Ronald Briggs

The adoption of new technology in the American machinery industry

Rees J., Briggs R. and Oakey R. (1984) The adoption of new technology in the American machinery industry, Reg. Studies 18, 489–504. This study examines the spread of a number of key production technologies among machinery manufacturers across the United States. Based on a mail and interview survey of over 600 industrial plants across the country, it was found that adoption rates for these innovations varied by industrial sector, organizational status of plants, age and size of plants as well as by region and metropolitan characteristics of plants. The findings suggest that policy makers interested in nurturing small businesses should consider technical assistance strategies that encourage the spread of innovation among firms, and that high priority be given to labour training programmes in local economic development strategies. At the federal level this study also suggests that the innovation potential of Manufacturing Belt companies should not be overlooked in any new initiatives to encourage economic re...

Modeling Urban Population Growth from Remotely Sensed Imagery and TIGER GIS Road Data

We modeled population growth from 1990 to 2000 in the north Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex using two different methods: a conventional model based on remote sensing land-use change detection, and a newly devised approach using GIS-derived road development measurements. These methods were applied at both city and census-tract levels and were evaluated against the actual population growth. It was found that accurate population growth estimates are achieved by both methods. At the census-tract level, our models yielded a comparable result with that obtained from a more complex commercial demographics model. At both city and census-tract levels, models using road development were better than those using land-use change detection. In addition to being efficient in cost and time, our models provide direct visualization of the distribution of the actual population growth within cities and census tracts when compared to commercial demographic models.

Mortality and ecological structure: A canonical approach

Abstract The ability of variables describing ecological structure to predict variation in cause specific mortality is examined using census tract data for Houston, Texas. A canonical regression model, incorporating recent developments in canonical theory, demonstrates that mortality differentials are more strongly associated with indicants of the disadvantaged population than any other component of ecological structure. However, substantial portions of mortality variability remain unexplained by ecological variables. Policy implications of these results are then discussed.

Control Factors in the Economic Development of Nonmetropolitan America

Nonmetropolitan counties of the United States have shown a remarkable degree of economic growth and diversity in the 1970s. This paper examines three control mechanisms behind these changes and concludes that: the interstate highway system was not a major determining factor in the spatial pattern of nonmetropolitan development, branch plants of manufacturing companies seemed to contribute to employment stability in these areas, and unearned income played an increasing role over time in the economic base of these rural areas. These conclusions, therefore, separate some of the realities from the myths that have surrounded the growth of nonmetropolitan America.

Scalable and Error Tolerant Automated Georeferencing under Affine Transformations

Georeferencing is a key component in GIS systems. However, its performance has been dragged by the manual georeferencing process. In this paper, we develop a scalable and error tolerant automated georeferencing scheme for general affine transformations called localized matching and global optimization (LM-GO). Under LM-GO, the complexity of control point pair (CPP) matching is not directly tied to image or vector data size, which makes it highly scalable. The unavoidable image point extraction errors are effectively managed and filtered out by the verification and optimization process. Another major contribution of this paper is to propose the first asymmetric CPP matching algorithm for general affine transformations, namely AIPP matching, based on pattern matching methodology, which improves CPP matching performance by an order. Overall, the running time of LM-GO grows almost linearly with vector data size. LM-GO effectively reduces the georeferencing time from hours by the bruteforce search approach down to seconds.

An Automated System for Image-to-Vector Georeferencing

Although modern imagery usually has latitude and longitude or similar coordinates to provide true world location, much potentially useful imagery lacks this information. This includes historical imagery, as well as modern imagery that may have lost its locational information through inappropriate processing. Its provision through the process of georeferencing is still primarily a manual procedure. This paper proposes an efficient, fully- automated solution for massively asymmetric image-to-vector georeferencing whereby an image of a relatively small geographic area is automatically located relative to a substantially larger vector map base. For control points, road intersections are automatically extracted from high resolution aerial or satellite imagery using the new concepts of reference circles and central pixels. For automated control point pair identification between image and vector map, an invariant point pattern matching approach is proposed based on shape invariance for similarity transforms and invariant area ratios for affine transforms. The matching algorithm necessitates only a small subset of image points and requires no additional information beyond pixel and map coordinates. Further, it tolerates inaccurate, missing and spurious points, and provides high performance with linear scalability. A final step performs transformation verification, globalization and optimization based upon an Iterative Closest Point Greedy algorithm. Experimentation shows that images covering a few city blocks with as few as 6 to 17 extracted road intersection points can be efficiently and correctly located using the road network of Dallas County, Texas, with over 80,000 intersections.