Forecasting the market for ships

Product development and market penetration strategy rely on dependable forecasts. Market segmentation is necessary for finding profitable niches. The paper describes macro- forecasts in the maritime sector divided by nine ship types. Balance between supply and demand is calculated with dynamic models. Demand for transportation depends on the development of world trade. Supply of transportation capacity depends on present fleet size, future contracting, scrapping and productivity.     

DIY culture and extended milieux: LETS, veggie boxes and festivals

The wave of DIY culture and environmental innovation sweeping through the UK is not restricted to isolated sites of high profile protest, such as the Newbury bypass. Based on fieldwork in the South West of England, consisting of in-depth interviews, participant observation, focus groups and a postal survey, we argue that networks such as those around festivals, LETS and organic food box schemes contribute to green milieux, which encourage ecological and cultural innovation of everyday life. We suggest that this creative social and ecological margin may be viewed as extended milieux combining global and local aspects. Local social relations and identities are reconfigured in new reflexive ways that utilize, criticise and even contribute to globalization, while developing new senses of locality and community.     

Impact of methods for reducing respondent burden on personal network structural measures

We examine methods for reducing respondent burden in evaluating alter–alter ties on a set of network structural measures. The data consist of two sets, each containing 45 alters from respondent free lists: the first contains 447 personal networks, and the second 554. Respondents evaluated the communication between 990 alter pairs. The methods were (1) dropping alters from the end of the free-list, (2) randomly dropping alters, (3) randomly dropping links, and (4) predicting ties based on transitivity. For some measures network structure is captured with samples of less than 20 alters; other measures are less consistent. Researchers should be aware of the need to sample a minimum number of alters to capture structural variation.     

Floating ideas—An experiment in enhancing hypergames with maps

Within the OR community, an increasing emphasis is being placed on developing approaches to tackle complex, ‘messy’ decision problems. The work described in this paper arose out of the premise that it would be desirable to integrate ideas from a number of different approaches of this type. Specifically, the paper describes one experimental attempt to link methods for modelling conflict situations (the analysis of options and hypergames) with the cognitive mapping approach to eliciting subjective data. Taking a personally-owned decision problem, mapping was used to enrich the game-based approaches by providing a way of documenting the argumentation underlying the models used. Though difficult to generalise from, the experiment not only suggested that such an extension is likely to be an improvement, but also highlighted some deficiencies in the existing versions of the game-based approaches themselves.     

ON BOOTSTRAP HYPOTHESIS TESTING

We describe methods for constructing bootstrap hypothesis tests, illustrating our approach using analysis of variance. The importance of pivotalness is discussed. Pivotal statistics usually result in improved accuracy of level. We note that hypothesis tests and confidence intervals call for different methods of resampling, so as to ensure that accurate critical point estimates are obtained in the former case even when data fail to comply with the null hypothesis. Our main points are illustrated by a simulation study and application to three real data sets.     

India's Falling Sex Ratios

The proportion of females in India's population, low compared to other countries, reached its lowest level this century in the 1991 census. India's low sex ratios—defined here as the number of females relative to the number of males—have been scrutinized for well over a century. The persistent decline in the twentieth century has been the subject of renewed investigation and critical comment over the past two decades. While many explanations for the decline have been offered, almost without exception these have not addressed the causes of the nearly continuous fall observed since 1901. Several possible long-term changes are investigated in this note. The author argues that India's declining sex ratio is primarily an artifact of the dynamics of India's population growth.     

Planning and social change

During his ten years experience of corporate planning in industry the author became increasingly concerned about the relationship between planning and social change. This article, based on a talk given to the Social and Ecological Study Group of the Society for Long Range Planning, explores an approach to environmental appraisal which might make businesses and government agencies more responsive to the needs of a changing society and their products and services correspondingly more socially desirable. The author is currently leading a multidisciplinary team on a study of urban deprivation in Birmingham.