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Building a culture of safety in transportation is not dissimilar from building a culture of safety in health. Public health is widely known for protecting the public from diseases through milk pasteurization and chlorination of drinking water, and from injuries by implementing environmental and occupational safeguards and fostering behavioral change. Lifestyle and environmental changes that have contributed to the reductions in smoking and heart disease can also help change driving, walking and cycling behaviors, and environments. Stimulating a culture of safety on the road means providing safe and accessible transportation for all. The vision for a culture of traffic safety is to change the public’s attitude about the unacceptable toll from traffic injuries and to implement a systems approach to traffic injury prevention as a means for improving public health and public safety. Framing the motor vehicle injury problem in this way provides an opportunity for partnerships between highway safety and public health to improve the culture of safety.

The brief announcement that the Government had accepted that there should be regulations on open date marking of food, to come into effect in 1975, will come as no surprise. It is a timely reminder of what public pressure can achieve these days; how sustained advocacy and publicity by interested sectors of society—magistrates, local authorities, public health workers, consumer groups—can secure legislative changes which, in this case, run counter to trade opinions and the recommendation originally made by the Food Standards Committee that such a proposal was not practical and the existing law was an adequate protection. This was stated in the FSC Report on Food Labelling of 1964, although there was no indication of the evidence reviewed or that the subject had been considered very deeply; it was, after all, only a small fraction of the problem of food labelling control. It was also stated in this Report that in certain cases, date‐stamping of food could give to purchasers a false sense of security, “not justified by the conditions under which the food has been kept since manufacture”.

Young people’s choice of higher education institution and subject are often assumed to take place in a social vacuum, ignoring the influence of family and friends. Despite a shift away from state funding of undergraduate higher education towards a cost-sharing model (Johnstone, 2004), little research has been carried out on family attitudes to debt, particularly in Scotland where home students do not pay tuition fees. This chapter explores how higher education decisions are made by Scottish domiciled students in the context of their families and the ways in which such decisions are mediated by social class.

The purpose of this paper is to present a structure for identifying complexity that is not needed in an enterprise, and describe a methodology for eliminating it. Whether it is process complexity, product complexity, or organizational complexity, investments in managing higher levels of complexity often offer businesses significant value by enabling them to offer more and better products and services to a broader range of customers. However, along with higher levels of complexity has come an increased requirement to distinguish between that complexity which is needed and that which is needless.

This paper first presents a structure for categorizing different kinds of complexity, with a detailed focus on needless complexity that is categorized into four types. Next, specific factors are developed that can be used to identify needless complexity in an organization. Finally, a methodology is presented that organizations can utilize in order to eliminate needless complexity.

Needless complexity can be created where it never should have existed in the first place, and other times needless complexity exists as an historical relic left over from a time when it actually was needed. Using a structured approach, needless complexity can be identified and eliminated to yield significant business benefits.

This paper provides a framework for differentiating needless complexity from needed complexity, and assessing the landscape of needless complexity in an organization. It also provides an approach for identifying opportunities to reduce needless complexity using the needless complexity diagnostic.