Smart Asset Management for Electric Utilities: Big Data and Future

This paper discusses about future challenges in terms of big data and new technologies. Utilities have been collecting data in large amounts but they are hardly utilized because they are huge in amount and also there is uncertainty associated with it. Condition monitoring of assets collects large amounts of data during daily operations. The question arises "How to extract information from large chunk of data?" The concept of "rich data and poor information" is being challenged by big data analytics with advent of machine learning techniques. Along with technological advancements like Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics will play an important role for electric utilities. In this paper, challenges are answered by pathways and guidelines to make the current asset management practices smarter for the future.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of 12th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM) 201

Artificial intelligence: opportunities and implications for the future of decision making

Artificial intelligence has arrived. In the online world it is already a part of everyday life, sitting invisibly behind a wide range of search engines and online commerce sites. It offers huge potential to enable more efficient and effective business and government but the use of artificial intelligence brings with it important questions about governance, accountability and ethics. Realising the full potential of artificial intelligence and avoiding possible adverse consequences requires societies to find satisfactory answers to these questions. This report sets out some possible approaches, and describes some of the ways government is already engaging with these issues

Evolutionary Economics, Classical Development Economics, and the History of Economic Policy: A Plea for Theorizing by Inclusion

The author argues that in order to create a qualitative understanding of the factors polarizing the world in growing wealth and growing poverty there is a need to create economics by inclusion, a system where all relevant factors, some of which have been part of the economic discourse for centuries, but also elements (like the different effects of process and product innovations) that are part of evolutionary economics itself, are considered simultaneously. According to the author, this historical/institutional approach to economics would benefit especially the Third World. Moreover, the economics by inclusion should also open the way for policies of inclusion, a system that will put the accent on the wellbeing of the majority and not on the growth of the export sector.

Foreword: Path Dependence and Comparative Corporate Governance

This symposium issue of the Washington University Law Quarterly focuses the application of path dependence to corporate institutions on a natural topic: comparative corporate governance

F. Hodge O\u27Neal Corporate and Securities Law Symposium: Path Dependence and Comparative Corporate Governance

The study of institutions, and particularly the study of institutions that societies use to govern business enterprises, is at a point of transition. In the last two or three decades, scholars focusing on economic principles to define appropriate legal rules and corporate institutions rose up to challenge the traditional orthodoxy of corporate governance found in the Berle and Means corporation. One of the most exciting trends in the literature rests upon the increasing marginal returns school of economics associated with Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute. The traditional neoclassical economic theory of production, familiar from decades of undergraduate and graduate courses in microeconomic theory, focuses on competition between products in terms of decreasing marginal returns. The idea is that the economy will settle to a competitive (and optimal) equilibrium at the point where the decreasing marginal returns that sellers can obtain from increasing production just equal the increasing marginal costs of producing more and more units of a given product. As a producer increases the amount of production of a given product, it must sell to purchasers less excited about the product. Demand for additional units decreases, which in turn decreases marginal revenue

Global Impacts Report 2017

Our fifth Global Impacts Report reflects on the progress of the MSC over the past 20 years, examines the sustainability performance of certified fisheries around the world and highlights areas of future interest

The transformation of transport policy in Great Britain? 'New Realism' and New Labour's decade of displacement activity

In a 1999 paper, Goodwin announced ‘the transformation of transport policy in Great Britain’. His central point was that consensus was emerging among policy makers and academics based on earlier work including Transport: The New Realism, which rejected previous orthodoxy that the supply of road space could and should be continually expanded to match demand. Instead a combination of investment in public transport, walking and cycling opportunities and – crucially – demand management should form the basis of transport policy to address rising vehicle use and associated increases in congestion and pollution / carbon emissions. This thinking formed the basis of the 1997 Labour government’s ‘sustainable transport’ policy, but after 13 years in power ministers neither transformed policy nor tackled longstanding transport trends. Our main aim in this paper is to revisit the concept of New Realism and re-examine its potential utility as an agent of change in British transport policy. Notwithstanding the outcome of Labour’s approach to transport policy, we find that the central tenets of the New Realism remain robust and that the main barriers to change are related to broader political and governance issues which suppress radical policy innovation

The State Education Agency: At the Helm, Not the Oar

Never before has more been asked of State Education Agencies (SEAs), commonly known as state departments of education. In recent years, policymakers at the state and federal level have viewed the SEA as the default entity for implementing new and sweeping K -- 12 initiatives -- everything from Race to the Top grants and ESEA waivers to teacher evaluation reform and digital learning. But SEAs were designed -- and evolved over decades -- to address a relatively narrow set of tasks: distributing state and federal dollars, monitoring the use of these funds, and overseeing the implementation of federal and state education programs. They were not created -- nor have they developed the core competencies -- to drive crucial reforms. Accordingly, we argue that despite the best efforts of talented, energetic leaders, SEAs will never be able to deliver the reform results we need. But there is an alternative. We should view the SEA through the lens of Reinventing Government (1993), the path-breaking book by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler. In short, Osborne and Gaebler call for state agencies to "steer" more and "row" less. Here, we call for federal and state leaders to apply their thesis to SEAs, scaling back the tasks SEAs perform and empowering nongovernmental organizations to take up the slack. We offer the "4Cs" model (control, contract, cleave, and create) for rethinking state-level K -- 12 reform work. In practice, this means pursuing activities on two parallel tracks. On one, we should make the SEA a far leaner organization, able to execute a narrow set of activities. On the other, we should foster the growth of a new state-level reform ecosystem composed of a range of entities -- primarily independent public entities or nonprofits -- able to carry out key reforms

The Success and the Barriers to Women's Representation in Southeast Asia Between State Policies, Political Parties and Women's Movement

Inisiatif Kemitraan Asia Tenggara -- United States (IKAT-US) Component 1 -- POWER, is one of Partnership's projects that supports efforts to increase women's representation in the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste. One of the activities of the program is to conduct research on the success of, as well as the barriers to, increasing the representation of women. The research projects are: 1) "Women's Representation in the Parliament as Result of Different Electoral Systems: A Comparative Study in Five Southeast Asian Countries" - research and report by Ramlan Surbakti & August Mellaz 2) "The Increased Number of Female Members of Parliament: Identifying Its Origini and Obstacles in Indonesia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste" - research and report by Philips Vermonte 3) The Role of Parliamentary Women's Caucus in Promoting Women's Participation and Representation: A Case Study in Indonesia and Timor Leste" - research and report by Ani Soetjipto 4) "Patriarchal Barriers to Women's Political Participation in Southeast Asia: Lesson from the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and TimorLeste on Patriarchy and the Rise of Women's Participation in State Politics"- research and report by Adrianna Venny & Ruth Indiah Rahayu.The content of this e-Book is sourced from the above four research projects and is compiled to link the projects and to form a complete narration. These research papers are not only re-presented in this report, but also quoted in various parts. Hence, the sources for this paper are the researchers mentioned above, under the project authority of IKAT-US Component 1 and therefore the names of the researchers in this e-Book are not included in the footnote and references. With this e-Book, research data regarding women's representation in Southeast Asia can be widely circulated and easily accessed by the public, allowing it to be a source of reference for further research, education, or advocacy