722 research outputs found
Deregulating the Bus Industry.
In its Buses White Paper, the British Government sets out its proposals for abandoning quantitative control of entry to and provision of local bus services. The logic on which the proposals are based can be reduced to four propositions:-
(i) Deregulation will produce a competitive market.
(ii) Competition will substantially reduce costs.
(iii) A competitive market will improve resource allocation.
(iv) A competitive market will not cause any significant undesirable spin-off effects.
Each of these propositions is suspect.
If there is any competition on bus routes, it will tend to be small group rather than large group. Active rivalry involving schedule matching and price wars may occur, as may collusion. Neither will produce efficient results.
Even if a competitive result were to obtain, the resulting resource allocation would not be socially efficient. A first best optimum requires subsidies because the market is subject to external economies (the Mohring effect). If Government budget constraints operate, the second-best solution then requires cross-subsidies. Competition is not compatible with social efficiency in either of these cases. Nor will the competitive market solution optimise load factors. Quality competition, in the form of minibuses 'creaming' the best traffics, may also be socially undesirable.
The White Paper authors underplay the significance of these resource allocation arguments, while exaggerating the likely impact of deregulation on cost efficiency. Even though some cost savings may be available they could be obtained anyway under a regime of competitive tendering for profitable as well as unprofitable routes. Competition for the market rather than competition in the market is required
High performance architecture design for large scale fibre-optic sensor arrays using distributed EDFAs and hybrid TDM/DWDM
A distributed amplified dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) array architecture is presented for interferometric fibre optic sensor array systems. This architecture employs a distributed erbium doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) scheme to decrease the array insertion loss, and employs time division multiplexing (TDM) at each wavelength to increase the number of sensors that can be supported. The first experimental demonstration of this system is reported including results which show the potential for multiplexing and interrogating up to 4096 sensors using a single telemetry fibre pair with good system performance. The number can be increased to 8192 by using dual pump sources
The Development of a Common Investment Appraisal for Urban Transport Projects.
In December 1990 we were invited by Birmingham City Council and Centro to submit a proposal for an introductory study of the development of a common investment appraisal for urban transport projects. Many of the issues had arisen during the Birmingham Integrated Transport Study (BITS) in which we were involved, and in the subsequent assessment of light rail schemes of which we have considerable experience. In subsequent discussion, the objectives were identified as being:- (i) to identify, briefly, the weaknesses with existing appraisal techniques; (ii) to develop proposals for common methods for the social cost-benefit appraisal of both urban road and rail schemes which overcome these weaknesses; (iii) to develop complementary and consistent proposals for common methods of financial appraisal of such projects; (iv) to develop proposals for variants of the methods in (ii) and (iii) which are appropriate to schemes of differing complexity and cost; (v) to consider briefly methods of treating externalities, and performance against other public sector goals, which are consistent with those developed under (ii) to (iv) above; (vi) to recommend work to be done in the second phase of the study (beyond March 1991) on the provision of input to such evaluation methods from strategic and mode-specific models, and on the testing of the proposed evaluation methods. Such issues are particularly topical at present, and we have been able to draw, in our study, on experience of:-
(i) evaluation methods developed for BITS and subsequent integrated transport studies (MVA) (ii) evaluation of individual light rail and heavy rail investment projects (ITS,MVA); (iii) the recommendations of AMA in "Changing Gear" (iv) advice to IPPR on appraisal methodology (ITS); (v) submissions to the House of Commons enquiry into "Roads for the Future" (ITS); (vi) advice to the National Audit Office (ITS) (vii) involvement in the SACTRA study of urban road appraisal (MVA, ITS
Transport in the metropolitan counties: current performance and future prospects. - Vol. 2: Evidence
Finding footy : female fan socialization and Australian rules football
The question of how, irrespective of gender, a person becomes a sports fan has been absent in sociological studies of sports supporters. Distinct from other studies of sport spectatorship that focus on the practices of already existing (and overwhelmingly male) fans, our research is the first to consider how women become supporters, and in doing so, it begins to redress the significant under-representation of women in sports fan research. From interviews with female supporters of the Australian Football League (AFL), this article identifies and critically assesses the modes by which women come to support sport. We propose four categories to explain the different ways women accomplish fandom, focusing on the importance of strong social ties and doxic actions in this process. The events, experiences and social relations that inform women\u27s first encounters with AFL offers a template for the wider consideration of women as social agents in the sporting landscape
Towards Machine Wald
The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and
predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with
limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical
evaluation of sophisticated statistical models, these models are still designed
\emph{by humans} because there is currently no known recipe or algorithm for
dividing the design of a statistical model into a sequence of arithmetic
operations. Indeed enabling computers to \emph{think} as \emph{humans} have the
ability to do when faced with uncertainty is challenging in several major ways:
(1) Finding optimal statistical models remains to be formulated as a well posed
problem when information on the system of interest is incomplete and comes in
the form of a complex combination of sample data, partial knowledge of
constitutive relations and a limited description of the distribution of input
random variables. (2) The space of admissible scenarios along with the space of
relevant information, assumptions, and/or beliefs, tend to be infinite
dimensional, whereas calculus on a computer is necessarily discrete and finite.
With this purpose, this paper explores the foundations of a rigorous framework
for the scientific computation of optimal statistical estimators/models and
reviews their connections with Decision Theory, Machine Learning, Bayesian
Inference, Stochastic Optimization, Robust Optimization, Optimal Uncertainty
Quantification and Information Based Complexity.Comment: 37 page
Measurement of the B0-anti-B0-Oscillation Frequency with Inclusive Dilepton Events
The - oscillation frequency has been measured with a sample of
23 million \B\bar B pairs collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II
asymmetric B Factory at SLAC. In this sample, we select events in which both B
mesons decay semileptonically and use the charge of the leptons to identify the
flavor of each B meson. A simultaneous fit to the decay time difference
distributions for opposite- and same-sign dilepton events gives ps.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review Letter
Search for supersymmetry with a dominant R-parity violating LQDbar couplings in e+e- collisions at centre-of-mass energies of 130GeV to 172 GeV
A search for pair-production of supersymmetric particles under the assumption
that R-parity is violated via a dominant LQDbar coupling has been performed
using the data collected by ALEPH at centre-of-mass energies of 130-172 GeV.
The observed candidate events in the data are in agreement with the Standard
Model expectation. This result is translated into lower limits on the masses of
charginos, neutralinos, sleptons, sneutrinos and squarks. For instance, for
m_0=500 GeV/c^2 and tan(beta)=sqrt(2) charginos with masses smaller than 81
GeV/c^2 and neutralinos with masses smaller than 29 GeV/c^2 are excluded at the
95% confidence level for any generation structure of the LQDbar coupling.Comment: 32 pages, 30 figure
Detector Description and Performance for the First Coincidence Observations between LIGO and GEO
For 17 days in August and September 2002, the LIGO and GEO interferometer
gravitational wave detectors were operated in coincidence to produce their
first data for scientific analysis. Although the detectors were still far from
their design sensitivity levels, the data can be used to place better upper
limits on the flux of gravitational waves incident on the earth than previous
direct measurements. This paper describes the instruments and the data in some
detail, as a companion to analysis papers based on the first data.Comment: 41 pages, 9 figures 17 Sept 03: author list amended, minor editorial
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