Applying The Kano Model To Higher Education: Moving Beyond Measuring Student Satisfaction

This study sought to evaluate the Kano Model of Satisfaction (1984) for applicability to research on college student satisfaction. Traditional college students were surveyed using both the Ruffalo Noel Levitz Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI) and a follow-up Kano survey tool adapted from the SSI items for academic advising effectiveness and campus life. Responses were paired from respondents to both survey tools. Analysis showed that respondents tended to have general agreement that the service elements included in this study had some positive level of impact on overall (dis)satisfaction levels. However, the type of impact which respondents reported the service elements as having—large increases in dissatisfaction for failing to fulfill must-be elements; small increases in satisfaction for fulfilling satisfiers; large increases in satisfaction for fulfilling delighters, no direct impact on (dis)satisfaction for fulfilling indifferent elements, or an increase in dissatisfaction for fulfilling reverse quality elements—varied among respondents. The items for academic advising effectiveness were largely categorized as either must-be elements or satisfiers, with only small proportions of students seeing them as delighters, indifferent elements, or reverse quality elements. The campus life elements had much larger proportions of students coding them as indifferent or delighter elements in addition to must-be or satisfier elements. A series of t-tests and ANOVAs were run to test for a statistically significant different in importance scores by Kano categorization. However, the results were only significant between those participants who had answered that the Kano category for the item was “indifferent element” versus those that had placed it in another category. This showed that the SSI importance score did not give a full picture of an item’s impact on a student’s overall (dis)satisfaction levels as it did not clearly indicate what the impact of either meeting or not meeting student expectations for that item would be

Hydrogen and fuel cell technologies for heating: A review

The debate on low-carbon heat in Europe has become focused on a narrow range of technological options and has largely neglected hydrogen and fuel cell technologies, despite these receiving strong support towards commercialisation in Asia. This review examines the potential benefits of these technologies across different markets, particularly the current state of development and performance of fuel cell micro-CHP. Fuel cells offer some important benefits over other low-carbon heating technologies, and steady cost reductions through innovation are bringing fuel cells close to commercialisation in several countries. Moreover, fuel cells offer wider energy system benefits for high-latitude countries with peak electricity demands in winter. Hydrogen is a zero-carbon alternative to natural gas, which could be particularly valuable for those countries with extensive natural gas distribution networks, but many national energy system models examine neither hydrogen nor fuel cells for heating. There is a need to include hydrogen and fuel cell heating technologies in future scenario analyses, and for policymakers to take into account the full value of the potential contribution of hydrogen and fuel cells to low-carbon energy systems

Opportunities for hydrogen and fuel cell technologies to contribute to clean growth in the UK

Hydrogen is important because it is one of three key zero-carbon vectors for decarbonising economies in the future, along with electricity and hot water. The UK Government’s Clean Growth Strategy and the UK Committee on Climate Change have identified hydrogen as the most cost-effective option for decarbonising several parts of the UK energy system. Fuel cells convert fuels, including hydrogen, to electricity and heat. Fuel cells are important because they can generate electricity at higher efficiencies than most internal combustion engines, and with no emissions. For road transport, this means that they have a higher fuel economy than cars powered by engines

Mapping regional vulnerability in Europe’s energy transition: development and application of an indicator to assess declining employment in four carbon-intensive industries

Europe’s transition to an energy system compatible with limiting global heating to 1.5 °C will require radical changes in energy systems. While this will create substantial new growth industries in clean technologies, some currently important economic activities will decline. The impacts of that transition will not be the same for all regions. We map the economic vulnerability of European regions to ambitious decarbonisation scenarios in terms of employment losses in four carbon-intensive industries. To do so, we develop a composite vulnerability indicator that combines each region’s share of employment in those high-carbon industries with other dimensions of vulnerability and resilience. We then explore how regional patterns of vulnerability are influenced by the technology pathway to 2050, using four scenarios modelled using the European PRIMES model. We show that economic vulnerability to the low-carbon transition is regionally concentrated, with some regions combining high employment shares in industries expected to decline with weak adaptive capacity and high pre-existing unemployment. We also show that there is little variation in regional vulnerability arising from different transition pathways. All scenarios compatible with 1.5 °C involve large declines in all high-carbon sectors we analyse, and as a result, scenario variation does not lead to large variation in relative vulnerability of regions. The results highlight regions that may be in need of additional policy support to diversify their economies and achieve a just transition

Stable Determination of the Electromagnetic Coefficients by Boundary Measurements

The goal of this paper is to prove a stable determination of the coefficients for the time-harmonic Maxwell equations, in a Lipschitz domain, by boundary measurements

Narrative-driven alternative roads to achieve mid-century CO2 net neutrality in Europe

The tightened climate mitigation targets of the EU green deal raise an important question: Which strategy should be used to achieve carbon emissions net neutrality? This study explores stakeholder-designed narratives of the future energy system development within the deep decarbonization context. European carbon net-neutrality goals are put under test in a model comparison exercise using state of the art Energy-Environment-Economy (E3) models: ETM-UCL, PRIMES and REMIND. Results show that while achieving the transition to carbon neutrality by mid-century is feasible under quite different future energy systems, some robust commonalities emerge. Electrification of end use sectors combined with large-scale expansion of renewable energy is a no-regret decision for all strategies; Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) plays an important role for achieving net-neutral targets under all scenarios, but is most relevant when demand-side changes are limited; hydrogen and synthetic fuels can be a relevant mitigation option for mid-century mitigation in hard-to-abate sectors; energy efficiency can reduce the supply system strain. Finally, high carbon prices (300-900€/tCO2) are needed under all strategies in order to achieve carbon net neutrality in 2050

On order and complexity in innovations systems: Conceptual frameworks for policy mixes in sustainability transitions

The sheer complexity of sustainability transitions makes it vital to develop simplifying conceptual frameworks. Starting from the contrast between the mainstream innovation-economics and systems-innovation/evolutionary literatures, this paper begins by summarising the "Three Domains" framework, which relates technology innovation and adoption choices to different domains of socio-economic decision-making, at successively larger scales of time and social structures. We note the high-level implications for policy mixes and illustrate the main themes through three electricity technology examples (lighting, fossil fuel generation, and low carbon power systems), and use these also to show that the relative importance of different policy pillars may differ substantially according to the technology and context. We then relate this to the "innovation chain" (another simplifying framework) approach to vertical innovation and show how this can help to explain radical differences in innovation intensities between different sectors. We then expand the innovation chain framework from technology to the multiple journeys required for successful innovation, ordered according to levels of decision-making and hence domains. We conclude by indicating how this can help identify key blockages in energy transformations, and potentially help to reconcile the classical innovation-economics with systems innovation/evolutionary perspectives, and explain their currently divergent policy recommendations

Inverse Transport Theory of Photoacoustics

We consider the reconstruction of optical parameters in a domain of interest from photoacoustic data. Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) radiates high frequency electromagnetic waves into the domain and measures acoustic signals emitted by the resulting thermal expansion. Acoustic signals are then used to construct the deposited thermal energy map. The latter depends on the constitutive optical parameters in a nontrivial manner. In this paper, we develop and use an inverse transport theory with internal measurements to extract information on the optical coefficients from knowledge of the deposited thermal energy map. We consider the multi-measurement setting in which many electromagnetic radiation patterns are used to probe the domain of interest. By developing an expansion of the measurement operator into singular components, we show that the spatial variations of the intrinsic attenuation and the scattering coefficients may be reconstructed. We also reconstruct coefficients describing anisotropic scattering of photons, such as the anisotropy coefficient $g(x)$ in a Henyey-Greenstein phase function model. Finally, we derive stability estimates for the reconstructions