Grid Reliability in the Electric Era

The United States has delegated the weighty responsibility of keeping the lights on to a self-regulatory organization called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Despite the fact that NERC is one of the largest and most important examples of industry-led governance—and regulates in an area that is central to our economy and basic human survival— this unusual institution has received scant attention from policymakers and scholars. Such attention is overdue. To achieve deep decarbonization, the United States must enter a new “electric era,” transitioning many sectors to run on electricity while also transforming the electricity system itself to run largely on clean but intermittent renewable resources. These new resources demand new approaches to electric grid reliability—approaches that the NERC model of reliability governance may inadequately deliver. This Article traces NERC’s history, situates NERC in ongoing debates about climate change and grid reliability, and assesses the viability of reliability selfregulation in the coming electric era. It may have made sense to delegate the task of maintaining U.S. electric grid reliability to a self-regulatory organization in prior decades, when regulated monopolies managed nearly every segment of electricity production. But many of the criteria that NERC used to justify selfregulation earlier in its history—electric utilities’ expertise, widespread agreement about the organization’s goals, and an industry structure in which regulated parties’ interests align with the public’s—no longer hold. The climate crisis creates a need for expertise beyond NERC’s domain, while the introduction of competition to large parts of the electricity sector blurs lines of accountability for reliability failures. NERC’s structure also perpetuates an incumbency bias at odds with public goals for the energy transition. These shifting conditions have caused NERC to fail to keep pace with the reliability challenges of the electric era. Worse still, outdated NERC standards often help entrench fossil fuel interests by justifying electricity market rules poorly suited to accommodate renewable resources. We therefore suggest a suite of reforms that would increase direct government oversight and accountability in electricity reliability regulation

Disease Cured in the Least Expected Way: Communication.

Communication is an important factor in all doctor-patient relationships. This non-technical skill could potentially lead to better patient wellness outcomes. Since communication proficiencies are not a basic skill for everyone, most complaints about doctors are because of communication issues. However, the decline in communication skills begins early in a doctor’s career – in medical school. With increasing communication showing proven benefits, doctor’s communication abilities are vital to improving their patient’s wellness outcomes. Gaps in current literature include exactly how much communication benefits patient wellness outcomes. This literature review will fill in some of those gaps and also highlight what factors lead to doctor-patient communication break downs, how to avoid communication conflicts, and what factors of communication are most important between a doctor and the patient

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Iran and US Presidential Speeches at the UN: The Sociopragmatic Functions

Speeches articulated by politicians are often vehicles towards achieving their ultimate goals. That’s why there is always tendency to find out the potential ideologies indicated by the discursive strategies and rhetorical devices which these politicians employ to express their political viewpoints. This study adopted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to cognitively analyze the typical discursive characteristics underlying Iranian and American presidents’ speeches at the UNGA (2013). The findings revealed that the most frequent of the strategies employed by Obama were polarization, self-glorification, positive self-presentation, negative-other presentation and victimization while the most prominent ones used by Rouhani were metaphor, vagueness, negative-other presentation and national self-glorification. The intricate, undeniable relationships existing between language, power and ideology is also what had been clear through the analysis of the lectures transcription

Identity, Dignity and Taboos: Beliefs as Assets

We analyze social and economic phenomena involving beliefs which people value and invest in, for affective or functional reasons. Individuals are at times uncertain about their own deep values and infer them from their past choices, which then come to define who they are. Identity investments increase when information is scarce or when a greater endowment of some asset (wealth, career, family, culture) raises the stakes on viewing it as valuable (escalating commitments). Taboos against transactions or the mere contemplation of tradeoffs arise to protect fragile beliefs about the priceless value of certain assets (life, freedom, love, faith) or things one would never do. Whether such behaviors are welfare-enhancing or reducing depends on whether beliefs are sought for a functional value (sense of direction, self-discipline) or for mental consumption motives (self-esteem, anticipatory feelings). Escalating commitments can thus lead to a hedonic treadmill, and competing identities cause dysfunctional failures to invest in high-return activities (education, adapting to globalization, assimilation), or even the destruction of productive assets. In social interactions, norm violations elicit a forceful response (exclusion, harassment) when they threaten a strongly held identity, but further erode morale when it was initially weak. Concerns for pride, dignity or wishful thinking lead to the inefficient breakdown of Coasian bargaining even under symmetric information, as partners seek to self-enhance and shift blame by turning down insultingly low offers.identity, self-serving beliefs, self-image, memory, wishful thinking, anticipatory utility, self control, hedonic treadmill, inefficient bargaining, taboos, religion.

Risk Management Framework 2.0

The quantification of risk has received a great deal of attention in recently published literature, and there is an opportunity for the DoD to take advantage of what information is currently available to fundamentally improve on current risk assessment and management processes. The critical elements absent in the current process are the objective assessment of likelihood as part of the whole risk scenario and a visual representation or acknowledgement of uncertainty. A proposed framework would incorporate selected elements of multiple theories and axiomatic approaches in order to: (1) simultaneously examine multiple objectives of the organization, (2) limit bias and subjectivity during the assessment process by converting subjective risk contributors into quantitative values using tools that measure the attack surface and adversarial effort, (3) present likelihood and impact as real-time objective variables that reflect the state of the organization and are grounded on sound mathematical and scientific principles, (4) aggregate and function organization-wide (strategic, operational, and tactical) with maximum transparency, (5) achieve greater representation of the real scenario and strive to model future scenarios, (6) adapt to the preferred granularity, dimensions, and discovery of the decision maker, and (7) improve the decision maker’s ability to select the most optimal alternative by reducing the decision to rational logic. The proposed solution is what I term Risk Management Framework 2.0 , and the expected results of this modernized framework are reduced complexity, improved optimization, and more effective management of risk within the organization. This study introduces a Decision Support System (DSS) concept to aid implementation, maximize transparency and cross-level communication, and keep members operating within the bounds of the proposed framework