This article delves into the acceptance of autonomous driving within society and its implications for the automotive insurance sector. The research encompasses two different studies conducted with meticulous analysis. The first study involves over 600 participants involved with the automotive industry who have not yet had the opportunity to experience autonomous driving technology. It primarily centers on the adaptation of insurance products to align with the imminent implementation of this technology. The second study is directed at individuals who have had the opportunity to test an autonomous driving platform first-hand. Specifically, it examines users’ experiences after conducting test drives on public roads using an autonomous research platform jointly developed by MAPFRE, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The study conducted demonstrates that the user acceptance of autonomous driving technology significantly increases after firsthand experience with a real autonomous car. This finding underscores the importance of bringing autonomous driving technology closer to end-users in order to improve societal perception. Furthermore, the results provide valuable insights for industry stakeholders seeking to navigate the market as autonomous driving technology slowly becomes an integral part of commercial vehicles. The findings reveal that a substantial majority (96% of the surveyed individuals) believe that autonomous vehicles will still require insurance. Additionally, 90% of respondents express the opinion that policies for autonomous vehicles should be as affordable or even cheaper than those for traditional vehicles. This suggests that people may not be fully aware of the significant costs associated with the systems enabling autonomous driving when considering their insurance needs, which puts the spotlight back on the importance of bringing this technology closer to the general public.
DOCUMENT
Study about voluntary use of mobile apps to promote behaviour change presented at the Etmaal voor de Communicatiewetenschap
LINK
As society has to adapt to changing energy sources and consumption, it is driving away from fossil energy. One particular area of interest is electrical driving and the increasing demand for (public) charging facilities. For municipalities, it is essential to adapt to this changing demand and provide more public charging facilities.In order to accommodate on roll-out strategies in metropolitan areas a data driven simulation model, SEVA1, has been developed The SEVA base model used in this paper is an Agent-Based model that incorporate past sessions to predict future charging behaviour. Most EV users are habitual users and tend to use a small subset of the available charge facilities, by that obtaining a pattern is within the range possibilities. Yet, for non-habitual users, for example, car sharing users, obtaining a pattern is much harder as the cars use a significantly higher amount of charge points.The focus of this research is to explore different model implementations to assess the potential of predicting free-floating cars from the non-habitual user population. Most important result is that we now can simulate effects of deployement of car sharing users in the system, and with that the effect on convenience for habitual users. Results show that the interaction between habitual and non habitual EV users affect the unsuccessful connection attempts based increased based on the size of the car-sharing fleet up to approximately 10 percent. From these results implications for policy makers could be drawn.
MULTIFILE
City logistics is one of the causes of today's road congestion in our cities, but at the same time its efficiency is affected by the traffic problems. The driving behaviour and mission strategies used by vans and lorries operating in urban areas usually does not exploit modern infomobility solutions. CityLog, a project co-funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme, aims at increasing the sustainability and the efficiency of urban goods deliveries through an adaptive and integrated mission management and by innovative vehicle features. More particularly, CityLog integrates a wide range of logistics-oriented infomobility services that include an optimized pre-trip planner, a new type of navigation system based on enhanced maps and a last mile parcel tracking service to avoid unsuccessful deliveries. © 2011 IEEE.
LINK
It has become a topic at Dutch educational institutes to feel not only responsible for improvement of theoretical and practical skills, but also of 'competences' in a broader sense. The curriculum of the Electrical and Electronic (E&E) Department has been changed enormously in the past decade. Fewer lessons and many more projects were introduced. We have choosen to let the students work on competences especially in the projects they are in. With the introduction of competences and the aid of a student portfolio we have given the tools to the students to improve their competences in a broader way. At the E &E department we introduced two different ways of working on competences. In the first years of their study students choose different roles in our projects every time. We have described all the roles and the related tasks for each specific role. While working on a role, the students indirectly work on different competences. This way of working inforces a broader educational level (a student shouldn t work on things he already knows or is able to handle) and the hitch hiking behaviour is banned out. Students now do take responsibility while contributing to the project teams. Inquiries amongst the students confirm these results. The second way is working on the specific competences in their traineeship and thesis work in the last part of their study. This will be introduced in autumn 2004 in the E&E department. In this paper we will show you how we are implementing the integration of competences, like the E&E department did, for IPD projects as well. This implementation is planned to start in autumn 2004.
DOCUMENT
The hospitality industry contributes significantly to global climate change through its high resource consumption and emissions due to travel. As public pressure for hotels to develop sustainability initiatives to mitigate their footprint grows, a lack of understanding of green behavior and consumption of hotel guests hinders the adoption of effective programs. Most tourism research thus far has focused on the ecotourism segment, rather than the general population of travelers, and while research in consumer behavior shows that locus of control (LOC) and guilt can influence guests’ environmental behavior, those factors have not been tested with consideration of the subjective norm to measure their interaction and effect on recycling behavior. This study first examines the importance of internal and external LOC on factors for selecting hotel accommodation and the extent of agreement about hotel practices and, second, examines the differences in recycling behavior among guests with internal versus external LOC under levels of positive versus negative subjective norms and feelings of low versus high guilt.
MULTIFILE
With a market demand for low cost, easy to produce, flexible and portable applications in healthcare, energy, biomedical or electronics markets, large research programs are initiated to develop new technologies to provide this demand with new innovative ideas. One of these fast developing technologies is organic printed electronics. As the term printed electronics implies, functional materials are printed via, e.g. inkjet, flexo or gravure printing techniques, on to a substrate material. Applications are, among others, organic light emitting diodes (OLED), sensors and Lab-on-a-chip devices. For all these applications, in some way, the interaction of fluids with the substrate is of great importance. The most used substrate materials for these low-cost devices are (coated) paper or plastic. Plastic substrates have a relatively low surface energy which frequently leads to poor wetting and/or poor adhesion of the fluids on the substrates during printing and/ or post-processing. Plasma technology has had a long history in treating materials in order to improve wetting or promote adhesion. The µPlasma patterning tool described in this thesis combines a digital inkjet printing platform with an atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge plasma tool. Thus enabling selective and local plasma treatment, at atmospheric pressure, of substrates without the use of any masking materials. In this thesis, we show that dependent on the gas composition the substrate surface can either be functionalized, thus increasing its surface energy, or material can be deposited on the surface, lowering its surface energy. Through XPS and ATR-FTIR analysis of the treated (polymer) substrate surfaces, chemical modification of the surface structure was confirmed. The chemical modification and wetting properties of the treated substrates remained present for at least one month after storage. Localized changes in wettability through µPlasma patterning were obtained with a resolution of 300µm. Next to the control of wettability of an ink on a substrate in printed electronics is the interaction of ink droplets with themselves of importance. In printing applications, coalescence of droplets is standard practice as consecutive droplets are printed onto, or close to each other. Understanding the behaviour of these droplets upon coalescence is therefore important, especially when the ink droplets are of different composition and/or volume. For droplets of equal volume, it was found that dye transport across the coalescence bridge could be fully described by diffusion only. This is as expected, as due to the droplet symmetry on either side of the bridge, the convective flows towards the bridge are of equal size but opposite in direction. For droplets of unequal volume, the symmetry across the bridge is no longer present. Experimental analysis of these merging droplets show that in the early stages of coalescence a convective flow from the small to large droplet is present. Also, a smaller convective flow of shorter duration from the large into the small droplet was identified. The origin of this flow might be due to the presence of vortices along the interface of the bridge, due to the strong transverse flow to open the bridge. To conclude, three potential applications were showcased. In the first application we used µPlasma patterning to create hydrophilic patterns on hydrophobic dodecyl-trichlorosilane (DTS) covered glass. Capillaries for a Lab-on-a-chip device were successfully created by placing two µPlasma patterned glass slides on top of each other separated by scotch tape. In the second application we showcased the production of a RFID tag via inkjet printing. Functional RFID-tags on paper were created via inkjet printing of silver nanoparticle ink connected to an integrated circuit. The optimal operating frequency of the produced tags is in the range of 860-865 MHz, making them usable for the European market, although the small working range of 1 m needs further improvement. Lastly, we showed the production of a chemresistor based gas sensor. In house synthesised polyemeraldine salt (PANi) was coated by hand on top of inkjet printed silver electrodes. The sensor proved to be equally sensitive to ethanol and water vapour, reducing its selectivity in detecting changes in gas composition.
DOCUMENT
The aim of this QSR 2022 on tourism is to make an attempt to assess available information about the tourism industry from three countries and various sources and present it in a comprehensive manner. We, thereby, describe common features of regional tourism structures, as well as differences, and we present some of the identified data incompatibilities (sections 2.2 and 2.3). The recommendations in section 3 present avenues along which data collection and monitoring can be improved, inspired by a set of key forces driving change intourism that stakeholders should be prepared for (section 2.4).
MULTIFILE
![Tourism [Wadden Sea Quality Status Report]](https://publinova-harvester-content-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails/files/previews/pdf/20250506134122033770.20-20Wadden20Sea20Quality20Status20Report20-20Tourism-thumbnail-400x300.png)
Background. One of the stakeholders in tackling the rise and health consequences of overweight and obesity is the general practice physician (GP). GPs are in a good position to inform and give nutrition guidance to overweight patients. Objective. Assessment of working mechanism of determinants of the nutrition guidance practice: noticing patients’ overweight and guidance of treatment by GPs [linear analysis of structural relations (LISREL) path model] in a longitudinal study. Methods. This longitudinal study measured data in 1992, 1997 and 2007. The 1992 LISREL path model (Hiddink GJ, Hautvast J, vanWoerkumCMJ, Fieren CJ, vantHofMA. Nutrition guidance by primary-care physicians: LISREL analysis improves understanding. Prev Med 1997; 26: 29–36.) demonstrated that ‘noticing patients’ overweight and guidance of treatment’ was directly and indirectly influenced by predisposing factors, driving forces and perceived barriers. This article defines and discusses the path analysis of the 2007 data (compared with 1997). Results. This analysis shows both similarity and differences inworking mechanism of determinants of noticing patients’ overweight and guidance of treatment between 1997 and 2007. The backbone of themechanism with four predisposing factors is the similarity. The number of driving forces and of paths through intermediary factors to the dependent variable constitutes the difference. Conclusions. The backbone of the working mechanism of determinants of the nutrition guidance practice: noticing patients’ overweight and guidance of treatment by GPs was similar in 2007 and 1997. The influence of GPs task perception on noticing patients’ overweight and guidance of treatment considerably increased in 2007 compared to 1997. The longitudinal character of this article gives a strong practice-based evidence for weight management by GPs.
DOCUMENT
There is mounting evidence that efforts to mitigate the adverse effects of human activity on climate and biodiversity have so far been unsuccessful. Explanations for this failure point to a number of factors discussed in this article. While acknowledging cognitive dissonance as a significant contributing factor to continuing unsustainable practices, this article seeks to explore hegemonic rationality of industrial expansion and economic growth and resulting politics of denial. These politics promote the economic rationale for exploitation of the environment, with pursuit of material wealth seen as the most rational goal. Framed this way, this rationality is presented by political and corporate decision-makers as common sense and continuous environmentally destructive behavior is justified under the guise of consumer choices, hampering meaningful action for sustainable change. This article underlines forms of alternative rationality, namely, non-utilitarian and non-hierarchical worldview of environmental and human flourishing, that can advance sustainability. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
DOCUMENT
