Learning curves

Many developing nations wish to have the opportunity to industrialise and fear committing to global climate agreements will reduce that opportunity. They assume that to achieve industrialisation and modernisation requires fossil fuels. This is based on the belief that the Western industrial economies of UK, Europe and the USA achieved their industrialisation largely through access to and the use of fossil fuels. As a result of these concerns, most developing nations have resisted calls for placing a carbon price and joining the Copenhagen Accord (and subsequent international climate agreements), out of fear it would dampen economic growth, jobs growth and development.
However, as the latest climate change science shows, if Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and China (BRIIC) nations and developing countries “grow first with fossil fuels” and reduce emissions later, it is going to be very hard for greenhouse gas emissions and related global warming to stay within the 2 degree guardrail to avoid dangerous climate change. So, this thesis reviews whether or not these common myths are true. The thesis integrates the latest studies which
1) Evidences that the first industrial revolution could have technically still occurred with less fossil fuels and more renewable energy over time, just more slowly than it did with abundant fossil fuels. The thesis shows that it was not until the 1830s with the advent of rail in the UK that coal prices fell and use of coal and steam engines really took off. The thesis shows the key role renewable energy therefore played in powering first industrial revolution innovations from 1600s-1820 in the UK such as the revolution in cotton manufacturing, which was water powered.
2) Evidences that fossil fuels, whilst important still for some medium to high temperature industrial processes, are no longer essential to achieve much of the modernisation of developing and BRIIIC economies. The thesis evidences how innovations in energy efficiency (i.e.: more energy efficient industrial processes, building and transport vehicle design) makes it much easier now to power a modern economy on renewable energy and energy storage. (See Chapter 2)
3) Evidences that, if energy efficiency improvements are combined with low carbon energy sources such as wind power and solar PV, low carbon energy systems are no longer more expensive than fossil fuels in many parts of the world. (Chapters 2-4)
4) Shows that it is still possible to further reduce the costs of key renewable energy and other low carbon technologies (Chapters 3-4) and as a result
5) Shows that it is possible to meet society’s needs for key industrialised products whilst reducing emissions. Provides evidence that it is possible to have a 3rdlow carbon industrial revolution and hence technically and economically possible for developing and BRIIC economies now to leapfrog to a low carbon future. (Chapter 2-3)

The thesis also evidences that it was improvements in overall energy productivity through the combination of greater energy efficiency and energy conversion efficiency as well as expansion of energy sources, which drove the price of energy services down, which helped underpin economic growth in the first and second industrial revolutions.
The thesis shows that it is possible again to achieve a step change in energy productivity in how society delivers energy services – through a focus on integrated approaches to energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage – in ways that deliver energy services relatively cheaply in many parts of the world. Hence the thesis shows that it is possible for developing and BRIIC nations to chart a low carbon 3rd industrial revolution and that this is increasingly being understood in China and India and other developing nations. Thus the thesis overall show how to achieve a transition to a low carbon future whilst boosting productivity and economic growth, which is very important and relevant for current debates on climate change policy in developing and BRIIC countries. The thesis finishes (Chapter 5) by showing how a low carbon industrial revolution could create higher economic growth than business as usual using insights and results from earlier chapters

Personalised environments such as adaptive educational systems can be evaluated and compared using performance curves. Such summative studies are useful for determining whether or not new modifications enhance or degrade performance. Performance curves also have the potential to be utilised in formative studies that can shape adaptive model design at a much finer level of granularity. We describe the use of learning curves for evaluating personalised educational systems and outline some of the potential pitfalls and how they may be overcome. We then describe three studies in which we demonstrate how learning curves can be used to drive changes in the user model. First, we show how using learning curves for subsets of the domain model can yield insight into the appropriateness of the model's structure. In the second study we use this method to experiment with model granularity. Finally, we use learning curves to analyse a large volume of user data to explore the feasibility of using them as a reliable method for finetuning a system's model. The results of these experiments demonstrate the successful use of performance curves in formative studies of adaptive educational systems.

Ordering 3D configurations of curves of increasing complexity
Configurations of curves in 3D of increasing complexity
Configurations in 3D:
-- single continuous curves (Group I)
-- interlocking disjoint curves (Group II)
-- animations offering a 3D perspective (Group III)
-- fractional rotation of continuous curves with indication of increased spread (Group IV)
-- animation of curves with indication of increased spread (Group V)
-- animations of toroidal curves with indication of increased spread (Group VI)
Interpretation of knot language?
Psychosocial implications of configurations of curves?
Static description of cycles versus the dynamics of Cyclic experience
Implicit coherence speculatively explored?
Relative interestingness and boringness of forms of coherence
Sustainable dynamics "re-cognized" as knots?
Articulation and complexification of cycles of sustainability
Musical comprehension of unity versus diversity using four geometric parameters?
Imagined potential of circular forms as a pattern language

The existence of a learning curve in which a firm’s costs decline with cumulative experience suggests that early entry provides learning opportunities that create advantage by reducing future costs relative to later entrants. While prior strategy research often assumes that learning curves are deterministic and known ex ante to firms, a substantial body of evidence suggests that learning curves are inherently uncertain. If there is uncertainty in the learning curve, then the taken-for-granted wisdom regarding the strategic implications of learning curves may over- or under-emphasize the value of early entry. We consider two forms of uncertainty prospective (future costs) and contemporaneous (current costs). We demonstrate computationally that while prospective uncertainty in the learning curve enhances the benefits of early entry, contemporaneous uncertainty reduces these benefits. Further, we examine the implications of these findings for competition and learning curve spillovers between leader and laggard firms. Recognizing learning curve uncertainty highlights a novel form of spillovers that don’t affect expected cost, but rather affect uncertainty about cost. Our core insight is that when learning curve uncertainty is large relative to the expected learning rate, it is uncertainty, rather than expectations about this rate, that determines the extent of early mover advantage.

For multiple-well drilling and completion campaigns, cost and schedule performance tend to improve over time. This trend in improvement is commonly referred to as a "learning curve." When a learning curve is anticipated, the campaign cost and schedule estimates may be reduced dramatically relative to an assumption of constant performance. That is, ignoring the learning curve will lead to overly pessimistic estimates. While learning curves can be observed in campaigns of various lengths and complexity, they are typically most important in large campaigns where the majority of wells are drilled after a significant portion of the learning has occurred. Conversely, they may not be appropriate in short campaigns where there is a limited time to implement learnings, or in campaigns with highly idiosyncratic wells where learning does not necessarily translate across projects.

Self-bows replaced spear throwers as primary terrestrial hunting weapons on nearly all continents at different time periods throughout human prehistory. Many scholars have debated whether this transition occurred because of a shift in resource exploitation toward smaller fauna or because of the bow's supposedly superior performance in warfare. Before causal hypotheses explaining this technological shift can be tested, performance characteristics of atlatls versus bows must be well understood. Studies of performance characteristics often address topics such as the range, accuracy, or maintainability of weapons systems, but this study quantitatively compares the learnability of each weapon. Learning curves for spear throwers and bows are established using contemporary data generated by archers from the Society for Creative Anachronism and atlatlists from the World Atlatl Association. The hypothesis that spear throwers are easier to learn and can be wielded effectively by a wider segment of human populations than bows is supported. Implications for the organization of labor are contextualized in light of socioecological changes generally characterizing the conditions under which shifts from atlatl to self-bow technology occurred in prehistory.

[American Anthropologist early view; no volume number yet]

Sebuah study mengatakan bahwa untuk menjadi ahli anda butuh waktu 10.000 jam ( sepuluh ribu jam) latihan. Benar untuk menjadi seorang ahli yang benar-benar terampil maka di butuhkan waktu sekitar 10.000 jam terbang.

Namun ada satu hal yang jarang dibahas, jika kita berbicara tentang 10.000 terbang, artinya kita sudah berada di ranah habit( kebiasaan). Jadi anda bisa mencapai 10.000 jam terbang jika itu sudah menjadi habit anda, padahal banyak yang tumbang karena 1000 jam pertama.

Efficiency multipliers for construction productivity are often estimated on an ad-hoc basis, depending on the project characteristics. The purpose of the study is to define a structured approach allowing the determination of the appropriate empirical productivity relations and efficiency multipliers along with their respective values. The proposed method breaks down a given construction activity into distinct operational scenarios which represent unique combinations of key productivity variables, thus providing a perspective on construction productivity for both labor-intensive and equipment-intensive operations. In addition, this is the first study to explicitly describe the process and the theoretical prerequisites for the statistically valid derivation and comparative evaluation of new efficiency multipliers for a given construction activity. A case study heavy-duty concrete paving activities over an eight month period is utilized as a testbed for the derivation of new efficiency multipliers. An excavation scenario with the use of published estimation formulae is also presented to demonstrate the approach’s capability to corroborate the values of known efficiency multipliers. The results indicate that the proposed approach improves the accuracy of estimated multipliers stemming from past productivity studies and increases the estimation precision for the derivation of new multipliers related to future construction operations.

The F-layout was introduced in 1955 and eventually enforced as a national standard as a replacement to the popular QWERTY keyboard layout in Turkey. In a more recent work, another alternative (E-layout) was developed for Turkish language and argued to be faster and more comfortable than the F-layout. However, there has not been any empirical evidence favouring any of these layouts so far. To fill this research gap in the literature, we have employed a hybrid model and conducted both between-subjects and within-subjects user experiments with twelve freshmen majoring in computer engineering. The experimental results show that there is no significant difference between learning percentage of these two layouts but the completion time of typing a trial passage with the F-layout is significantly lower than the E-layout. The F-layout has also a significantly lower physical demand score, as revealed by the subjective assessments of participants. Based on our user survey data, we also discus...

The success of (online) courses depends, among other factors, on the underlying didactical models which have always been evaluated with qualitative and quantitative research methods. Several new evaluation techniques have been developed and established in the last years. One of them is â??learning curvesâ??, which aim at measuring error rates of users when they interact with adaptive educational systems, thereby enabling the underlying models to be evaluated and improved. In this paper, we report how we have applied this new method to two case studies to show that learning curves are useful to evaluate didactical models and their implementation in educational platforms. Results show that the error rates follow a power law distribution with each additional attempt if the didactical model of an instructional unit is valid. Furthermore, the initial error rate, the slope of the curve and the goodness of fit of the curve are valid indicators for the difficulty level of a course and the q...

In this paper we seek to identify different driving forces behind the fall in LNG liquefaction unit costs. Our focus is on organizational learning including process specific R&D, but we also seek to account for autonomous technological change, scale effects and the effects of upstream competition among liquefaction technology suppliers. To our surprise we find that upstream competition is by far the most important factor. This may have implications for the future development in costs as the effect of increased upstream competition is temporary and likely to weaken a lot sooner than effects from learning and technological change. On the other hand, the increased competition could also spur more innovation, and induce a new drop in future unit costs.

The transition from the atlatl to the bow-and-arrow happened numerous times in prehistory and often in tandem with rising social complexity. Recent work relying on longitudinal scores from recreational archery and atlatl competitions suggests that changes in social complexity arose due to between-technology differences in learning rates: bows take more time to master, and thus their benefits are not as easily obtained as those of atlatls. We show that the learning curves underpinning this conclusion do not account for inter-competitor variability in learning rates and that critical sources of uncertainty were omitted from the analysis. We use multilevel models to carry out an analysis of the score data that circumvents these problems. The multilevel models indicate that at best, the modern recreational data are consistent with similarly modest score gains for both technologies. These modest gains are probably unrelated to learning.

Zweifelsohne stehen lernende Organisationen im Blickpunkt vielfältiger Überlegungen, die Frage nach den Zielsetzungen liegt auf der Hand. Ob die genannte Lernfähigkeit oder das Lernen als solches (Formal-) Ziel einer Unternehmung oder generell einer Organisation sein können, muß wohl bezweifelt werden. Überlegungen zur Messung einer Zielerreichung sind überlagert durch die Frage, welches denn die Ziele sind und noch schwieriger, ob überhaupt Ziele konkret genug formuliert oder verfolgt werden. Es ist vielleicht ungewöhnlich, liegt aber auf der Hand, die altbekannte Lernkurventheorie darauf abzuklopfen, ob sie zur Messung von Lernerfolgen in Organisationen geeignet ist. An hochtrabender Umschreibung und aggressiver Vermarktung mangelt es in der mehr als umfangreichen Literatur wirklich nicht.

This document is a perpetual draft, updated as new research becomes available. It exclusively represents the author's personal views and does not imply endorsement of the World Bank or the Global Partnership for Education. 1 Helen Abadzi is a Greek psychologist, who has worked since 1987 as an education specialist and senior evaluation officer in the World Bank and the Global Partnership for Education. She explores cognitive neuroscience applications that may improve the education of the poor. Her publications helped raise early-grade reading fluency to a high-level international priority.

The F-layout was introduced in 1955 and eventually enforced as a national standard as a replacement to the popular QWERTY keyboard layout in Turkey. In a more recent work, another alternative (E-layout) was developed for Turkish language and argued to be faster and more comfortable than the F-layout. However, there has not been any empirical evidence favouring any of these layouts so far. To fill this research gap in the literature, we have employed a hybrid model and conducted both between-subjects and within-subjects user experiments with twelve freshmen majoring in computer engineering. The experimental results show that there is no significant difference between learning percentage of these two layouts but the completion time of typing a trial passage with the F-layout is significantly lower than the E-layout. The F-layout has also a significantly lower physical demand score, as revealed by the subjective assessments of participants. Based on our user survey data, we also discuss some possible reasons of F-keyboard's limited prevalence among Turkish users.

E ntrants are often viewed as suffering from a "liability of newness"-at founding, they rarely possess the knowledge and capabilities necessary to compete and survive. They can overcome this liability by learning vicariously from the knowledge of incumbent firms. But how can entrants learn from external knowledge when they lack the prior related knowledge that forms the basis of absorptive capacity? We theorize that the process of internal experiential learning facilitates learning from external knowledge, particularly for entrants. To test this theory, we examine learning using a comprehensive set of U.S. commercial banking firms, including a full census of entrants. Our estimates suggest that the share of vicarious learning realized in the process of experiential learning is twice as large for entrants as for incumbents. In this sense, entrants enjoy an "advantage of newness" in learning.

The incorporation of experience curves has enhanced the treatment of technological change in models used to evaluate the cost of climate and energy policies. However, the set of activities that experience curves are assumed to capture is much broader than the set that can be characterized by learning-by-doing, the primary connection between experience curves and economic theory. How accurately do experience curves describe observed technological change? This study examines the case of photovoltaics (PV), a potentially important climate stabilization technology with robust technology dynamics. Empirical data are assembled to populate a simple engineering-based model identifying the most important factors affecting the cost of PV over the past three decades. The results indicate that learning from experience only weakly explains change in the most important cost-reducing factors-plant size, module efficiency, and the cost of silicon. They point to other explanatory variables to include in future models. Future work might also evaluate the potential for efficiency gains from policies that rely less on 'riding down the learning curve' and more on creating incentives for firms to make investments in the types of cost-reducing activities quantified in this study. . Learning rates for energy technologies. Energy Policy, 29:255-261, 2001. Philippe Menanteau. Learning from variety and competition between technological options for generating photovoltaic electricity. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 63(1):63-80, 2000. Sabine Messner. Endogenized technological learning in an energy systems model. Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 7(3):291-313, 1997. Asami Miketa and Leo Schrattenholzer. Experiments with a methodology to model the role of R&D expenditures in energy technology learning processes; first results.

Personal networks are not always diverse or large enough to reach those with the right information. This
problem increases when assembling a group of experts from around the world, something which is a
challenge in Future-oriented Technology Analysis (FTA). In this work, we address the formation of a panel
of experts, specifically how to select a group of experts from a huge group of people. We propose an
approach which uses data quality dimensions to improve expert selection quality and provide quality
metrics to the forecaster. We performed a case study and successfully showed that it is possible to use data
quality methods to support the expert search process.

Cost management system in practice has various sub-systems. Improvement of the cost management systems can be implemented using well organized computer systems. Computer aided design (CAD) systems are usually being applied through manufacturing systems. In this paper, an integrated computer aided systems in cost management (earned value management) is proposed. The procedure is implemented step by step and finally a computerized dashboard is developed to enhance applicability of the proposed system. The effect of learning and education is finally discussed.

In low-income countries many students are marginalized very early and remain illiterate. In grades 1-3 they attend rarely, though they may officially drop out in grade 4. Many others graduate from primary school without having learned letter values. The worrisome outcomes, despite much donor investment in low-income countries, have prompted scrutiny of the methods, and textbooks used to make students literate. This document offers insights from cognitive neuroscience and evidence suggesting that students can be taught basic literacy within the first semester of grade 1, if taught in consistently spelled languages. Teaching students at risk of dropout to read as early as possible enhances equity. However, the reading methods used in many countries are complex and hard for teachers to execute. They pertain to high-income countries and to certain western European languages. English but also French, Portuguese, and Dutch have complex spelling systems. English in particular requires thre...

... Addison-Wesley, 1996. [4] Simon Haykin, AH Syed, J. Zeidler, P. Yee, P. Wei, “Adaptive Tracking of Linear Time-Variant Systems by Extended RLS Algorithms”, IEEE Trans on Signal Processing,Vol.45No. 6, 1118-1128,May 1997 ... [lo] Mohammad B. Malik, Hafsa Qureshi, Rashid ...

Ce document représente exclusivement les opinions personnelles de l'auteur et n'implique pas l'approbation de la Banque mondiale ou du Partenariat mondial pour l'éducation. 1 Helen Abadzi est une psychologue grecque qui travaille depuis 1987 comme spécialiste de l'éducation et comme responsable principale d'évaluation à la Banque mondiale et au Partenariat mondial pour l'éducation. Son objectif est de trouver les applications de neurosciences cognitives qui peuvent contribuer à améliorer l'éducation des populations pauvres. Ses publications ont permis de faire de la maîtrise de la lecture dans les petites classes une priorité internationale de haut niveau.

We do two things in this paper. First, we put forward some elements of a microeconomic theory of technological evolution. This involves adding nascent (essentially undiscovered) technologies to the existing technologies of neoclassical production theory, and, more importantly, expanding the notion of the production plan to include the recipe } the complete description of the underlying engineering process. Second, we use the recipes approach in constructing a simple microeconomic model of shop-#oor learning by doing. We simulate the dynamics of the model and report the e!ects of changes in the basic parameters on the resulting engineering experience curves. For correctly chosen values of these parameters, the predictions of the model match the observed experience curves.

– Japanese (Nihongo) is an east Asian Language, extensive use of Chinese character called KANJI and Phonetic Characters called KANA (hiragana and katakana). Many people assume Japanese Keyboard on smartphone is difficult to use that's why I decide to conduct study to determine how easy to learn Japanese Keyboard for new users. Two user with no experience with Japanese keyboard on smart phone were asked to enter some Japanese sentences as fast as they can at least 20 times and same thing was asked to experienced users as well.

The combination of substantial public funding of nascent energy technologies and recent increases in the costs of those that have been most heavily supported has raised questions about whether policy makers should sustain, alter, enhance, or terminate such programs. This paper uses experience curves for photovoltaics (PV) and wind to (1) estimate ranges of costs for these public programs and (2) introduce new ways of evaluating recent cost dynamics. For both technology cases, the estimated costs of the subsidies required to reach targets are sensitive to the choice of time period on which cost projections are based. The variation in the discounted social cost of subsidies exceeds an order of magnitude. Vigilance is required to avoid the very expensive outcomes contained within these distributions of social costs. Two measures of the significance of recent deviations are introduced. Both indicate that wind costs are within the expected range of prior forecasts but that PV costs are not. The magnitude of the public funds involved in these programs heightens the need for better analytical tools with which to monitor and evaluate cost dynamics.

Learning mechanisms for enterprises adjusting to the new era of information technology are needed as they constitute the dynamic element of technological capabilities. Thai manufacturing industries are being used to demonstrate an analysis of technological learning by learning curve estimation. This paper presents clusters of industries based on the ISIC classification with good learning potential and learning effect that implies the marginal return to resources allocated for productivity improvement via learning which varies across industries. It is found that learning curves of Thai industry have a medium learning elasticity with average learning potentials. Heavy manufacturing industries are found to have higher learning potentials or steeper learning curves than the light manufacturing industries. The study is aimed at gaining an insight into the industrialized efforts of industries towards developing appropriate learning mechanisms.

Information Systems Development (ISD) is fast moving, knowledge-intensive and requires a substantive amount of teamwork. In order to develop quality software, teams need to leverage the skills and knowledge of each team member. ISD teams who engage in learning at a group level can perform more effectively and efficiently. However, relative to other disciplines, knowledge and literature about team learning in ISD research is new and dispersed. This fact hampers the cumulative progress in research that seeks to answer questions about how ISD teams learn to work together and improve their performance. We draw on and extend the classification scheme of Edmondson et al. (2007) and conduct a review of ISD team learning research literature. We synthesize the main findings and highlight the limitations of existing approaches. We emphasize potential directions for future research while focusing on the resulting implications for ISD management and methodology. We further demonstrate that ther...

Improving the quality of literacy teaching may require intervening at different levels, for example, encouraging school attendance and optimizing textbook format and teaching methods. Reading is a complex task involving perceptual, motor, linguistic, phonological, and memory components, each of which has a crucial role in determining reading rate. High poverty rates continue to have a negative impact on human resource development and education quality in Africa, further complicating the ability of most countries to reach the Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Moreover, Africa and Asia are hosts to most of the world's multilingual countries, in which textbook availability in major indigenous languages is sorely lacking. Therefore, it is important to take all possible steps to maximize the effectiveness of teaching interventions. In parallel, also the quality of textbooks is a crucial factor for quality education, especially in developing countries. It...

This study attempts to answer the following questions: What are the potential factors that internally affect the effectiveness of an organisation's experiential learning, and how do the network characteristics of an organisation influence the impact of those internal factors on that effectiveness? This study examines the automotive engine plants in North America between 1995 and 2006 to suggest two factors that influence the effectiveness of experiential learning: (1) the change in part-time worker ratio and (2) the in-house manufacturing ratio. We also pay attention to the interaction effects of the network properties of engine plants and each internal factor of the effectiveness of learning by doing to examine the influence of the networks in which engine plants are embedded. The network properties of engine plants used in this study are degree centrality and closeness centrality, which are obtained from the engine plants' production-based networks. The findings show that both the increase in part-time worker ratio and the high in-house manufacturing ratio negatively affect learning outcomes and that those negative effects are mitigated when plants have high centralities in networks.

Abstract The ability to remotely operate an unmanned vehicle while simultaneously looking for suspicious targets and then classifying those targets is not a trivial skill. This study looked at different training approaches to make better use of simulation as a first training step. When transferring to a live environment, the operators could be grouped into two categories according to whether they passed live training criteria or not. There were clear performance differences between these groups. The group that failed to pass criteria had poorer ...

This paper presents and formalizes the problem of assigning and scheduling a set of tasks to a set of workers when the worker's performance on a task depends on the experience of the worker of this task and of the other tasks involved. We assume that the main objective is to assign the tasks by minimizing the completion time of the set of tasks. Different model formulations that combine alternative options are proposed to solve the problem. The formulations are tested on a set of instances.

This study tackles the puzzle of why increasing entrepreneurial experience does not always lead to improved financial performance of new ventures. We propose an alternate framework demonstrating how experience translates into expertise by arguing that the positive experience-performance relationship only appears to expert entrepreneurs, while novice entrepreneurs may actually perform increasingly worse because of their inability to generalize their experiential knowledge accurately into new ventures. These negative performance implications can be alleviated if the level of contextual similarity between prior and current ventures is high. Using matched employee-employer data of an entire population of Swedish founder-managers between 1990 and 2007, we find a non-linear relationship between entrepreneurial experience and financial performance consistent with our framework. Moreover, the level of industry, geographic, and temporal similarities between prior and current ventures positively moderates this relationship. Our work provides both theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurial experience-people can learn entrepreneurship and pursue it with greater success as long as they have multiple opportunities to gain experience, overcome barriers to learning, and build an entrepreneurial-experience curve.

We implement a diffusion model for an innovative product in a market with a structure of social relationships. Diffusion is described with a percolation approach in the price space. Percolation shows a phase transition from a diffusion to a no-diffusion regime. This has strong implications for market demand and pricing. We study the effect of network structure on market diffusion efficiency by considering a number of cases, such as one-dimensional and two-dimensional lattices, small worlds, Poisson networks and Scale-free networks. We consider two measures of diffusion efficiency: the size of diffusion and the diffusion time-length. We find that network connectivity "spreading" is the most important factor for the size of diffusion. Clustering is ineffective. This means that societies with higher dimensionality are better markets for diffusion. This result is most evident for the size of diffusion, while a short average path-length is more important for the speed of diffusion. Endogenous learning curves shift the percolation threshold to higher prices, and constitute an endogenous mechanism of price discrimination. The best market strategy of innovation diffusion is to start with high price and allow for a learning curve. 1 ) have identified a number of factors that drive and sometimes delay the establishment of new technologies, as consumer heterogeneity, imperfect information, sunk costs of adoption. Yet, the role of market network structure in the diffusion of innovations is a rather recent research topic , and can play a fundamental role in the success or failure of innovations. This is particularly relevant to the problem of more efficient innovations that do not diffuse in face of less desirable incumbent technologies.

Learning curves are useful for assessing performance improvement due to the positive impact of learning. In recent years, the deleterious effects of forgetting have also been recognized. Workers experience forgetting or decline in performance over time. Consequently, contemporary learning curves have attempted to incorporate forgetting components into learning curves. An area of increasing interest is the study of how fast and how far the forgetting impact can influence overall performance. This article introduces the concept of half-life analysis of learning curves using the concept of growth and decay, with particular emphasis on applications in the defense acquisition process. The computational analysis of the proposed technique lends itself to applications for designing training and retraining programs for the Defense Acquisition Workforce.

Understanding how learning occurs, and what improves or impedes the learning process is of importance to academicians and practitioners; however, empirical research on validating learning curves is sparse. This paper contributes to this line of research by collecting and analyzing CAD (computer-aided design) procedural and cognitive performance data for novice trainees during 16-weeks of training. The declarative performance is measured by time, and the procedural performance by the number of features used to construct a design part. These data were analyzed using declarative or procedural performance separately as predictors (univariate), or a combination of declarative or procedural predictors (multivariate). Furthermore, a method to separate the declarative and procedural components from learning curve data is suggested.

This paper empirically examines 13 technologies in which significant cost and performance improvements occurred even while no commercial production occurred. Since the literature emphasizes cost reductions through increases in cumulative production, this paper explores cost and performance improvements from a new perspective. The results demonstrate that learning in these pre-commercial production cases arises through mechanisms utilized in deliberate R&D efforts. We identity three mechanisms – materials creation, process changes, and reductions in feature scale – that enable these improvements to occur and use them to extend models of learning and invention. These mechanisms can also apply during post-commercial time periods and further research is needed to quantify the relative contributions of these three mechanisms and those of production-based learning in a variety of technologies.

Understanding technological replacement is a ubiquitous problem in archaeology. Modeling the transition from atlatl to self bow has implications for elucidating the driving mechanisms behind why and how prehistoric culture change occurs worldwide. At different periods of human prehistory, atlatls were replaced by self bows as primary hunting weapons on all continents except Australia. Previous scholars have hypothesized that this shift may have occurred when changes in environment/subsistence strategies and/or a rise in social complexity and warfare favored the bow over the atlatl. Quantitative, diachronic data obtained from atlatl and self bow target shooting suggest that physical constraints and distinct patterns of learning inherent to using each weapon may have acted as causal factors of technological change under shifting environmental conditions when considered under a framework of human behavioral ecology. Furthermore, these data indicate that the transition from atlatl to bow would have necessitated changes in age and sex/gender-based task differentiation for prehistoric children, women, and men.

M any organizational learning studies have an implicit assumption that the learning rate is maximized through specialization: the more an individual or organization focuses on a particular task, the faster it will improve. However, through contrasting the various learning process theories described in the research on organizational, group, and individual learning, we develop a set of competing hypotheses that suggest some degree of variation might improve the learning rate. Furthermore, such comparison yields competing arguments about how related or unrelated such task variation should be to improve the learning rate. This research uses an experimental study to answer the following research questions: Is the learning rate maximized through specialization? Or does variation, related or unrelated, enhance the learning process? We find that the learning rate under conditions of related variation is significantly greater than under conditions of specialization or unrelated variation, indicating the possibility of synergy between related learning efforts consistent with an implicit learning or insight effect. We find no significant differences in the rates of learning under the conditions of specialization and unrelated variation. These results yield important implications for how work should be organized, and for future research into the learning process.

Abstract- TINABUAN Arts and Crafts is a micro-enterprise which serves as one of the local suppliers of abaca-made products in the Philippines and the only one located in Misamis Oriental. Sinamay rolls, commonly used as place mats, etc., comprise the bulk of its sales as compared to the other eleven product lines currently carried by the company. Existing production capacity is at 1,500 meters of Sinamay Rolls per month. In March 2007, the company had to refuse a 60,000 meter order of Sinamay Rolls, resulting to an opportunity loss of P1.2 M. The refusal was based on the fact that Tinabuan Arts and Crafts had no standards to enable management to forecast lead time needed for a specific quantity of order and it had no basis as to how much resources should be employed. The management at present cannot establish the pricing per meter since the needed resources such as manpower, which may be skilled or unskilled, cannot be quantified. An experiment using the concept of learning curves w...

The F-layout was introduced in 1955 and eventually enforced as a national standard as a replacement to the popular QWERTY keyboard layout in Turkey. In a more recent work, another alternative (E-layout) was developed for Turkish language and argued to be faster and more comfortable than the F-layout. However, there has not been any empirical evidence favouring any of these layouts so far. To fill this research gap in the literature, we have employed a hybrid model and conducted both between-subjects and within-subjects user experiments with twelve freshmen majoring in computer engineering. The experimental results show that there is no significant difference between learning percentage of these two layouts but the completion time of typing a trial passage with the F-layout is significantly lower than the E-layout. The F-layout has also a significantly lower physical demand score, as revealed by the subjective assessments of participants. Based on our user survey data, we also discus...

Background: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the perceptual (2D versus 3D view) and instrumental (classical versus robotic) impacts of robotic system on surgical skill acquisition and, in a second time, to determine whether skills were transferred between conventional laparoscopy and robotic system. Methods: 40 medical students without any surgical experience were randomized into four groups (classical laparoscopy with 3D-direct view or with 2D-indirect view, robotic system in 3D or in 2D) and repeated a complex motor task 6 times. Afterwards, they performed 2 trials with the same technique but in the other viewing condition (perceptive switch). Finally, subjects performed last three trials with the other technique (technical switch). Subjects impressions were surveyed by a questionnaire. Results: Our study showed better performance and improvement in 3D view than in 2D view whatever instrumental aspect. Participants reported less mastery, familiarity, self-confidence and more difficulty in classical laparoscopy with 2D indirect view than in the other conditions. Conclusions: Robotic surgery improves surgical performance and learning particularly by 3D view advantage. However, performances after switches emphasize the need to adapt and pursue training also with conventional laparoscopy in order to prevent risks in conversion procedure. FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: we certify that we have no commercial associations that might pose a conflict of interest in connection with the submitted article. All funding sources supporting the Work and all institutional or corporate affiliations of the authors are acknowledged.