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The world looking in
09 December, 2019
At the time of my visit to Japan, rugby fans where filling up the Rugby World Cup stadiums around the country, while Emperor Naruhito officially proclaimed his enthronement before dignitaries from about 190 countries. The spotlight is still on Japan, as the country is preparing to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Wind of change
07 November, 2019
On the occasion of the UN Global Climate Action Summit and the Global Climate Strikes, renewable energy became a hot discussion topic among government leaders as well as citizens of countries around the world.

A wide ranging issue
03 October, 2019
This month, we cover the industry about as widely as we could: at one end of the capacity scale, our regular correspondent Stuart Anderson takes a deep dive into the small telecrawler sector; on the other, feature writer Julian Champkin, visits the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant, where he saw one of the world's biggest cranes at work.

Checking research on checklists
17 September, 2019
Checklists have become a routine part of modern life. In simple form, as to-do lists and shopping lists, they help us all keep track of the overlapping and numerous tasks of our day.

Experience and innovation
17 July, 2019
One of the things that makes the crane industry so interesting to report on, is the level of innovation coming out of a relatively small and tightly-knit industry. Unlike other sectors I've covered, it has been relatively easy to meet a broad range of suppliers and users; and, where some industries progress only slowly, just in the decade or so I've been covering the sector, I've seen new crane types come into regular use.

Mind the gap
20 June, 2019
For travellers on London's underground railway, the warning to 'Mind the gap' quickly becomes part of the background of daily life: the city's old, curved, station platforms don't fit neatly with tube carriages, meaning there's often a substantial hop from train to platform. That phrase, painted on every platform edge and spoken over the tannoy at every stop, seeks to prevent us hurling ourselves absentmindedly under the train. By and large it works.

Fitting capacity to requirements
22 May, 2019
On any crane contract, the first and most vital commercial step is to make sure that the crane you bring to the job site matches the clients' lifting requirements: big enough to work safely, but not so big that you're wasting capacity (and, therefore, investment that you can't earn back with profitable rental rates).

Digging deep for opportunity
18 April, 2019
In this issue, two of our lead features look at the impact of infrastructure projects on demand for lifting equipment.

Demag answers and questions
18 March, 2019
In our lead news items this month, I've tried to find answers for at least a few of the questions readers may have about Tadano's planned acquisition of Demag from Terex. As you'd expect for a deal at this stage, I wasn't able to get a lot more detail.

Choosing a look, choosing names
14 February, 2019
Sometimes, how a thing is presented, how it looks or how we name it, shapes how we think of it, even if the thing itself is unchanged. Think, for example, of how 'premium' and 'basic' products are packaged at the supermarket: glossy packaging, metallic embossing, and an emphasis on ingredients for 'premium' goods; primary colours, simple design, and a focus on price and value for 'basic' goods. Often, the gap between the two is not as great as the name or the package might suggest.

A sliding window of opportunity
21 January, 2019
There is a concept in political science known as the Overton Window, after its creator, Joseph Overton. Overton argued that political policy is set within a window—ranging from 'more free' to 'less free'—of public perception of acceptable ideas. Over time, the limits of this window of acceptability change, and the policies politicians propose change with them.