Creative Commons Licenses: empowering open access

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Which economic model for a water-efficient Europe? Report of a CEPS Task Force. CEPS Task Force Report, 27 November 2012

This CEPS Task Force Report focuses on how to improve water efficiency in Europe, notably in public supply, households, agriculture, energy and manufacturing as well as across sectors. It presents a number of recommendations on how to make better use of economic policy instruments to sustainably manage the EU’s water resources. Published in the run-up to the European Commission’s “Blueprint to Safeguard Europe’s Waters”, the report contributes to the policy deliberations in two ways. First, by assessing the viability of economic policy instruments, it addresses a major shortcoming that has so far prevented the 2000 EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) from becoming fully effective in practice: the lack of appropriate, coherent and effective instruments in (some) member states. Second, as the Task Force report is the result of an interactive process involving a variety of stakeholders, it is able to point to the key differences in interpreting and applying WFD principles that have led to a lack of policy coherence across the EU and to offer some pragmatic advice on moving forward

The Economics of Water: Taking Full Account of First Use, Reuse and Return to the Environment.A Report for the Australian Water Conservation and Reuse Research Program (AWCRRP).

There has been a lot of discussion about water being undervalued in Australia. The nation's attention is presently focussed on water issues with the drought of 2002 - 2003, the deepening crisis with the River Murray and water rationing in a number of urban areas. Over 2003-2005, the States and Territories will be required to demonstrate progress against the water reform goals in the area of urban and rural water pricing. This is an opportune time as part of the Australian Water Conservation and Reuse Research Program to develop a framework for the introduction of mechanisms that reveal the full cost of using water. This paper emphasises the importance of looking at potable water, reuse and disposal and return of water to the environment together as part of a comprehensive framework.catchment; Australia; water; water reuse

Accelerator Memory Reuse in the Dark Silicon Era

Accelerators integrated on-die with General-Purpose CPUs (GP-CPUs) can yield significant performance and power improvements. Their extensive use, however, is ultimately limited by their area overhead; due to their high degree of specialization, the opportunity cost of investing die real estate on accelerators can become prohibitive, especially for general-purpose architectures. In this paper we present a novel technique aimed at mitigating this opportunity cost by allowing GP-CPU cores to reuse accelerator memory as a non-uniform cache architecture (NUCA) substrate. On a system with a last level-2 cache of 128kB, our technique achieves on average a 25% performance improvement when reusing four 512 kB accelerator memory blocks to form a level-3 cache. Making these blocks reusable as NUCA slices incurs on average in a 1.89% area overhead with respect to equally-sized ad hoc cache slice

Bridging the Equity Gap: Driving Community Health Outcomes Through the Green Jobs Movement

The fundamental link between poverty and health mandates a new approach to both, one capable of raising community health standards by lifting individuals, families and communities out of poverty.Merely providing access to healthcare does not address fundamental societal inequities that translate into greater health risks and more extensive exposure to environmental hazards for low-income communities and communities of color -- risks aggravated by climate change.In Bridging the Equity Gap: Driving Community Health Outcomes Through the Green Jobs Movement, Green For All makes the case that the Green Jobs Movement -- a broad, progressive coalition of environmental and health advocates, social justice and civil rights organizations, labor and community-based groups, and business -- can bring about a systems change to improve economic, environmental and health conditions for low-income communities