Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1963. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-114). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-74). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-74). Also available on the Internet.

Concerns over the environmental impacts of the transport sector have led to the United Kingdom (UK) Government establishing a legally binding commitment of an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (relative to the 1990 baseline) through the Climate Change Act 2008. The decarbonisation of the transport sector by 2050 will substantially contribute towards achieving this target. Technological innovations, therefore, have an important role in supporting policy objectives. One innovation that is being developed for this purpose in the transport sector is an alternative fuel vehicle. While there are several alternative fuel vehicle technologies, the only two with zero tailpipe (exhaust) emissions are battery electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Both of these technologies are not yet at a stage in their development where they can successfully compete with conventional fuel vehicles (internal combustion engine vehicles). They face a variety of technological hurdles that include range, performance, cost, and infrastructure. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are not commercially available, although battery electric vehicles have been on the commercial market for several years. Uptake of alternative fuel vehicles is occurring at a slower pace than hoped by policy makers and manufacturers. The aim of this thesis is to examine the factors influencing the decision to adopt an alternative fuel vehicle, and is underpinned by Rogers (2003) Diffusion of Innovations theory. The Innovation-Decision Process from this theory posits that an individual must first know about an innovation before forming an attitude about it. Innovativeness is instrumental in determining the knowledge an individual has of an innovation and how early in the diffusion process they are likely to become an adopter. Perceptions of the innovation are influential in forming an attitude towards it. The focus of the research is on Birmingham, the UK s second largest city. The first stage of the research involves establishing the locations of individuals across the city that possess socio-demographic characteristics associated with early adopters of alternative fuel vehicles. This is achieved by applying cluster analysis to Birmingham census data, which enabled the identification of a strong spatial cluster of potential early adopters in the suburb of Sutton Coldfield. In the second stage of the research, a household questionnaire was undertaken with 413 respondents in Sutton Coldfield. The analysis of the questionnaire data firstly involves the verification of the early adopter characteristics from stage one by examining the relationship of these characteristics with innovativeness. Analysis is then undertaken of the level of knowledge and the perceptions that the respondents have of alternative fuel vehicles. The final step in the analysis is an evaluation of the characteristics of current models of electric vehicles and how well aligned they are with the driving needs and vehicle expectations of respondents. The results confirm that the knowledge of alternative fuel vehicles is limited and individual perceptions have led to the development of negative attitudes towards them. Socio-demographic characteristics were significant in influencing these factors. There were 5% (21) of respondents who have previously considered the adoption of an electric vehicle but have not yet done so. There is evidence from the survey of active rejection among a small number of respondents. The reasons largely relate to three problems: purchase price, limited range, and poor infrastructure availability. However, the majority of respondents have passively rejected alternative fuel vehicles, such that they have never given consideration to the adoption of one. This confirms that a concerted effort is required to inform the general public about alternative fuel vehicles. Opportunities for increasing adoption have been identified for policy and marketing, including education and awareness-raising campaigns.

O café é um dos mais tradicionais produtos da agricultura brasileira e teve grande influência no processo de industrialização da economia. É também um produto que contribui significativamente para a geração de emprego no campo, principalmente em regiões inaptas à mecanização da lavoura. A cafeicultura passou por uma significativa reestruturação nas últimas décadas, que modificou tanto a organização interna entre os elos da cadeia agroindustrial, como as práticas de condução das lavouras pelo produtor rural. Sistemas alternativos de produção foram surgindo com o objetivo de aumentar a competitividade dessa lavoura. Na esteira desses sistemas, emergem dúvidas quanto à viabilidade técnica e econômica de cada um. Esse trabalho está dividido em duas partes. Primeiramente procurou-se identificar as técnicas de produção que estão sendo adotadas e caracterizar as dúvidas existentes. Em seguida, partiu-se para a elaboração de um modelo fundamentado nas técnicas de análise de decisão, para auxiliar nas escolha entre alternativos sistemas de processamento de café, na forma tradicional ou especial, uma das dúvidas que foram identificadas. As decisões disponíveis indicavam a possibilidade de produzir um café natural (no sistema tradicional vigente ou mais elaborado), um café cereja descascado ou um café despolpado. Essas alternativas, por sua vez, envolvem investimentos e são expostas a condições de risco, já que o clima pode influenciar os resultados da lavoura e a qualidade do grão. Por meio dessa pesquisa foi possível identificar, entre outros resultados, uma ligeira distorção entre as demandas dos produtores e os estudos de especialistas que, em muitos casos, dão excessiva importância a aspectos considerados triviais para os cafeicultores. Além disso, a pesquisa proporcionou avaliar os sistemas de processamento do café e identificar os cafés especiais como uma boa alternativa aos produtores do Sul de Minas Gerais. / Coffee is one of the most traditional products of the Brazilian agriculture and had a great influence on the industrialization process of economics. It is also a product which contributes significantly for generation of employment in the field mainly in the regions unsuitable for mechanization of farming. Coffee growing has past by a significant restructuration in the last few decades which has changed both the internal organization among the links of the agribusiness chain and the practices of conducting crops at the farmer's level. Alternative systems of farming have been appearing with the purpose of increasing the competitiveness of those crops. On the track of those system appears the doubts as to the economical and technical viability of each one. This work was divided into two parts, where first its was sought to identify the cropping techniques which have been being adopted and to characterize the existing doubts. Next, the making of a working model was started in the decision -analysis techniques to aid in the choice among alternative coffee -processing systems either in the traditional or special form, one of the doubts which were identified. The available decisions point out the possibility of producing a natural coffee (in the current traditional or more elaborated), either a pulped naturals or washed coffee. Those alternative, in turn, involve investments and are exposed to risk conditions since the climate may influence the results of the crop and bean quality. By mean of the research work, it was possible to identify among other results, a slight distortion among the demands of the farmers and the studies by experts, which in a lot of cases give an excessive importance to aspects regarded as trivial to the coffee growers. In addition, research has proposed to evaluate the coffee- processing systems and to identify the special coffees as a good alternative to the farmers of Southern Minas Gerais.

Thesis (M.S.) -- Mississippi State University. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

The work presented in this thesis falls naturally into two parts. The first part (Chapter 2), is concerned with the benefit of perturbing a population into an immediately undesirable state, in order to improve estimates of a static probability which may improve long-term management. We consider finding the optimal harvest policy for a theoretical harvested population when a key parameter is unknown. We employ an adaptive management framework to study when it is worth sacrificing short term rewards in order to increase long term profits. / Active adaptive management has been increasingly advocated in natural resource management and conservation biology as a methodology for resolving key uncertainties about population dynamics and responses to management. However, when comparing management policies it is traditional to weigh future rewards geometrically (at a constant discount rate) which results in far-distant rewards making a negligible contribution to the total benefit. Under such a discounting scheme active adaptive management is rarely of much benefit, especially if learning is slow. In Chapter 2, we consider two proposed alternative forms of discounting for evaluating optimal policies for long term decisions which have a social component. / We demonstrate that discount functions which weigh future rewards more heavily result in more conservative harvesting strategies, but do not necessarily encourage active learning. Furthermore, the optimal management strategy is not equivalent to employing geometric discounting at a lower rate. If alternative discount functions are made mandatory in calculating optimal management policies for environmental management, then this will affect the structure of optimal management regimes and change when and how much we are willing to invest in learning. / The second part of this thesis is concerned with how to account for partial observability when calculating optimal management policies. We consider the problem of controlling an invasive pest species when only partial observations are available at each time step. In the model considered, the monitoring data available are binomial observations of a probability which is an index of the population size. We are again concerned with estimating a probability, however, in this model the probability is changing over time. / Before including partial observability explicitly, we consider a model in which perfect observations of the population are available at each time step (Chapter 3). It is intuitive that monitoring will be beneficial only if the management decision depends on the outcome. Hence, a necessary condition for monitoring to be worthwhile is that control polices which are specified in terms of the system state, out-perform simpler time-based control policies. Consequently, in addition to providing a benchmark against which we can compare the optimal management policy in the case of partial observations, analysing the perfect observation case also provides insight into when monitoring is likely to be most valuable. / In Chapters 4 and 5 we include partial observability by modelling the control problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). We outline several tests which stem from a property of conservation of expected utility under monitoring, which aid in validating the model. We discuss the optimal management policy prescribed by the POMDP for a range of model scenarios, and use simulation to compare the POMDP management policy to several alternative policies, including controlling with perfect observations and no observations. / In Chapter 6 we propose an alternative model, developed in the spirit of a POMDP, that does not strictly satisfy the definition of a POMDP. We find that although the second model has some conceptually appealing attributes, it makes an undesirable implicit assumption about the underlying population dynamics.

O café é um dos mais tradicionais produtos da agricultura brasileira e teve grande influência no processo de industrialização da economia. É também um produto que contribui significativamente para a geração de emprego no campo, principalmente em regiões inaptas à mecanização da lavoura. A cafeicultura passou por uma significativa reestruturação nas últimas décadas, que modificou tanto a organização interna entre os elos da cadeia agroindustrial, como as práticas de condução das lavouras pelo produtor rural. Sistemas alternativos de produção foram surgindo com o objetivo de aumentar a competitividade dessa lavoura. Na esteira desses sistemas, emergem dúvidas quanto à viabilidade técnica e econômica de cada um. Esse trabalho está dividido em duas partes. Primeiramente procurou-se identificar as técnicas de produção que estão sendo adotadas e caracterizar as dúvidas existentes. Em seguida, partiu-se para a elaboração de um modelo fundamentado nas técnicas de análise de decisão, para auxiliar nas escolha entre alternativos sistemas de processamento de café, na forma tradicional ou especial, uma das dúvidas que foram identificadas. As decisões disponíveis indicavam a possibilidade de produzir um café natural (no sistema tradicional vigente ou mais elaborado), um café cereja descascado ou um café despolpado. Essas alternativas, por sua vez, envolvem investimentos e são expostas a condições de risco, já que o clima pode influenciar os resultados da lavoura e a qualidade do grão. Por meio dessa pesquisa foi possível identificar, entre outros resultados, uma ligeira distorção entre as demandas dos produtores e os estudos de especialistas que, em muitos casos, dão excessiva importância a aspectos considerados triviais para os cafeicultores. Além disso, a pesquisa proporcionou avaliar os sistemas de processamento do café e identificar os cafés especiais como uma boa alternativa aos produtores do Sul de Minas Gerais. / Coffee is one of the most traditional products of the Brazilian agriculture and had a great influence on the industrialization process of economics. It is also a product which contributes significantly for generation of employment in the field mainly in the regions unsuitable for mechanization of farming. Coffee growing has past by a significant restructuration in the last few decades which has changed both the internal organization among the links of the agribusiness chain and the practices of conducting crops at the farmer's level. Alternative systems of farming have been appearing with the purpose of increasing the competitiveness of those crops. On the track of those system appears the doubts as to the economical and technical viability of each one. This work was divided into two parts, where first its was sought to identify the cropping techniques which have been being adopted and to characterize the existing doubts. Next, the making of a working model was started in the decision -analysis techniques to aid in the choice among alternative coffee -processing systems either in the traditional or special form, one of the doubts which were identified. The available decisions point out the possibility of producing a natural coffee (in the current traditional or more elaborated), either a pulped naturals or washed coffee. Those alternative, in turn, involve investments and are exposed to risk conditions since the climate may influence the results of the crop and bean quality. By mean of the research work, it was possible to identify among other results, a slight distortion among the demands of the farmers and the studies by experts, which in a lot of cases give an excessive importance to aspects regarded as trivial to the coffee growers. In addition, research has proposed to evaluate the coffee- processing systems and to identify the special coffees as a good alternative to the farmers of Southern Minas Gerais.

The aim of this work is to show that even people who outwardly demonstrate irrational behaviour are actually rational. The only reason why their actions deviate from theoretical rational behaviour is given by different utility functions. Ultimatum game with its easy rules represents a great way to show deviations between human and rational behaviours. The model described in the thesis focuses on Responder's decision making, which is influenced not only by maximization of pure economical profit but also by many other factors, which are summed in the model in one variable -- attitude to fairness. It is shown how this variable can be predicted using decisions obtained from a multi-round Ultimatum game. To prove that humans behave in accordance with their own preferences, the modelled game does not only estimate players' attitudes to fairness but also predicts players' following actions using knowledge of estimated values.

As a purposive sustainability transition requires environmental innovation and innovation policy, we discuss potentials and limitations of three dominant strands of literature in this field, namely the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (MLP), the innovation systems approach (IS), and the long-wave theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts (LWT). All three are epistemologically rooted in an evolutionary understanding of socio-technical change. While these approaches are appropriate to understand market-driven processes of change, they may be deficient as analytical tools for exploring and designing processes of purposive societal transformation. In particular, we argue that the evolutionary mechanism of selection is the key to introducing the strong directionality required for purposive transformative change. In all three innovation theories, we find that the prime selection environment is constituted by the market and, thus, normative societal goals like sustainability are sidelined. Consequently, selection is depoliticised and neither strong directionality nor incumbent regime destabilisation are societally steered. Finally, we offer an analytical framework that builds upon a more political conception of selection and retention and calls for new political institutions to make normatively guided selections. Institutions for transformative innovation need to improve the capacities of complex societies to make binding decisions in politically contested fields.