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This paper discusses the Topsat satellite, currently being built by a partnership between DERA Space, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd and InfoTerra Ltd (Formerly NRSC). Topsat will have the capability to provide imagery at 25m panchromatic and 5m colour resolution, direct to the user at a mobile ground station, from a 125kg microsatellite in low Earth orbit. Its low‐cost philosophy includes wide use of commercial off‐the‐shelf components and the goal of a one‐year mission life.

Fluctuations in the tender price index have an adverse effect on the construction sector and the economy at large. This is largely due to the positive relationship that exists between the construction industry and economic growth. The consequences of these variations include cost overruns and schedule delays, among others. An accurate forecast of the tender price index is good for controlling the uncertainty associated with its variation. In the present study, the efficacy of using an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for tender price forecasting is investigated. In addition, the Box–Jenkins model, which is considered a benchmark technique, was used to evaluate the performance of the ANFIS model. The results demonstrate that the ANFIS model is superior to the Box–Jenkins model in terms of the accuracy and reliability of the forecast. The ANFIS could provide an accurate and reliable forecast of the tender price index in the medium term (i.e. over a three-year period). This chapter provides evidence of the advantages of applying nonlinear modelling techniques (such as the ANFIS) to tender price index forecasting. Although the proposed ANFIS model is applied to the tender price index in this study, it can also be applied to a wider range of problems in the field of construction engineering and management.

This chapter estimates how minimum parking requirements increase the cost of constructing housing, office buildings, and shopping centers. It also explains proposed legislation to limit how much parking cities can require in transit-rich districts.

I assembled data on the cost of constructing office buildings, shopping centers, and parking spaces in eight American cities, and data on the minimum parking requirements in these cities. I then combined the parking construction costs with the number of required parking spaces for each land use to estimate how the minimum parking requirements increase development costs for office buildings and shopping centers.

Minimum parking requirements increase the cost of constructing a shopping center by up to 67 percent if the parking is in an aboveground structure and by up to 93 percent if the parking is underground.

In suburban Seattle, parking requirements force developers to spend between $10,000 and $14,000 per dwelling to provide unused parking spaces.

On a typical construction site in Los Angeles, parking requirements reduce the number of units in an apartment building by 13 percent.

To mitigate the high costs imposed by minimum parking requirements, California is considering legislation to set an upper limit on how much parking cities can require in transit-rich districts: no more than one space per dwelling unit or two spaces per 1,000 square feet (93 square meters) of commercial space. This legislation would limit parking requirements, but it would not limit the parking supply because developers can always provide more than the required number of spaces if they think demand justifies the added cost.

This chapter measures how minimum parking requirements increase the cost of housing, office buildings, and shopping centers in order to subsidize parking. Urban historians often say that cars have changed the city, but urban planning has also changed the city to favor cars.

Numbers of worthy people are no doubt nursing themselves in the fond and foolish belief that when the Food Bill has received the Royal assent, and becomes law, the manufacture and sale of adulterated and sophisticated products will, to all intents and purposes, be suppressed, and that the Public Analyst and the Inspector will be able to report the existence of almost universal purity and virtue. This optimistic feeling will not be shared by the traders and manufacturers who have suffered from the effects of unfair and dishonest competition, nor by those whose knowledge and experience of the existing law enables them to gauge the probable value of the new one with some approach to accuracy. The measure has satisfied nobody, and can satisfy nobody but those whose nefarious practices it is intended to check, and who can fully appreciate the value, to them, of patchwork and superficial legislation. We have repeatedly pointed out that repressive legislation, however stringent and however well applied, can never give the public that which the public, in theory, should receive—namely, complete protection and adequate guarantee,—nor to the honest trader the full support and encouragement to which he is entitled. But, in spite of the defects and ineffectualities necessarily attaching to legislation of this nature, a strong Government could without much difficulty have produced a far more effective, and therefore more valuable law than that which, after so long an incubation, is to be added to the statute‐book.

The institution of food and cookery exhibitions and the dissemination of practical knowledge with respect to cookery by means of lectures and demonstrations are excellent things in their way. But while it is important that better and more scientific attention should be generally given to the preparation of food for the table, it must be admitted to be at least equally important to insure that the food before it comes into the hands of the expert cook shall be free from adulteration, and as far as possible from impurity,—that it should be, in fact, of the quality expected. Protection up to a certain point and in certain directions is afforded to the consumer by penal enactments, and hitherto the general public have been disposed to believe that those enactments are in their nature and in their application such as to guarantee a fairly general supply of articles of tolerable quality. The adulteration laws, however, while absolutely necessary for the purpose of holding many forms of fraud in check, and particularly for keeping them within certain bounds, cannot afford any guarantees of superior, or even of good, quality. Except in rare instances, even those who control the supply of articles of food to large public and private establishments fail to take steps to assure themselves that the nature and quality of the goods supplied to them are what they are represented to be. The sophisticator and adulterator are always with us. The temptations to undersell and to misrepresent seem to be so strong that firms and individuals from whom far better things might reasonably be expected fall away from the right path with deplorable facility, and seek to save themselves, should they by chance be brought to book, by forms of quibbling and wriggling which are in themselves sufficient to show the moral rottenness which can be brought about by an insatiable lust for gain. There is, unfortunately, cheating to be met with at every turn, and it behoves at least those who control the purchase and the cooking of food on the large scale to do what they can to insure the supply to them of articles which have not been tampered with, and which are in all respects of proper quality, both by insisting on being furnished with sufficiently authoritative guarantees by the vendors, and by themselves causing the application of reasonably frequent scientific checks upon the quality of the goods.

The academic library clings to its etymological roots; even a term such as “alternative materials” connotes print. Still, because of the recognition of recreational or instructional values, some audiovisual (AV) formats—traditionally, the sight‐sound media of film, recordings, and graphics— have become accepted (if not wholly embraced) in academic collections. Whether these nonprint materials are bibliographically and physically accessible is problematical: AV is often purchased from different budgets, housed separately, and indexed by a system different from that for the print collection. Nonprint also includes three‐dimensional objects (3D), materials equally useful as supplements to the printed page: a model, a simulation, the “real thing” itself. The literature indicates these materials are increasingly important in school and public library collections. We ask then, should objects be part of academic library collections, and what is the present status of these materials in academic libraries?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the complex relationship between the learner and the learning environment. As a method case study research was employed to examine the student's experience of the learning environment. Work experience is considered to be an essential course requirement for vocational programmes throughout the world. This paper exclusively describes the learning environment and presents a number of significant processes that the learner experiences, each one having an impact on the learning experience. This paper will be of interest to policy makers, academics and educators who face the challenge of trying to understand how students learn in the workplace.

Case study research was used to systematically investigate the learning environments and examine five students’ experience of learning in healthcare settings which included nurseries, nursing homes and hospitals while studying on a two-year health studies Further Education (FE) programme. Through critical incident interviews, observations and documentation data were collected and analysed.

This study has identified the learning environment as a complex entity comprising of six significant processes: physical environment, interaction communication, self-awareness, tasks, feelings and learning. These processes illustrate the multidimensional nature of the learning environment, how dependent they are on each other and how they coexist within the learning environment.

In studying this particular student group many similarities have been found with pre-registration nurses and other professional groups studying on undergraduate programmes in higher education who rely on the “workplace” for learning, particularly where the workplace may provide up to half the educational experience in a programme's curriculum.

This study only really provides a snapshot of a number of healthcare settings that exist in one geographical area, and coupled with the size of the sample itself further limits the study. However, what is inherent in qualitative research particularly in a case study design is the focus on in-depth contextual data.

This paper is unique as it examines the learning experience of students on a health studies programme in FE. It describes and discusses their experience of workplace learning.

This conceptual paper diagnoses the fundamental tensions between the social temporality of sustainability and the individual temporality of marketing in the Dominant Social Paradigm. We propose the notion of ‘existentialized sustainability’ as a possible way forward.

We take the Heideggerian perspective that death may bring individual and societal time into a common framework. From here, we compare anthropological and consumer culture research on funerary rites in non-modern societies with contemporary societies of the DSP.

Funerary rites reveal important insights into how individuals relate to their respective societies. Individuals are viewed as important contributors to the maintenance and regeneration of the group in non-modern societies. In contrast, funerary rites for individuals in the DSP are private, increasingly informal, and unconnected to sustaining society at large. This analysis reveals clear parallels between the goals of sustainability and the values of non-modern funerary rites.

We propose the metaphor of a funerary rite for sustainability to promote consciousness towards societal futures. The idea is to improve ‘quality of death’ through sustainability – in other words, the ‘existentialization of sustainability’. This opens up a possible strategy for marketers to actively contribute to a societal shift towards a New Environmental Paradigm (NEP).

The Heideggerian approach is a novel way to identify and reconcile the epistemic contradictions between sustainability and marketing. This diagnosis suggests a way in which marketing can address the wicked problem of global sustainability challenges, perhaps allowing a new spirituality in consumption.