Browsing by Author "Morris, Jonathan"
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Item The Increasing Importance of Vehicle Based Risk Assessment for the Vehicle Insurance Industry(Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, 2015) Gage, Thomas; Bishop, Richard; Morris, JonathanInsurance is a data driven world of actuarial analysis. Insurance carriers rate drivers and price coverage based on past driving performance, credit score (which is highly correlated to, but obviously not causal of, driving behavior), and increasingly Usage Based Insurance (UBI). Insurance carriers also factor in annual mileage, where the vehicle is garaged and driven, and the type and value of the vehicle. Modest increases in data and analysis can provide one insurance company with an important advantage over its competitors. Now a new opportunity (and challenge) awaits the insurance industry. Crash Avoidance (CA) technologies such as electronic stability control, lane departure avoidance, and forward collision avoidance are poised to revolutionize auto safety. These crash avoidance technologies are fast becoming widely available and are aimed at reducing the approximately six million annual vehicle crashes on U.S. roads. Each auto manufacturer is developing its own versions of CA technologies, with different capabilities and likely different degrees of efficacy. This means that different makes and models of vehicles with different CA technologies, and different generations of the technologies, will perform differently. Soon, knowing about the driver’s driving behavior will be insufficient for insurance companies. It will be vital to know what type and generation of CA technology is on the driver’s vehicle and how that technology performs in various driving environments. It will be many decades before the entire U.S. vehicle fleet is equipped with CA technologies of one generation or another. And even longer before most of the fleet is fully automated. This interim period provides an opportunity for insurers to move beyond just understanding drivers to also better understanding vehicles and their CA effectiveness.Item Measurement of Viscosity of Cellular Mediums Using Brownian Motion(2011-04-13) Morris, JonathanThe viscosity of an artificial biological medium developed in Vincent Noireaux’s laboratory based on cytoplasm extracted from cells will be determined. These measurements will allow for comparison of the viscosity of the artificial medium used for in vitro protein expression with that of real cytoplasm used in cells. Using an optical microscope, the displacement after thirty seconds time interval of a one micrometer latex bead in the medium. The displacement measurements form a distribution. The root mean square of the displacement is the square root of 2Dt, where D is the diffusion coefficient and t is the time. From the diffusion coefficient, using the Stokes-Einstein equation, D = KbT/(6*pi*nu*a), where Kb is Boltzmann's constant, a is the radius of the bead, and nu gives the viscosity of the medium. The viscosity of water will be determined as a baseline and validation of the procedure, before measuring the viscosity of the medium.