Concrete and the barriers to innovation in UK housebuilding

It is widely accepted that our housing industry is in crisis. Like most crises this has not happened overnight but comes after many decades during which little progress has been made from within and the numerous government white papers calling for change have gone unheeded. The proposition put forward in this thesis is that too much attention is being given to the benefits to be gained from innovation within the industry, at the expense of understanding the barriers that are preventing those innovations from being adopted, or possibly even from being considered. That lack of understanding represents a gap in our knowledge that could potentially mean the difference between our housing industry continuing on its current trajectory and it transitioning to a more sustainable path which can provide us with more, better quality, truly affordable housing. The initial aim of this research was to discover what those barriers were, by looking at the industry from all possible perspectives and capturing any influencing factors that might have been previously overlooked. The methods used to achieve this were a series of industry interviews across all sectors, together with on–line questionnaires and an analysis of government produced recommendations. By asking each sector in turn about their knowledge and perceptions of how the other sectors operated, a picture emerged of an adversarial, fragmented industry that was failing to understand the motivations and drivers of those it must collaborate with to bring about change. From this stemmed the realisation that, more than anything else, it was a process that was needed to help the industry deal with the many complex, interrelated problems it faces, that not only have to be recognised as such, but also assessed for their comparative impact on the decisions being made. Through a series of twenty case studies, a set of decision making tools were therefore developed, tested and validated against known issues spanning the whole remit of innovation within housing, using the concrete industry as the vehicle for this process throughout. There were many findings taken from this interrogation of the barriers to innovation, with relevance to the industry as a whole both from the perspective of those promoting and those wanting to adopt innovative solutions. By questioning what laid behind each barrier in turn, a model was constructed that showed a hierarchy of causes and consequences and exposed the true root causes that this process suggests must be dealt with. Whilst the practical lessons learnt from this exercise were strategically important, the more urgent message that should be taken from this is the need for a more holistic decision making process that can lay out the options available to the housing industry with greater clarity and allow decision makers to make their own, more informed choices

Vertical integration by oil exporting countries

Most oil-producing countries have now nationalised their oil reserves and are pursuing their own pricing and marketing policies; in recent years some of them have attempted to extend their influence over the oil market by undertaking processing activities downstream from oil production. What motives underlie this strategy of vertical integration? What is its economic justification? What effects will it have on oil-importing countries

Technology and economic performance in the German economy

Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech industries of the early twentieth century - automobiles, machinery, electrical engineering, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Increasingly, however, those institutions are seen as failing to respond to new technological stimuli. In addition, Germany's bank-centered capital and inflexible labor markets have long constrained the opportunities of innovative firms for equity-based growth and the incentives for academic brains to set up in private business. Promising changes in technology policy and capital market conditions can be observed only since the mid-1990s

Automatic Passenger Counting: Introducing the t-Test Induced Equivalence Test

Automatic passenger counting (APC) in public transport has been introduced in the 1970s and has been rapidly emerging in recent years. Still, real-world applications continue to face events that are difficult to classify. The induced imprecision needs to be handled as statistical noise and thus methods have been defined to ensure that measurement errors do not exceed certain bounds. Various recommendations for such an APC validation have been made to establish criteria that limit the bias and the variability of the measurement errors. In those works, the misinterpretation of non-significance in statistical hypothesis tests for the detection of differences (e.g. Student's t-test) proves to be prevalent, although existing methods which were developed under the term equivalence testing in biostatistics (i.e. bioequivalence trials, Schuirmann in J Pharmacokinet Pharmacodyn 15(6):657-680, 1987) would be appropriate instead. This heavily affects the calibration and validation process of APC systems and has been the reason for unexpected results when the sample sizes were not suitably chosen: Large sample sizes were assumed to improve the assessment of systematic measurement errors of the devices from a user's perspective as well as from a manufacturer's perspective, but the regular t-test fails to achieve that. We introduce a variant of the t-test, the revised t-test, which addresses both type I and type II errors appropriately and allows a comprehensible transition from the long-established t-test in a widely used industrial recommendation. This test is appealing, but still it is susceptible to numerical instability. Finally, we analytically reformulate it as a numerically stable equivalence test, which is thus easier to use. Our results therefore allow to induce an equivalence test from a t-test and increase the comparability of both tests, especially for decision makers.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures. Transportation (2019

The influence of time headway on subjective driver states in adaptive cruise control

There is no agreement on the relation between driving parameters and drivers’ subjective states. A linear as well as a threshold relationship for different subjective variables and driving parameters has been put forward. In this study we investigate the relationship between time headway and the ratings of risk, task difficulty, effort, and comfort. Knowledge about this interrelation may advance the development of adaptive cruise control and autonomous driving and can add to the discussion about driver behavior models. An earlier study (Lewis-Evans, De Waard, & Brookhuis, 2010) found a threshold effect for drivers’ ratings of subjective variables for time headways between 0.5 and 4.0 s at a speed of 50 km/h. This study aims to replicate the threshold effect and to expand the findings to time headways at different speeds. A new measure for criticality was added as a categorical variable, indicating the controllability of a driving situation to give indications for the appliance of time headway in adaptive cruise control systems. Participants drove 24 short routes in a driving simulator with predefined speed and time headway to a leading vehicle. Time headway was varied eightfold (0.5–4 s in 0.5 s increments) and speed was varied threefold (50, 100, 150 km/h). A threshold effect for the ratings of risk, task difficulty, effort, and comfort was found for all three different speeds. Criticality proved to be a useful variable in assessing the preferred time headway of drivers