Engineered products have economic, environmental, and social impacts, which comprise the major dimensions of sustainability. This paper seeks to explore interactions between design parameters when social impacts are incorporated into the concept development phase of the systems design process. Social impact evaluation is increasing in importance similar to what has happened in recent years with environmental impact consideration in the design of engineered products. Concurrently, research into new airship design has increased. Airships have yet to be reintroduced at a large scale or for a range of applications in society. Although airships have the potential for positive environmental and economic impacts, the social impacts are still rarely considered. This paper presents a case study of the hypothetical introduction of airships in the Amazon region of Brazil to help local farmers transport their produce to market. It explores the design space in terms of both engineering parameters and social impacts using a discrete-event simulation to model the system. The social impacts are found to be dependent not only on the social factors and airship design parameters but also on the farmer-airship system, suggesting that socio-technical systems design will benefit from integrated social impact metric analysis.

The impact of engineered products is a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental or social impact, with the last category defined as the effect of a product on the day-to-day life of people. Design teams lack sufficient tools to estimate the social impact of products, and the combined impacts of economic, environmental and social impacts for the products they are designing. This paper aims to provide a framework for the estimation of product impact during product design. To estimate product impact, models of both the product and society are required. This framework integrates models of the product, scenario, society and impact into an agent-based model to estimate product impact. Although this paper demonstrates the framework using only social impact, the framework can also be applied to economic or environmental impacts individually or all three concurrently. Agent-based modelling has been used previously for product adoption models, but it has not been extended to estimate product impact. Having tools for impact estimation allows for optimising the product design parameters to increase the potential positive impact and reduce potential negative impact.

Engineered products have economic, environmental, and social impacts, which comprise the major dimensions of sustainability. This paper seeks to determine the interaction between design parameters when the social impacts are incorporated into the design process. Social impact evaluation is increasing in importance similar to what has happened with environmental impact consideration in recent years in the design of engineered products. Concurrently, research into new airship design has increased, however airships have yet to be reintroduced at a large scale and for a range of applications in society. Although airships have the potential for positive environmental and economic impacts, the social impacts are still rarely considered. This paper presents a case study of the hypothetical introduction of airships in the Amazon to help local farmers transport their produce to market. It explores the design space in terms of the airship's social impacts connected to the design parameters. The social impacts are found to be dependent not only on the social factors and airship design parameters, but also on the farmer-airship system, suggesting that socio-technical systems design will benefit from integrated social impact metric analysis.

The impact of products is becoming a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental, or social impact and is defined by the effect of a product on day-to-day life. Design teams lack sufficient tools to predict the impact of products they are designing. In this paper we present a framework for the prediction of product impact during product design. This framework integrates models of the product, scenario, society, and impact into an agent-based model to predict product impact. Although this paper focuses on social impact, the framework can also be applied to economic or environmental impacts. An illustration of using the framework is also presented. Agent-based modeling has been used previously for adoption models, but it has not been extended to predict product impact. Having tools for impact prediction allows for optimizing the product design parameters to increase potential positive impact and reduce potential negative impact.

The equations for gravity waves on the free surface of a laterally unbounded inviscid fluid of uniform density and variable depth under the action of an external pressure are derived through Hamilton's principle on the assumption that the fluid moves in vertical columns. The resulting equations are equivalent to those of Green & Naghdi (1976). The conservation laws for energy, momentum and potential vorticity are inferred directly from symmetries of the Lagrangian. The potential vorticity vanishes in any flow that originates from rest; this leads to a canonical formulation in which the evolution equations are equivalent, for uniform depth, to Whitham's (1967) generalization of the Boussinesq equations, in which dispersion, but not nonlinearity, is assumed to be weak. The further approximation that nonlinearity and dispersion are comparably weak leads to a canonical form of Boussinesq's equations that conserves consistent approximations to energy, momentum (for a level bottom) and potential vorticity.

Individuals given a series of words to memorize normally show better immediate recall for items from the beginning and end of the list than for midlist items. This phenomenon, known as the serial position effect, is thought to reflect the concurrent contributions of secondary and primary memory, respectively, to recall performance. The present study compared the serial position effects produced on Trial 1 of the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) in mildly demented (N = 25; M MMSE = 20.0) and very mildly demented (N = 25; M MMSE = 25.5) patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and age- and education-matched normal control (NC) participants (N = 50). In addition, the serial position effects of the very mildly demented AD patients were compared to those of patients with a transient, circumscribed amnesia arising from a prescribed series of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments for the relief of depressive illness (N = 11). While the NC group exhibited the typical serial position effect, AD patients recalled significantly fewer words than NC participants overall, and exhibited a significantly reduced primacy effect (i.e., recall of the first 2 list items) with a normal recency effect (i.e., recall of the last 2 list items). Patients with circumscribed amnesia due to ECT were as impaired as the very mildly demented AD patients on most standard CVLT measures of learning and memory, but exhibited primacy and recency effects, which were within normal limits. These results suggest that a reduction in the primacy effect, but not the recency effect, is an early and ubiquitous feature of the memory impairment of AD. It is not, however, a necessary feature of all causes of memory impairment. (JINS, 2000, 6, 290–298.)

The economic role of the state is controversial, even after the collapse of communism and the election of New Labour. The demand that governments get off the backs of wealth-creators has barely diminished since the 1980s; but some still urge control of private and corporate greed in the public interest. There is no sign of such controversy in Greek antiquity; but I shall suggest that the practice of the cities depended on political considerations which reveal comparable principles. All governments, whatever their complexion, now accept some responsibility for general economic well–being, even if their actions may amount to little more than a claim that prosperity will ‘trickle down’ from top to bottom. Numerous functions which would now be identified as economic were performed by Greek cities; after brief preliminaries to set the economic scene, I shall explore them, and try to determine why they were undertaken.