The Possibilities for Local Housing System Analysis in Innovative Housing Policy Planning

Continuous localization technologies for radiotherapy delivery: Report of the American Society for Radiation Oncology Emerging Technology Committee

Despite featuring very different housing systems, both in Vienna and Milan a growing number of people struggle to access affordable and decent housing. Even though social housing policies are in place in both contexts, for many the unregulated and often unaffordable private housing market is the only option. Building upon Antonio Tosi’s work, we centre our analysis on the poor and compare how two very different local housing systems create the conditions for their inclusion or exclusion. Through a comparative analysis of the Viennese and Milanese local housing regimes and adopting a mixed methodology, we discuss how both generate conditions of exclusion and who the ones excluded are, which local policies address the poor and how appropriate these are for mitigating housing exclusion. Finally, we indicate some directions for policies aimed at tackling the intersections of poverty and housing exclusion, advocating for a maximization of the ‘sociality’ of housing policies, involving a shift in prioritisation from the middle classes to the most vulnerable groups and the loosening of certain formal access requirements to housing or welfare services that constitute barriers to these groups, where possible.

This paper provides a preliminary examination of individual self-provision of housing in Scotland; that is, instances where individuals are directly involved in the production of their own house, rather than buying a house on the market. After a brief overview of the history of individual self-provision in Britain, the characteristics of the sector in Britain, and particularly in Scotland, are outlined. The core of the paper reports the results of a pilot survey of self-provision in Scotland. Four issues are examined: the type of self-provision; land availability; relationships with commercial interests; and local housing systems and access. It is concluded that self-provision is an important but mostly unrecognised source of new housing provision, whose incidence depends crucially on the nature of local housing systems and the extent to which planning policies are favourable in terms of land release and development control.

*ION GNSS+ 2017 Student Paper Award Winner* Cooperative swarms of robots have been proven to be fast, efficient, and robust systems for performing tasks such as mapping, exploration, search and rescue, surveillance, disaster management etc. Hence, several researchers are investigating the use of swarm networks for aerial, land, and marine applications. A key requirement in all applications involving swarms is localization of each of the nodes. This paper develops a distributed cooperative swarm localization system using GNSS, inertial and Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) sensors. The system is distributed since each of the nodes perform computations locally i.e. no central server is involved. The localization system is cooperative since each of the nodes in the swarm shares their information with all the other nodes and thus assists nodes without GNSS in achieving robust localization. The major contributions of this paper are development and analysis of a cooperative localization system. This paper presents the first results of this distributed system, provides a performance analysis of the localization system, and highlights the challenges in developing a true robust distributed cooperative localization system. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt in realizing a prototype of a true distributed cooperative localization system using low cost sensors. The experimental results show that in the absence of GNSS, it is possible to achieve an accuracy of about 4 m in a cooperative swarm using low cost sensors. This is achieved when communication and connectivity in the swarm is reasonably good. Under constrained communication conditions and in the absence of GNSS, the localization accuracy degrades to about 10m. Further it is demonstrated that localization accuracy improves with better network connectivity as well as increase in size of the swarm network.

Reflecting the national overcrowding crisis, the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail (ACRJ) in Charlottesville, Virginia, currently operates at 150 percent of its rated capacity. The jail must accommodate all offenders detained in the City of Charlottesville and the Counties of Albemarle and Nelson despite infrastructure and personnel limitations. Overcrowding hinders ACRJ's ability to effectively serve its role in the criminal justice system and the community. This paper identifies the sources of ACRJ overcrowding through analysis of the regional criminal justice system. To gain a basic understanding of the local criminal justice system, the project team conducted extensive interviews with key stakeholders. The information acquired during these interviews supported the development of a detailed process model of the system. This model identified decision points in the system that affect the drivers of jail population - the number of offenders incarcerated and the length of their confinement. The static process model was incorporated in a discrete-event simulation capturing jail-population dynamics. The simulation identified bottlenecks in the local system and components with the greatest leverage to reduce overcrowding. The study concluded that ACRJ should focus its efforts on reducing the volume of offenders at arrest, the decision to set bond, and probation. The project laid the foundation for future research into the selection and implementation of long-term solutions to overcrowding.

This paper presents a tool for the indicator-based analysis of national innovation systems (ANIS). ANIS identifies the economic strengths and weaknesses of a country-wide, regional or local system and includes a comprehensive examination and evaluation of the status of existing innovation systems. The use of a particular form of expert interviews at macro, meso and micro levels provides a detailed image of a national, regional or local economy. This analytical approach is intended mainly for emerging and developing countries, for which standard innovation benchmarking and monitoring approaches may not be appropriate. The ANIS approach provides a quick and comprehensive picture of the main scope of interventions for improving individual determinants of an innovation system. As a result, targeted policy measures can be formulated to address these determinants. Policy makers can thus benefit from clear advice when striving to overcome weaknesses in their innovation systems and in identifying those determinants that should receive special attention. An analysis of the local innovation system of Manaus in Brazil is presented here as an example.

The emerging context-aware applications relying on the wireless networking, require the availability of network services that provide even simple notions of context as position and identity. In the last few years several localization and tracking systems for indoor environment have been proposed. However, these systems are often very expensive since they require the installation of dedicated infrastructures of sensors based on radio, ultrasound or infrared technologies, to determine the user position. This paper aims to propose and analyze a novel indoor localization and tracking system based on the Bluetooth technology. This is a short-range, low complexity and low cost wireless technology that supports explicit device discovery services. The proposed localization system fully integrates these device discovery procedures into the infrastructure-based network of Bluetooth access points that provides the wireless connectivity inside a building. This design approach guarantees a cost-effective solution for the positioning service implementation. In this paper we have extensively investigated through simulative analysis the performances of the proposed localization system, showing that it has a negligible overhead, still providing a timely update of user location.KeywordsAccess PointInquiry PhaseData ConnectionUser SpeedDevice DiscoveryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Forestry, forest, pulp and paper industries provide important cases for environmental and ecological economics and for corporate environmental management, because of the large quantities of flows of material and energy that are derived from the natural ecosystem. Because of the natural capital intensive nature of its activity, the forest industry also offers a fruitful case study for industrial ecology (IE), the practical concern of which is the comparison of material and energy flows of nature to these same flows in economic and industrial systems. In this paper, the concept of an industrial ecosystem is reflected in a typical local forest industry system in Finland, known as ‘a local forest industry integrate’. We present a material and energy flow model that can be used to study forest industry environmental management and for the planning of environmental policies directed to forest industry. Flows of matter (biomass), nutrients, energy and carbon are described, and the waste utilization possibilities are considered. A local forest industry system can be a fruitful case for IE development as the cuttings of forests in Finland are below the renewal rate, material cycles, nutrient cycles and energy cascades are developed and the carbon dioxide (CO2) binding capacity of the forest ecosystem is maintained. The difficulties and barriers in light of the industrial ecosystem vision of a materially closed local system include the high export rates of paper, energy intensive production and problem displacement in waste utilization efforts. The presented material and energy flow model of forest industry environmental management is compared with a case of a local agricultural and food industry system. For agro‐food sector applications, a different emphasis on the flows may have to be adopted than in a forest industry application. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

WiFi-based localization is a promising candidate for indoor localization because the localization systems can be implemented on WiFi devices widely used today. In this paper, we present a distributed localization system to realize on-demand location-based services. We define characteristics of on-demand from both the service providers' and users' perspectives. From the service providers' perspective, we utilize our previous work, a WiFi ad-hoc wireless positioning network (AWPN). From the users' perspective, we address two challenges: the elimination of a user-application installation process and a reduction in network traffic. We design a localization system using the AWPN and provide a location-based service as a Web service, which allows the use of Web browsers. The proposed localization system is built on WiFi access points and distributes network traffic over the network. We describe the design and implementation and include a design analysis of the proposed localization system. Experimental evaluations confirm that the proposed localization system can localize a user device within 220 milliseconds. We also perform simulations and demonstrate that the proposed localization system reduces network traffic by approximately 24% compared to a centralized localization system.

While attention has been paid to how politico-legal reforms have enabled or inhibited the entrance of institutional investors, less is known about how these providers impact or challenge existing actors, regulations, processes, and institutional arrangements within local housing systems. This article departs from the case of Sweden: it has been discussed how institutional investors have been enabled by the country’s soft rent regulation, which is based on a collective bargaining process between all providers and the Swedish Union of Tenants (SUT) and allows for sharp rent increases after renovation. We show how in the Swedish case large institutional investors exploit existing institutional arrangements and challenge the norms that underlie the functioning of the rental housing system. To explore and illustrate this process we rely on the theory of incremental institutional change and complement it through the conceptual metaphor of “gaming.” We argue that housing systems can be understood as playing fields in which different actors employ tactics to defend or advance their interests, without, necessarily, the need to formally change the rules of the game. We suggest that more attention should be paid to institutional investors’ active engagement with local housing systems over time, beyond dichotomies of enablement or inhibition.

Since housing is a location-fixed property, the causes and solutions for housing problems in each region are inevitably different. Accordingly, since the 1990s, when the local autonomy system began, there has been continued discussions on the necessity of localizing housing policies. However, the central government still plays a leading role in the planning and implementation of housing policies, and the local governments play a supportive role. While focusing on the public rental housing policies, this paper aims to identify the obstacles deterring the localization of housing policies and to suggest practical implications for expanding the role of local governments in public housing policies. Through in-depth interviews with major stakeholders such as local governments and local public enterprises, this paper argues that the local government’s comprehensive housing plan should be strengthened in terms of its status and role. In the proposed new system, local governments establish public rental housing policies in consideration of individual local conditions. The central government should present budget allocation standards so that local governments can reduce the financial burden of the supply and management of public rental housing.

Localization systems are becoming an important feature for many RFID-based inventory and warehouse management support tools, due to the ever increasing diffusion of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) in logistic processes. RFID-based Location system will allow offering value-added services to logistics operators, where RFID tags can be used for more than just labeling items. This paper proposes a Received Signal Strength (RSS) based positioning system for perishable products equipped with active UHF RFID tags, inside a refrigerated warehouse (4C°). A fundamental problem in the design of RFID based localization system is the evaluation and mapping of the signal attenuation, which depends upon several parameters (fading from obstacles in the transmission path, reflections off surfaces and relative antenna orientation). Such information should be considered in the design phase, where instead simplified theoretical approaches are frequently employed. Theoretical path loss models are however inadequate for a reliable prediction of the signal strength, which significantly affects the accuracy of distance measurement and ultimately the precision of localization. An accurate prediction of the coverage level is hence required for obtaining a reliable design. In this paper, a case study on the design of an RFID localization system is presented, comparing a realistic signal distribution, obtained considering the influence of reflections and refractions, and the theoretical approach based on simple path loss models. Realistic coverage maps are obtained by means of a simulation tool based on 2D ray tracing algorithm.

The politics of housing: Introduction

This paper aims to consider whether there is an incipient problem of housing obsolescence in the UK, and if so, what its main dimensions are. It first examines how obsolescence in housing might be understood, and identifies four relevant factors: the nature of the housing stock; the expectations of households and how they are changing; locational and housing market factors; and the role of housing and urban policy. Using this broad structure, obsolescence and the changing aspirations of households are examined in two ways: first by drawing on an eclectic literature about housing, policy and household behaviour; and second by using evidence from interviews with housing professionals in the north of England. The paper concludes that there are good grounds for thinking that the relationship between what the housing stock offers and aspirations is under increasing strain. There seems to be a significant gap opening up between the qualities provided by new and by older housing, challenging longstanding preferences. There is an important set of relationships between tenure and obsolescence, with home ownership defining what is considered normal throughout the housing system. The findings also challenge the prevalent view that neighbourhood conditions are the key to obsolescence, as there is evidence of suppressed obsolescence and doubt about the strengths of some local markets where demand is apparently high. There is consensus around the desirability of local housing systems offering a choice of sizes and dwelling types, which many older as well as new housing areas do not.

The legislation of public housing policy in Taiwan was in the 1949 after the Nationalist Government moved to Taiwan from China. Since 1949, Taiwan faced several difficult situations, for example the oil crisis period and the real estate economy took off. In 2000, government decided to stop this policy, and didn't offer any appropriate social housing policy. However, Taipei is the most densely-populated city in Taiwan. People could not buy their own private house for the high price. Its showed us a great deal of the need of housing rental. With this matter, Taipei City Government began to offer the public housing in 2012. This syudy compares the Taiwan national public housing policy and the Taipei local social housing overall policy planning. The purpose of this study is to examine if the Taipei social housing policy suits the rent market or not. We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of Taipei policy planning, analyzed the need of improvement on Taipei social housing policy.