Radiation Effects in Materials

The study of radiation effects has developed as a major field of materials science from the beginning, approximately 70 years ago. Its rapid development has been driven by two strong influences. The properties of the crystal defects and the materials containing them may then be studied. The types of radiation that can alter structural materials consist of neutrons, ions, electrons, gamma rays or other electromagnetic waves with different wavelengths. All of these forms of radiation have the capability to displace atoms/molecules from their lattice sites, which is the fundamental process that drives the changes in all materials. The effect of irradiation on materials is fixed in the initial event in which an energetic projectile strikes a target. The book is distributed in four sections: Ionic Materials; Biomaterials; Polymeric Materials and Metallic Materials

Manager’s and citizen’s perspective of positive and negative risks for small probabilities

So far „risk‟ has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL, being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the event. The so called risk matrix is based on this definition. Also for favorable events one usually refers to the expected gain PG, being G the gain incurred as a consequence of the positive event. These “measures” are generally violated in practice. The case of insurances (on the side of losses, negative risk) and the case of lotteries (on the side of gains, positive risk) are the most obvious. In these cases a single person is available to pay a higher price than that stated by the mathematical expected value, according to (more or less theoretically justified) measures. The higher the risk, the higher the unfair accepted price. The definition of risk as expected value is justified in a long term “manager‟s” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen‟s perspective to the definition of risk

Privatisation, Restructuring and Regulation: Electricity Supply Industry in Thailand

After the 1997 financial crisis electricity supply industry (ESI) restructuring and privatisation of state owned enterprises (SOEs) in this industry were included in the Master Plan for State Enterprise Sector Reform. Considering the extent of debate over privatisation, restructuring and regulation of the ESI in Thailand in recent years there was a surprising lack of rigorous economic analyses and studies. This thesis aims to fill that gap. Part I of this thesis highlights the economic and political background material on: the SOE sector; reform and privatisation of SOEs; SOEs, restructuring and regulation in the ESI in Thailand. Then, in Part II, the theoretical and empirical literature on privatisation, natural monopoly and economic regulation along with regulation in practice, is drawn upon to create framework for analyses in Part III. In addition, characteristics of developing countries are discussed to explore an appropriate choice of regulatory regimes in Thailand. In Part III analyses of regulation and privatisation in ESI in Thailand are presented. Regulatory, efficiency and fiscal issues are examined. The major finding from the regulatory analysis is that, due to poor regulatory capacity, a specialised, separated and centralised form of regulatory body for ESI is recommended for Thailand. A high powered incentive regulatory regime, in the form of a revenue cap, is recommended for electricity transmission and distribution. In addition, this analysis demonstrates that the adoption of regulatory finance from developed countries with well developed capital and equity markets needs some modifications to fit with Thailand, which is characterised by poor accounting and auditing systems and weakly functioning capital and equity markets. The problem of lack of data and asymmetric information faced by the regulator in Thailand is more severe than in developed countries. Then this thesis examines the empirical analyses for the two widely claimed justifications for privatisation: efficiency improvement and fiscal benefit. In the efficiency analysis, measures of the technical efficiency of the electricity generation sector in Thailand are estimated by employing a comparative application of Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis approaches. Results show that the state owned, electricity generating company in Thailand is on the efficiency frontier, meaning that the expected efficiency improvement after it privatisation is unlikely to happen. Then a fiscal analysis is undertaken to evaluate fiscal net benefits of full privatisation in form of asset sales of all SOEs in ESI. This analysis employed a bottom-up valuation approach, taking issues in the public sector into account, to assess fiscal costs (retention of SOEs) and benefits (sale of SOEs) of privatisation. Full privatisation of Thai state owned, electricity generation company results in fiscal net benefits only when ESI restructuring and deregulation of wholesale electricity market are well established. Under revenue cap regulation, full privatisation of the regulated distribution monopolies is fiscally feasible only when they are privatised at very high sale price or privatised firms achieve very high annual costs reductions and operate much more efficiently than under public ownership. In summary, ESI restructuring and adoption of a regulatory regime, form and finance from developed countries has to be undertaken with care and modified in light of Thai characteristics and economy. ESI reform requires proper sequencing. Building up regulatory capacity and designing effective and practical regulatory regimes are required to achieve effective regulation in Thailand. ESI has to be restructured to introduce competition, and regulation has to be in place to ensure fair competition and to regulate natural monopoly activities before privatisation should be considered. In view of the limited benefits of privatisation, alternative policies that can achieve the objectives of privatisation without transfer of ownership should be considered

A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data

Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods

A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium

When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices