Search results for "ample"
showing 10 items of 2398 documents
Assessing the productivity change of water companies in England and Wales: A dynamic metafrontier approach
2017
The assessment of productivity change and its drivers across water companies and over time is a powerful tool for both regulators and companies when setting water tariffs. Water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) and water only companies (WoCs) provide different services. Hence, their productivity change cannot directly be evaluated jointly. In this paper and for the first time, we provide a pioneering approach to assess and compare the dynamics of productivity change of WaSCs and WoCs. To achieve this, both the traditional Malmquist productivity index and the metafrontier Malmquist productivity index and its components are computed to assess the productivity change for a sample of English and …
Environmental externalities and efficiency measurement.
2009
Production of desirable outputs often produces by-products that have harmful effects on the environment. This paper investigates technologies where the biggest good output producer is not the greatest polluter, i.e. technologies located on the downward-sloping segment of the frontier depicted in Fare et al. (1989). Directional distance functions and Data Envelopment Analysis techniques are used to define an algorithm that allows them to be identified empirically. Furthermore, we show that in such situations producers can contribute social goods, i.e. reducing polluting wastes, without limiting their capacity to maximise production of marketable output. Finally, we illustrate our methodology…
Use of finite element models for estimating thermal performance of façade-integrated solar thermal collectors
2016
Abstract Research on building-integrated solar thermal collectors is attracting increasingly more interest. Many efforts have been focused at the design level for obtaining specific building-orientated products, but there is a significant lack of standardised methods for evaluating how the efficiency of solar collectors changes when a wall is an integral part of the solar component itself. Generally speaking, experimental tests on integrated components are not easy to realise and are, in any case, expensive in terms of time and money. Physical and numerical methods can be utilised, but at the moment, there is no common approach. The present work addresses a method for the calculation of a b…
A novel visual pipework inspection system
2017
The interior visual inspection of pipelines in the nuclear industry is a safety critical activity conducted during outages to ensure the continued safe and reliable operation of plant. Typically, the video output by a manually deployed probe is viewed by an operator looking to identify and localize surface defects such as corrosion, erosion and pitting. However, it is very challenging to estimate the nature and extent of defects by viewing a large structure through a relatively small field of view. This work describes a new visual inspection system employing photogrammetry using a fisheye camera and a structured light system to map the internal geometry of pipelines by generating a photorea…
The comprehensive aerospace index (CASI): Tracking the economic performance of the aerospace industry
2008
In this paper, we described the Comprehensive Aerospace Index (CASI), a financial index aimed at representing the economic performance of the aerospace industry. CASI is build upon a data set of approximately 20 years of daily close prices set, from January 1987 to June 2007, from a comprehensive sample of leading aerospace-related companies with stocks negotiated on the New York Exchange (NYSE) and on the over-the-counter (OTC) markets. We also introduced the sub-indices CASI-AERO, for aeronautical segment, and CASI-SAT for satellite segment. and considered the relation between them. These three indices are compared to others aerospace indices and to more traditional general financial indi…
Implementation of the driver training curriculum in Spain – An analysis based on the Goals for Driver Education (GDE) framework
2014
Abstract The Goals for Driver Education (GDE) framework represents a conceptual outline of the goals to be satisfied in driver education (Hatakka et al., 2002). We aimed to analyze the implementation of the driver training curriculum in Spain, taking this framework as reference; the Spanish driving instructors was the target population from which to gather the information to be analyzed. For this purpose, we developed the DTCI (Driver Training Curriculum Implementation) scale as well as a number of questions concerning the driving instructors’ opinions about their own training as instructors, and they were included in a survey that provided information for a probabilistic sample of 676 driv…
Beautiful Innovation: Understanding Management Innovation in the Spanish Arts, Heritage and Recreation Industries
2013
The objective of this paper is to gain an insight into the types of innovation that Spanish firms in arts, heritage and recreation undertook during the period 2006–2011. To achieve this aim we have examined which types of innovation –product, process, marketing and organizational–, have the highest share of the total, and how important organizational innovation is for these firms. The study is based on a sample of firms in the arts, heritage and recreation industries, based on a survey drawn up by the Spanish National Statistics Institute. Three important conclusions can be inferred from the results obtained in this paper for the Spanish case. The first is that, although these sectors are l…
Assessing the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants: A double-bootstrap approach
2017
Abstract Benchmarking the performance of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is essential for promoting their long-term sustainability. Recent research has applied data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to evaluate the efficiency of WWTPs providing a synthetic index of their performance. However, the traditional DEA is a deterministic method; therefore, regression analysis cannot be used to explore the external factors influencing efficiency scores. To overcome this limitation, in this study, a double bootstrap DEA model was used for the first time to compute the efficiency scores for a sample of WWTPs. The confidence intervals for efficiency scores were estimated for each facility. Results…
Validation of the group nuclear safety climate questionnaire.
2013
Abstract Introduction Group safety climate is a leading indicator of safety performance in high reliability organizations. Zohar and Luria (2005) developed a Group Safety Climate scale (ZGSC) and found it to have a single factor. Method The ZGSC scale was used as a basis in this study with the researchers rewording almost half of the items on this scale, changing the referents from the leader to the group, and trying to validate a two-factor scale. The sample was composed of 566 employees in 50 groups from a Spanish nuclear power plant. Item analysis, reliability, correlations, aggregation indexes and CFA were performed. Results Results revealed that the construct was shared by each unit, a…
Keeping Track of Samples in Multidisciplinary Fieldwork
2021
We here present methods, tools and results for efficiently collecting metadata and tracking samples collected in the field. The samples and metadata were collected during scientific cruises conducted by amongst others marine biologists, oceanographers, geochemists and marine geologists in the Nansen Legacy project. It is here reported on the successful development and implementation of a system for labeling, tracking and openly publishing metadata from the cruises. The results and tools have been made openly available, as they are suitable for a range of situations, from the individual scientist working in the field to large research missions.