This study considers the mechanical and neuroendocrine-metabolic effects of obesity on cortical bone and joint morphology throughout the human skeleton. Obesity has primarily been associated with changes in lower limb bone morphology, attributed to local mechanical responses; however, it is known that systemic metabolic shifts concomitant with obesity also influence bone turnover and cell signaling. Thus, the interaction of these mechanical and metabolic effects should be considered, rather than either factor in isolation. The presented research addresses this interaction by examining skeletal data obtained the William M. Bass Donated Collection (University of Tennessee), a modern collection with documentation representing obese and non-obese individuals. Much of the collection has also undergone x-ray computer tomographic (CT) scanning, providing the means to assess bone morphologies beyond the external surface. The scans of 114 individuals are used here to test the hypothesis that obese individuals have increased cortical bone strength properties throughout the skeleton due to both mechanical and systemic effects, while the linear joint dimensions remain unaffected. A total of 22 cross-sections from six skeletal elements (cranial vault, humerus, radius, femur, tibia, fibula), representing three mechanically disparate regions (cranial vault, upper limb, lower limb), and linear dimensions from three articulations (shoulder, hip, and knee) are examined for each individual. Results indicate that obese individuals exhibit larger cross-sectional geometric properties for the humerus, femur, tibia, and fibula relative to normal mass individuals, and the load bearing bones display the greatest magnitudes of difference. Furthermore, whole-diaphyses data indicate that variability in bone robusticity decreases along a proximal-to-distal gradient. Equivocal cranial vault results require further investigation, although the present study suggests that there are minute, if any, macroscopic differences in cranial vault properties between obese and normal mass individuals. Articular dimensions are found to be constrained relative to the diaphyseal cross-sectional measures. Both biomechanical and systemic stimuli are known to affect bone and adipose tissues in known capacities but are rarely examined together. The study presented here applies conclusions from the experimental literature to a human skeletal sample with known demographics, finding that both biomechanical and neuroendocrine-metabolic factors influence macroscopic bone morphology throughout the skeleton

Experimental investigation for characterizing and improving inlet designs in rotating detonation engines

Rotating detonation engines (RDEs) present great potential for significant improvement in efficiency for land based power generation systems, in addition to aircraft propulsion devices. They offer the advantage of a net pressure gain across the combustor, as well as high exhaust temperatures and less entropy production due to detonative combustion. These improvements provide direct correlation to improved overall efficiency and thermal efficiency of gas turbine engines. RDEs surpass their conventional combustor counterparts in terms of their geometric size and simpler mechanical design. Among many areas of much needed research to further the technology readiness level (TRL) of RDEs, the inlet design is paramount to the successful operation of a rotating detonation engine. The inlet is one of the central impetuses behind current RDE research.;The existing inlet designs for RDEs in the research community are not optimized for maximum performance, yet are mostly used to operate research combustors. They are shown to induce high pressure drop, anywhere from 50-90%, and provide insufficient mixing for the inlet reactants. They also provide poor interaction between channel pressure fluctuations and detonation propagations. For these reasons, novel inlet design concepts are devised and tested in this work. The primary goal of the work is to design an inlet that is well isolated from the combustion channel, and is conducive to short interruption times of its refueling capability due to shockwave passes. This will precede the loss reduction efforts to the inlet. A combustor from the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) serves as the baseline geometry for all testing conducted. A linear lab scale testing device, which is a scaled model of the full size cylindrical RDE to allow for lower flow rates and pressures to be used, has been developed for more simplified and rapid experimental testing of inlet concepts. Novel inlet geometries are designed and created using additive manufacturing techniques. Initial experiments are conducted on the baseline inlet and are used as comparison experimental results of new inlet designs. Geometric characteristics are leveraged for their acoustic and resonant properties in order to provide the highest backflow prevention. Experimental results for each design are presented and evaluated. High-speed Schlieren video is used to supplement the quantitative data reported, and is used to analyze the flow structures and interactions with detonation. Novel inlet concepts are presented that show capability to reduce the pressure influence of detonation by 1-2%, and improve the refueling time of the injectors. Improvements from the baseline inlet consist of improvements in backflow length by up to 60%, as well as reduction in recovery times from 20-30%