Evolution of the Second-Story City: The Minneapolis Skyway System

This paper describes and explains the growth of the Minneapolis Skyway network. Accessibility is used as a major factor in understanding that growth (i.e. does the network connect to the location(s) with the highest accessibility, followed by the second highest, and so on). First, employment opportunities are used as the measure of activity and are based off of the square footage of buildings and/or ITE trip generation rates. Using information about the buildings located downtown for each year since the first skyway was built, the accessibilities of each of the connected and adjacent unconnected blocks were calculated for every time period the skyway system expanded. The purpose is to determine how often the expansion connected the block with the highest accessibility. The results show that though important, accessibility was rarely maximized, except in the early stages of development. A connect-choice logit model relating the probability of joining the network (in a given year) to accessibility and network size was employed. The results show accessibility does remain an important factor in predicting which links are connected. Physical difficulties in making connections may have played a role, as well as the potential for adverse economic impacts.Network growth, Transport economics, Incremental connection, Skyways, Minneapolis

Operating Costs for Trucks

This study estimates the operating costs for commercial vehicle operators in Minnesota. A survey of firms that undertake commercial truck road movements was performed. The average operating cost per kilometer for commercial vehicle operators was calculated from the survey responses. Results show that the translog and Cobb-Douglas models have approximately equal explanatory power in estimating the total cost from the data. The models also revealed the presence of nearly constant returns to scale, a finding consistent with earlier studies; an increase in output (total truckloads) of 1% increases total costs by 1.04%.

Exploring the potential of technology in enabling the inclusive co-production of space

The potential of emerging technology to address poly-urban issues is a growing focus on the agendas of cities worldwide. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding how and in whose interests it should be applied - should the aim be to establish 'smart cities' or to encourage 'smart citizens'? The 'bottom-up' approach advocates the latter and recognises the potential of technology to facilitate the prioritisation of issues and co-production of spaces. Particularly in a developing context where resources are severely limited, the ability to prioritise interventions to have maximum impact is exciting. However, these projects and the processes which enable them are under-researched. In this dissertation, a combination of Network Action Research and case study methods are used to guide the application of a selection of digital tools in combination with semi-structured and indepth interviews, surveys, and focus groups to a specific context. The products of this are insights regarding the processes which enable inclusive bottom-up smart city projects; the application of the Network Action Research method; and a context-specific resource of information to guide the future prioritisation of projects and planning in the study area. This dissertation explores the value of inclusive participation in planning, and the role that technology can play in facilitating this. However, it also uncovers the complex and non-linear nature of these projects, ultimately arguing that although technology is a valuable resource, it is not a catch-all. A hybridised approach to bottom-up smart city projects is crucial to their success

Alfred Haywood: A Biography

Alfred Haywood was a successful businessman and public servant who lived, worked, and served in the city of Savannah for almost half a century. Mr. Haywood not only made his mark in the local business world but also, through civic participation, and a significant contribution to the growth and development of the city. Born in Oxford, England, in the year 1817, the son of Ebenezer and Elizabeth Haywood, he married Mary Fagan, a native of Ireland, in Liverpool, February 2, 1834. They immigrated to New York soon thereafter. While living in New York with his father, two children were born to the couple, a daughter Margaret, in 1836, and a son Ebenezer, in 1837)https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sav-bios-lane/1095/thumbnail.jp

Dunmore\u27s new world: Political culture in the British Empire, 1745--1796

Despite his participation in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, eventually became royal governor of New York (1770-1771), Virginia (17711783), and the Bahama Islands (1787-1796). His life in the British Empire exposed him to an extraordinary range of political experience, including border disputes, land speculation, frontier warfare and diplomacy, sexual scandal, slave emancipation, naval combat, loyalist advocacy, Amerindian slavery, and trans-imperial filibusters, to say nothing of his proximity to the Haitian Revolution or his role in the defense of the British West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. Quick to break with convention on behalf of the system that ensured his privilege, Dunmore was an usually transgressive imperialist whose career can be used to explore the boundaries of what was possible in the political cultures of the Anglo-Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century.;Remarkably, Lord Dunmore has not been the subject of a book-length study in more than seventy years. With a few exceptions (the work of African American historians notable among them), modern scholars have dismissed him as a greedy incompetent. While challenging this characterization, the dissertation makes several arguments about the weakness of royal authority in pre-Revolutionary New York and Virginia, the prominent and problematic role of the land grant as a mechanism of political consent, the importance of Dunmore\u27s proclamation of emancipation, and the endurance of British ambition in North America after 1783. It seeks to make a methodological contribution as well. By positioning Dunmore as the epicenter of a web of interrelations, one reflected in a variety of historical texts and involving people at all levels of the imperial social structure, the dissertation suffuses a host of elements and actors within a single biographical narrative. This integrated approach can serve to counter the excessive compartmentalization that has marked some academic history in recent decades

Winged Words: an Interview with Claire Corbett by David Golding

Claire Corbett has had stories, essays, and journalism broadcast on Radio National and published in Picador New Writing, Rolling Stone, and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. She was born in Canada and moved to Australia at the age of nine. Claire studied film and writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, and crewed on films before becoming a policy advisor to the Premier in the NSW Cabinet Office. She worked on water and genetically modified organisms for the Environment Protection Authority and child and family health for NSW Health. She now teaches Popular Fiction at UTS, is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney, and lives with her husband and children in the Blue Mountains

The financial impact of ISO 9000 certification in the United States: an empirical analysis.

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue that the standard is too generic to cause performance improvement but can be seen as a signal of good management. In this paper, we track financial performance from 1987 to 1997 of all publicly traded ISO 9000 certified manufacturing firms in the United States with SIC codes 2000–3999, and test whether ISO 9000 certification leads to productivity improvements, market benefits, and improved financial performance. We employ event-study methods, matching each certified firm to a control group of one or more noncertified firms in the same industry with similar precertification size and/or return on assets. We find that firms’ decision to seek their first ISO 9000 certification was indeed followed by significant abnormal improvements in financial performance, though the exact timing and magnitude of this effect depend on the specification of the control group. Three years after certification, the certified firms do display strongly significant abnormal performance under all control-group specifications. The degree to which the precise results vary across control-group specifications indicates that event studies should always include extensive sensitivity analysis, for instance matching by size and performance separately and jointly, using both single firms and portfolios as controls.ISO 9000; Quality management; Standards; Financial; Empirical; Event study; Compustat;