Amazon’s Robot Revolution

BackgroundAfter many years of decline, tuberculosis (TB) incidence is now increasing in England. Interventions are needed to reduce spread, reduce treatment delays and improve outcomes. Adults aged 65 years or...

This chapter outlines three practical examples of uniting health and planning at a local authority or municipality level with a view to sharing learning that may be useful to other practitioners globally. It captures the experiences of public health practitioners from the Midlands area of the United Kingdom (UK) of working with planning authorities to develop a joined up response to healthy urban planning. That is, ‘health-integrated planning and appraisal’ as a mechanism for improving the population’s health and well-being. It has not sought at this stage to capture the same experiences from a planning perspective; however, this is an interesting challenge for the future.

This paper reports on the findings of a small qualitative research project that examined the experiences of a group of adult learners attending a basic skills programme in the English Midlands during the late 1990s. It explores patterns of participation on such programmes and illustrates that early life course experiences can shape changing dispositions towards learning and forms of (dis)engagement from formal provision. The concept of reflexivity is used to help describe the differing contributions that structural and agential processes make to this patterning of engagement with learning. Such an approach is posited as a development of the concepts of learning identity and learning career that have recently been used to understand participation in education.

A scale was constructed to assess children's generalized trust beliefs (CGTB) in four target groups (mother, father, teacher and peer) with respect to three bases of trust: reliability, emotionality, and honesty. The CGTB Scale was administered to 145 Year 5 and 156 Year 6 children (mean age = 10 years, 1 month) residing in the English Midlands, United Kingdom. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielded evidence for the expected factor structure of the CGTB Scale. The total CGTB Scale and subscales demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and expected levels of stability across time. As support for validity, Year 6 participants' scores on the CGTB peer subscale were correlated with their trust beliefs in classmates, assessed a year earlier. As hypothesized, children's helpfulness to their classmates was correlated with the CGTB Scale and subscales. Girls displayed greater trust beliefs and helpfulness to classmates than did boys.

There was, as in most years, plenty of lively weather in 2011. In the United Kingdom, we had the odd experience of a cold winter that was not at all cold in this calendar year as the severe cold of late 2010 soon vanished. The only cooler-than-normal weather in 2011 came in the summer, whilst the most concentrated warmth and sunshine was to be found in late April and late September/early October. It is a year that could prove to be the second warmest on record in the UK. The normally-prevailing southwesterly winds have been even more frequent than usual, making it much wetter than normal over most of the north and west, whilst it was exceptionally dry over the English Midlands. That overview was, of course, written without knowledge of how the last five weeks or so of the year might turn out. Extensive publicity was given in the autumn to rogue forecasters predicting another severe winter. They might be right, but they are guessing. One group forecast that the winter would start with snow in a cold October – and claimed to have got this right! Our subject does suffer from crazy media coverage, but credit should be given to BBC Two's ‘Will it snow?’ programme, broadcast on 6 November. It made it quite clear that seasonal forecasting is a very imprecise science, but also pointed out that we can expect some cold weather and snow – because it is winter. We should always be prepared, and have patently not been in some recent winters. Equally, we are almost certainly not prepared for an exceptionally hot summer which, given the overall rise in global temperature, we are now overdue. On behalf of everyone involved with Weather, a happy Christmas and all the best for 2012 to all our readers.

This paper discusses, through the vehicle of case studies, how Fashion and Design brands have been instrumental in regenerating commerce in the United Kingdom (UK) regarding luxury goods, leathercraft and footwear. A particular attention is paid to the current research surrounding the ‘commodification of heritage’ exemplified by the fashion house Burberry, which demonstrates Britishness as an intangible element of cultural heritage. In-depth findings illustrated cover V&A Archives, Burberry’s celebrity endorsement and the royal appointment system. To compare the findings from this top profitable company, the centuries old footwear brands of the Northampton area in the English Midlands that have preserved the making of gentleman’s shoes, are also exemplified. It has been noted that some manufacturers have been taken over by international houses such as Hermes and Prada to essentially safeguard the craftsmanship that is “Made in Britain”. Both exemplars will be related to the UK Government funded initiatives and by Walpole, British Fashion Council, Made in Britain Initiative, London Craft Fair, as well as other benevolent bodies, namely Leathersellers and Cordwainers Guilds. Live fashion events and halo projects sponsored by industry are also the focal point for certain aspects of the intangible cultural heritage industry. Policy and reports, such as The State of Fashion [1], will inform the debate. In conclusion, it is argued that the exclusive club of luxury labels with ‘intangible cultural heritage’ is at the cross-roads in retailing and frequently referenced to define notions of Britishness, which will be the focus of discussion.

There are hundreds of small museums, archives, and collections in the English Midlands, United Kingdom (UK), many of which are the legacy of the region’s rich industrial heritage. A surprising number of these include dress and textiles in various forms, from the costume collection of Charles Paget-Wade at Berrington Hall (Leominster) to intricately stitched smocks made by local needlewomen in Herefordshire, and the wealth of manufacturers’ samples that comprise the silk ribbon trade archive at the Herbert Museum, Coventry. These are challenging times for many such organizations as they face cutbacks in staff and local authority funding. Yet they offer a unique and largely unexploited resource for staff, students, and researchers in art and design higher education (HE), not only for primary research but also as a catalyst for design innovation.The discussion here, which takes the format of group research practitioner interview, builds on a Knowledge Exchange event that was held December 2017 at the Fashion Lab, University of Wolverhampton (UoW). The event brought together a diverse group of fashion and textiles professionals to talk, exchange ideas, take part in object handling sessions, mind-map, and brain-storm how to catalyze connections between heritage collections and HE and build value. With seed funding from the Museum-University Partnership Initiative (see National Coordinating Center for Public Engagement—NCCPE 2019), the day built on a series of scoping visits to collections in the region undertaken by Professor Fiona Hackney and Dr Emily Baines. The group involved staff, students and museum professionals including those from UoW, De Montfort University, Hereford College of Arts, Nottingham Trent University, artist Ruth Singer who leads the Arts Council-funded Criminal Quilts project in association with Staffordshire Record Office (Singer 2019), and representatives from Herefordshire Museum Service, the Herbert Gallery (Coventry), Walsall Museums Service, the Lace Guild Stourbridge, and Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. The following conversation reflects themes that emerged in the project including: the need to embed archival work and primary research in fashion and textiles curricula at all levels, the development of hubs to connect university research with museum practice, the added value of artist-led projects, and the significance of place-based textiles heritage as a catalyst for new business and sustainable design practice.

This paper examines the neglected area of the perceptions and attitudes of residents of United Kingdom conservation areas to these conservation designations, and to conservation planning as a whole. Three residential conservation areas in the English midlands, designated in the early 1970s, were surveyed through a postal questionnaire of all residents. The results support the general suggestion that conservation planning is extremely popular and well supported in the United Kingdom. There are, however, worrying aspects of lack of knowledge, poor experiences and a much wider conception of conservation than purely planning legislation suggests.

We quantify the distortionary effects of nexus tax laws on Amazon's distribution network investments between 1999 and 2018.We highlight the role of two features of the expansion of Amazon's network: densification of the network of distribution facilities and vertical integration into package sortation.Densification results in a reduction in the cost of shipping orders, but comes at the expense of higher facility operating costs in more expensive areas and lower scale economies of processing shipments.Nexus laws furthermore generate additional sales tax liabilities as the network grows.Combining data on household spending across online and offline retailers with detailed data on Amazon's distribution network, we quantify these trade-offs through a static model of demand and a dynamic model of investment.Our results suggest that Amazon's expansion led to significant shipping cost savings and facilitated the realization of aggregate economies of scale.We find that abolishing nexus tax laws in favor of a nondiscriminatory tax policy would induce the company to decentralize its network, lowering its shipping costs.Non-discriminatory taxation would also entail lower revenue, however, as taxinclusive prices would rise, resulting in a fall in profit overall.This drop and the decline in consumer welfare from higher taxes together fall short of the increases in tax revenue and rival profit, suggesting that the abolishment of nexus laws would lead to an increase in total welfare.

Adaptive thermal model for loading of transformers in low carbon electricity distribution networks

Enhancing power system resilience to extreme weather requires an effective coordination of pre-disaster preventive response actions and post-disaster repair and restoration services. In this context, this article presents a two-stage framework to enhance resilience of power distribution networks to severe weather events. It considers operating and resource constraints in interdependent power and transportation networks based on official guidance from transport appraisal studies. It also incorporates sources of information available in a smart city context, such as energy measurements, traffic flows, and geographical information systems. In the first stage, a pre-disaster operational planning strategy is defined to prepare the grid for a high-risk outage scenario with the objective of minimizing the value of lost loads, formulated as a mixed-integer quadratic programming model. In the second stage, a post-disaster corrective strategy is implemented over a receding time horizon to compensate for deviations between the actions computed in the first stage and the actions required to minimize power outages, embedded into a model predictive control scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated on a real-world large-scale distribution network in the United Kingdom over a range of outage scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed framework is capable of effectively minimizing first-stage operational costs and second-stage deviations between the projected and actual load demand supply. Numerical results obtained with the proposed framework indicate that the load energy unserved is at least twice smaller than with typical practices adopted by distribution network operators and computational times take two minutes or less. Therefore, it can be effectively used by distribution network operators to ensure an appropriate level of preparedness to power outages caused by extreme weather along with prompt restoration and repair services.

In the course of net zero carbon transition, electricity distribution networks are faced with great challenges brought by increasing total and peak demand due to the electrification of transport and heat, as well as the significant uncertainties from renewable power generation and customer behaviors (such as electric vehicle travelling behaviors). Therefore, distribution network operators (DNOs) need effective tools to assess the capability of distribution networks in integrating generation and demand to conduct active management and efficient expansion of networks. However, conventional scenario-based assessment methods only provide conservative and limited information on the network capability, also with exponentially increased computational burden. By contrast, another stream of methods with different philosophy, named as operation region-based methods, describe the overall picture of the network capability analytically with little computational power needed. However, the existing linearized analytical regions, which are mainly applied to electricity transmission networks, cannot describe the capability of distribution networks accurately enough. To solve these problems, a novel feasible operation region (FOR) method with quadratic analytical expressions was proposed to characterize the range of the operating states of distribution networks, where the thermal and voltage constraints will not be violated. The FOR is a geometry in a high-dimensional space, and thus a high-dimensional error analysis approach was further developed for validating the proposed method. The boundary errors are described by multiple distance functions and operational indices, and the conservativeness of the analytical boundaries are quantified. An 11 kV radial distribution network from the United Kingdom Generic Distribution System (UKGDS) was used for the case study. The simulation results show that the quadratic analytical boundaries well approximated the real boundaries of FOR. The maximum errors for thermal and voltage boundaries would maximally cause an overcurrent up to 116 % and an undervoltage down to 0.96p.u., which are able to satisfy the requirements of engineering practice. Compared to the existing linear approximation (termed as hyperplane expressions) of FOR boundaries, the proposed quadratic expressions were proved to have higher accuracy.

– UK Power Networks (UKPN) has been allocated funding of nearly £25m by the UK energy regulator, Ofgem, to trial innovative commercial and technical solutions to distribution networks management to meet the challenges emerging from the growth in low carbon technologies such as electric vehicles, heat pumps and distributed generation. The Low Carbon London project [1] will focus on facilitating technologies to achieve carbon reduction targets, while exploring the role of distribution network operators to enable and share benefits throughout the low carbon supply chain. The project will trial new smart grid technologies and commercial arrangements with real London communities and businesses between 2011 and 2014. Through a series of coordinated trials, the project will demonstrate the impact on, and the role of, the distribution network in meeting low carbon objectives. Keywords : Low Carbon Networks, Smart Grids, Demand Response, Smart Metering 1. Introduction As major cities and metropolitan areas embark on the transitional path towards a low carbon economy, a number of technical and commercial challenges emerge for elec-tricity network operators. London has the highest concentrations of electricity demand and CO2 emissions in the United Kingdom (UK), and the most demanding carbon reduction targets (60% reduction on 1990 levels by 2025).

Assessing the implications of socioeconomic diversity for low carbon technology uptake in electrical distribution networks

Distribution network pricing is to allocate all or part of the existing cost of distribution system efficiently. Since the integration of distributed generation (DG) into distribution networks, DGs and dispatchable loads play an active role in the network operation and planning. In the United Kingdom, there are fourteen distribution companies representing each discrete region. Existing charging methods cannot deal with DG penetration, so the system charging methodology is currently under revaluation. In this paper network asset is mainly the turn over cost of the circuit, so for a given distribution network, the aim is to set up the network tariff to recover the cost of circuit asset. The proposed network pricing method tariff is based on two separate elements: a used circuit capacity element and an unused (headroom) circuit capacity element. Using the case studies, it shows that the method treat users (loads and DGs) and the network operator fairly.