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The purpose of this paper is to describe a pilot application of the Sustainable Transportation Analysis & Rating System (STARS), and highlight how a sustainability rating system can be used to promote sustainable urban development through a university–city partnership. STARS is an example of a second-generation “green” rating system focused on transportation planning, design, operations and maintenance.

In Fall 2013, James Madison University (JMU) initiated a STARS pilot demonstration using a local corridor that connects the university and the city of Harrisonburg. The pilot’s purposes were to develop attainable transportation-development targets, evaluate infrastructure and programmatic options in the context of a credit-based system and demonstrate a decision-making framework centered on sustainability optimization. The paper provides an overview of the STARS framework and the pilot’s collaborations, analysis, findings and recommendations for credits across sustainability dimensions.

Upon applying the rating system, the research team found that STARS may initially be easier to integrate into a comprehensive transportation planning process than a corridor-level evaluation due to data needs, in-house expertise and planning timelines for campus and city developments. A campus-wide master plan based on STARS would enable a university and a city to apply sustainability principles to their physical and/or policy interfaces to systemically create change and achieve quantifiable targets.

The STARS framework provides a novel approach for integrating multiple stakeholders (faculty, the university and city staff, students and community members) in a process of capacity building, evaluating options, policy-making, implementation and performance monitoring. The JMU pilot is the first application of STARS at a university and the only US East Coast application to date.

Although the importance of climate change is generally acknowledged, its impacts are often not taken into account explicitly when planning development projects. This being due to limited resources, among others, this paper aims to propose a simple and low-cost approach to assess the viability of human activities under climate change.

Many human activities are feasible only within a narrow range of climatic conditions. Comparing such “climate corridors” with future climate projections provides an intuitive yet quantitative means for assessing needs for, and the viability of, adaptation activities under climate change.

The approach was tested within development projects in Pakistan, Peru and Tajikistan. The approach was shown to work well for forestry and agriculture, indicating positive/negative prospects for wheat in two districts in Pakistan, temperature constraints for maize in Peru and widening elevation ranges for walnut trees in Tajikistan.

Climate corridor analyses feed into the preparation of Local Adaptation Plans of Action in Pakistan.

The simplicity and robustness of climate corridor analysis allow for efficient analysis and communication of climate change impacts. It works when data availability is limited, but it can as well accommodate a wide range of complexities. It has proven to be an effective vehicle for mainstreaming climate change into adaptation planning.

Recently there has been a strong trend towards automation in the mine industry. This paper seeks to describe and analyse an algorithm that can be used as a part of an infrastructure‐free reactive navigation system for autonomous vehicles in underground mines.

The idea presented here to enable infrastructure‐free autonomous navigation is to combine reactive behaviours for tunnel following, with topological localization. To assess the reliability and precision of the corridor detection algorithm real data recorded in both indoor and mine environments have been used.

In the research it was found that the algorithm is able to reliably detect corridors even in difficult environments such as office corridors where a large part of the walls are made of glass or in mine tunnels with a high intensity of intersections. It was also concluded that the algorithm provides good enough precision and robustness to noise in the data to enable reactive tunnel following.

This paper presents an algorithm for corridor detection, intended to be used in combination with reactive behaviours for tunnel following in underground mines. To enable fully autonomous navigation, functionality to detect and turn at intersections also needs to be developed.

This research shows that corridor detection can be used for reactive tunnel following in certain underground mine types, and that the concept of using reactive tunnel following in combination with topological localization is worthy of continued development.

This paper has presented a new algorithm for corridor detection based on the Hough transform. The algorithm is robust to noise in the data and can reliably detect corridors even where the surfaces of the walls are uneven and slightly curved.

The authors contribute to scholarly understanding of the interplay between macro-level institutions and micro-level action by focusing attention on the ways the power of institutions works through mundane organizational spaces to constrain individuals as they interact with organizations. The authors explore these macro- and micro-connections between institutions and organizational spaces through a qualitative inductive study of an emergency department in a public hospital in Australia. Analyzing observational and interview data related to a waiting room and a corridor, their findings show how the systemic power of the state and the medical profession impacts micro-level action through organizational spaces. The authors find that the medical profession exerted power in a system of domination over marginalized patients through the waiting room as an exclusion space. At the same time, the state exerted discipline power over professional subjects through the corridor as a surveillance space. Individual resistance to institutional power over the ED was controlled by policing deviance in the surveillance space and ejecting resisters to the exclusion space. Their findings contribute to the literature by opening up new insight into how mundane organizational spaces convey institutional power by dominating and disciplining micro-level actions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the choice of the accounting method for recognising actuarial gains and losses of defined benefit plans.

In the paper, a logit model is estimated in order to relate the dependent variable (actuarial gains and losses method) with some explanatory variables (size, industry, leverage, profitability, size of pension funds and the existence of actuarial gains or losses).

The results of this study indicate that size, industry, profitability and the existence of actuarial gains or actuarial losses are important determinants in the choice of the accounting method for actuarial gains and losses.

The study only addresses the choice between the equity recognition method and the corridor method due to the small number of companies that adopted the profit or loss method (only eight observations).

This paper examines the recognition of actuarial gains and losses which can have an economically significant impact on companies' financial position and financial performance. This paper contributes to the accounting choice literature by exploiting the determinants of the choice of the accounting method for recognising actuarial gains and losses under IAS 19.

In Iran, as elsewhere, a great number of student dormitory-style buildings have been built with shared rooms either side of a central corridor as a simple and affordable building form. Highly populated shared rooms with common facilities in such buildings can produce problems in terms of personal space but, at the same time, have many advantages for social interactions and better use of resources, which is a feature of sustainability. Most of these buildings are old and need fundamental refurbishment. This study aims to provide some guidelines to improve advantages and control disadvantages of this building type for future refurbishment and new developments.

The advantages and disadvantages of shared spaces have been analysed using a Post Occupancy Evaluation approach in a case study which is representative of more than 30 university dormitories in Iran. Interview, observation and questionnaire survey tools are used in this study.

Results show students have some problems regarding privacy, interaction, security, noise, circulation, access hierarchy, storage spaces, use of rooms and territory definition.

Based on the results of the study, some design suggestions are made for more efficient shared spaces for future designs and also for improving the case study dormitory, in terms of both access hierarchy and internal room arrangements.

Post Occupancy Evaluation has not previously been used to provide guidelines for architects to improve the quality of design according to existing functional/behavioural problems in similar buildings.

By using the lens of effectuation and causation, this paper aims at exploring how the team is formed in high-tech academic spinoffs, by looking specifically at decisional heuristics in an academic context. Indeed, the team composition is a critical issue for the subsequent growth of the academic new venture: on the one hand, the scientific-centred knowledge of the academic entrepreneurs is one of the main elements that lay the foundation for the new venture; on the other hand, it has been widely recognized that the lack of market-related knowledge and experience often has detrimental effects on performance. Decisive is then to explore how team decisions pertaining to the team formation process are taken.

A qualitative methodology based on multiple case studies is adopted under an abductive approach.

Results shed light on how decisions pertaining to team formation are taken by academic entrepreneurs and with what effects on team composition, a fundamental element to foster the growth of academic new ventures. Specifically, this study derives some propositions about the adoption of effectuation and causation in the team formation process, their occurrence and sequence in the light of the scientific context in which academic new ventures spin out and the effects on the team composition.

This study contributes to the debate on academic entrepreneurs’ decisional heuristic and the use of effectuation or causation in the early stages of an academic new venture, by focusing on the team formation process. This study specifically considers three temporal micro-phases – the selection of founders before inception, the appointment of top management teams, and the integration of early employees after the inception – and whether the academic context influences the decisional heuristics. Managerial implications are also derived.

By reviewing recent literature, it is noticeable that considerable attention has been given to the relationship between all Atlantic hurricanes and those that make landfall in the USA. However, less research has been done regarding landfall frequency and identifying spatial areas that are statistically more likely to produce landfalling hurricanes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a better prediction method for US landfalling hurricanes.

This work is based on the hypothesis that landfall variations along the US coast can be better explained in terms of hurricane origination points over more susceptible areas on the North Atlantic Ocean. Simulation techniques are used to spatially quantify the landfall probability.

Results indicate the existence of a landfall corridor in the Atlantic Basin, which explains some of the variances observed in the landfall process. Two different hypotheses of climate are examined. A long‐term assumption is based on the historical data from 1940 to 2010. The second assumption is based on the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. Since 1995, we are in a warm phase and we assume that sea surface temperatures remain warmer than the long‐term average over the next several years. Results indicate that the average increase on landfall frequency is about 13 per cent.

This paper is the first paper that introduces the concept of landfall origination corridor. It spatially identifies the differences between long term and warm phase of the atmosphere in terms of US landfall occurrence using hurricane origination points.

This paper seeks to identify the instances of informal knowledge sharing at the “backstage” of the clinical environment and to demonstrate their contribution to organisational learning and patient safety.

The approach takes the form of an ethnographic study in two Day Surgery Units in the UK National Health Service undertaken over three months in various clinical and non‐clinical settings. The observations recorded the instances of communication and knowledge sharing, as well as taking into account the wider socio‐cultural and organisational context.

The study identified situations of informal knowledge sharing. These were characterised by degrees of homogeneity/heterogeneity and patency/privacy. Focusing on three sites – staff lounge, storeroom, and theatre corridor, the paper elaborates the context and content of knowledge sharing, and the contributions to clinical practice, service function and learning.

Backstage knowledge sharing is premised on shared understanding, trust and mutuality and situational opportunity. This contrasts with more formal models of learning advocated in policy. Services managers might embrace, rather than replace, these relationships, whilst emphasising the need for knowledge to be shared more widely amongst peers and service leaders.

To date, little research in the area of patient safety has considered the contribution of informal learning at the “backstage”. This is an important, if taken‐for‐granted, part of everyday practice and makes a “hidden” contribution to organisational learning.

Up-to-date, the simulation of pedestrian behavior is used to support the design and analysis of urban infrastructure and public facilities. The purpose of this paper is to present a microscopic model that describes pedestrian behavior in a two-dimensional space. It is based on multi-agent systems and cellular automata theory. The concept of layered-intelligent terrain from the video game industry is reused and concepts such as tracing, evasion and rejection effects related to pedestrian interactive behavior are involved. In a simulation scenario, an agent represents a pedestrian with homogeneous physical characteristics such as walking speed and height. The agents are moved through a discrete space formed by a lattice of hexagonal cells, where each one can contain up to one agent at the same time. The model was validated by using a test that is composed of 17 real data sets of pedestrian unidirectional flow. Each data set has been extracted from laboratory-controlled scenarios carried out with up to 400 people walking through a corridor whose configuration changed in form of the amplitude of its entrance doors and the amplitude of its exit doors from one experiment to another. Moreover, each data set contained different groups of coordinates that compose pedestrian trajectories. The scenarios were replicated and simulated using the proposed model, obtaining 17 simulated data sets. In addition, a measurement methodology based on Voronoi diagrams was used to compute the velocity, density and specific flow of pedestrians to build a time-series graphic and a set of heat maps for each of the real and simulated data sets.

The approach consists of a multi-agent system and cellular automata theory. The obtained results were compared with other studies and a statistical analysis based on similarity measurement is presented.

A microscopic mobility model that describes pedestrian behavior in a two-dimensional space is presented. It is based on multi-agent systems and cellular automata theory. The concept of layered-intelligent terrain from the video game industry is reused and concepts such as tracing, evasion and rejection effects related to pedestrian interactive behavior are involved. On average, the simulated data sets are similar by 82 per cent in density and 62 per cent in velocity compared to the real data sets. It was observed that the relation between velocity and density from real scenarios could not be replicated.

The main limitations are presented in the speed simulations. Although the obtained results present a similar behavior to the reality, it is necessary to introduce more variables in the model to improve the precision and calibration. Other limitation is the dimension for simulating variables at this moment 2D is presented. So the resolution of cells, making that pedestrian to occupy many cells at the same time and the addition of three dimensions to the terrain will be a good challenge.

In total, 17 data sets were generated as a case study. They contain information related to speed, trajectories, initial and ending points. The data sets were used to calibrate the model and analyze the behavior of pedestrians. Geospatial data were used to simulate the public infrastructure in which pedestrians navigate, taking into account the initial and ending points.

The social impact is directly related to the behavior analysis of pedestrians to know tendencies, trajectories and other features that aid to improve the public facilities. The results could be used to generate policies oriented toward developing more consciousness in the public infrastructure development.

The general methodology is the main value of this work. Many approaches were used, designed and implemented for analyzing the pedestrians’ behavior. In addition, all the methods were implemented in plug-in for Quantum GIS. The analysis was described with heat maps and statistical approaches. In addition, the obtained results are focused on analyzing the density, speed and the relationship between these features.