Effects of Clean Air Act on Patenting Activities in Chemical Industry: Learning from Past Experiences

The chemical industry provides essential goods we use in our daily lives and key ingredients for many diverse industries. On the other hand, their production and use require serious attention while they may be seriously harmful to local air quality. The Clean Air Act (CAA) and its subsequent amendments regulate the emissions of hazardous air pollutants to protect public health and welfare in the U.S.A. since 1970. This study aimed to assess the impact of CAA on the rate of patenting in the chemical industry. With this in mind, basic chemical utility patents were analyzed to detect the effects of CAA on the patenting activities. Subsequent to the fitting of the ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) model (producing the least square of errors), a significant outlier was detected with the Dixon’s r22 Ratio Test. This outlier was the number of patents granted in 1972. Contextual queries in the text of those patent documents have shown that there was a considerable increase in the patents of chemistry which takes the sustainability relevant terms (air, emission, pollution, etc.) into consideration. It was concluded that companies in the chemistry industry adapted themselves very rapidly to the changes and CAA was an important incentive to create novel technologies

Enhancing technology clustering through heuristics by using patent counts

International Patent Classification (IPC) system is a hierarchical classification structure used essentially to classify and explore patents along with the technical fields which they are concerned with. Therefore, corresponding number of patents for a certain IPC, can serve as an indicator of technical developments in the relevant area. These numbers can also form a basis for investigating state of the art for a particular field of technology. This paper proposes an approach for clustering of patents for those of the technologies listed by IPC via the number of patent counts. A set of n real numbers indicating the patent counts for different technologies is partitioned into k clusters such that the sum of the squared deviations from the mean-value within each cluster is minimized. With this purpose in mind, two different heuristics have been considered for clustering since complete enumeration would take considerable solution time. The first heuristic is specifically proposed for this study and the second one is Great Deluge Algorithm (GDA) which has been extensively used for solving complicated problems. The proposed heuristics are coded in visual basic (VB) 6.0 and a user interface is developed for the program. The developed program attempts to find the appropriate k value in order to make the best possible clustering. As an application of the proposed clustering approach, patent data that is retrieved from web site of Turkish Patent Institute (TPI) has been used for clustering technologies. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Effects of new payment regulations on mobile phone diffusion in TURKEY

Technology Diffusion (TD) investigates how, why and to what extent a new technology has spread within a social system. Some innovations diffuse in a social system successfully, but some of them fail. The explanation to the question &ldquo;Why does an innovation diffuse successfully?&rdquo; depends on very different factors such as the complexity, simplicity, and compatibility, etc. of the new technology as defined in the diffusion literature. The purchasing power of an individual is also another important factor in the diffusion of an innovation. Many different diffusion models have been developed to model the adoption process of an innovation. Generally, cumulative adoption of a new technology is called an S curve; this starts slowly, then speeds up and reaches saturation after a period of time. Some interventions such as public regulations relating to the diffusion can speed up the process or affect it even though an innovation is at the saturation phase. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of the payment regulations which were invoked on February 1, 2014 in TURKEY on the diffusion process. The Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency of TURKEY rescinded installment payments for mobile phone purchase with this legal arrangement. For this purpose, in this study the mobile phone diffusion process in TURKEY is modeled by using Gompertz and Logistic curves and the effects of these new regulations on the diffusion process is analyzed.</p

Industrial applications of type-2 fuzzy sets and systems: A concise review

Data, as being the vital input of system modelling, contain dissimilar level of imprecision that necessitates different modelling approaches for proper analysis of the systems. Numbers, words and perceptions are the forms of data that has varying levels of imprecision. Existing approaches in the literature indicate that, computation of different data forms are closely linked with the level of imprecision, which the data already have. Traditional mathematical modelling techniques have been used to compute the numbers that have the least imprecision. Type-1 fuzzy sets have been used for words and type-2 fuzzy sets have been employed for perceptions where the level of imprecision is relatively high. However, in many cases it has not been easy to decide whether a solution requires a traditional approach, i.e., type-1 fuzzy approach or type-2 fuzzy approach. It has been a difficult matter to decide what types of problems really require modelling and solution either with type-1 or type-2 fuzzy approach. It is certain that, without properly distinguishing differences between the two approaches, application of type-1 and type-2 fuzzy sets and systems would probably fail to develop robust and reliable solutions for the problems of industry. In this respect, a review of the industrial applications of type-2 fuzzy sets, which are relatively novel to model imprecision has been considered in this work. The fundamental focus of the work has been based on the basic reasons of the need for type-2 fuzzy sets for the existing studies. With this purpose in mind, type-2 fuzzy sets articles have been selected from the literature using the online databases of ISI-Web of Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Informaworld, Engineering Village, Emerald and IEEE Xplore. Both the terms "type-2 fuzzy" and "application" have been searched as the main keywords in the topics of the studies to retrieve the relevant works. The analysis on the industrial applications of type-2 fuzzy sets/systems (FSs) in different topics allowed us to summarize the existing research areas and therefore it is expected be useful to prioritize future research topics. This review shows that there are still many opportunities for application of type-2 FSs for several different problem domains. Shortcomings of type-1 FSs can also be considered as an opportunity for the application of type-2 FSs in order to provide a better solution approach for industrial problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved