Freshwater biology and water supply in Britain

This paper is designed to give a general account of freshwater biology as it bears on waterworks practice. Most water that is used for consumption will commonly go through a storage reservoir. Here special reference is given to the biological relations in standing waters, the biological control of water supplies, methods of plankton estimation, the biology of slow sand filtration and the use of algicides

Escaping Satiation in an Evolutionary Model of Structural Economic Dynamics

This paper presents the problem of satiation in relation to a model of evolutionary endogenous growth. The model represents an attempt to provide an evolutionary economic micro foundation to Pasinetti's scheme of the structural economic dynamics of a labour economy. Like this scheme the model deals with an economic system with a varying number of sectors, each of which is producing a consumption good. The goods are produced within consumer-producer firms which organise both production and consumption for their workers. Through innovative activities firms increase their productivity with respect to individual goods. The long-run consequence of this is that labour becomes available for the production of new consumption goods. If such goods are not provided to a sufficient degree, "technological unemployment" will emerge. If there is slow productivity development in the production of new goods, the overall rate of growth will slow down irrespectively of productivity growth in old sectors. Thus, to enhance long-term growth there is a need of "anticipatory R&D", i.e. R&D which produces designs for novel consumption goods and increases productivity in the production of these goods.Evolutionary modelling, endogenous growth and development, structural economic dynamics, satiation of demand, Robinson Crusoe.

The drivers of Chinese CO2 emissions from 1980 to 2030

China's energy consumption doubled within the first 25 years of economic reforms initiated at the end of the 1970s, and doubled again in the past 5 years. It has resulted of a threefold CO2 emissions increase since early of 1980s. China's heavy reliance on coal will make it the largest emitter of CO2 in the world. By combining structural decomposition and input–output analysis we seek to assess the driving forces of China's CO2 emissions from 1980 to 2030. In our reference scenario, production-related CO2 emissions will increase another three times by 2030. Household consumption, capital investment and growth in exports will largely drive the increase in CO2 emissions. Efficiency gains will be partially offset the projected increases in consumption, but our scenarios show that this will not be sufficient if China's consumption patterns converge to current US levels. Relying on efficiency improvements alone will not stabilize China's future emissions. Our scenarios show that even extremely optimistic assumptions of widespread installation of carbon dioxide capture and storage will only slow the increase in CO2 emissions

Silicon-organic hybrid electro-optical devices

Organic materials combined with strongly guiding silicon waveguides open the route to highly efficient electro-optical devices. Modulators based on the so-called silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) platform have only recently shown frequency responses up to 100 GHz, high-speed operation beyond 112 Gbit/s with fJ/bit power consumption. In this paper, we review the SOH platform and discuss important devices such as Mach-Zehnder and IQ-modulators based on the linear electro-optic effect. We further show liquid-crystal phase-shifters with a voltage-length product as low as V pi L = 0.06 V.mm and sub-mu W power consumption as required for slow optical switching or tuning optical filters and devices

ParaFPGA 2013: Harnessing Programs, Power and Performance in Parallel FPGA applications

Future computing systems will require dedicated accelerators to achieve high-performance. The mini-symposium ParaFPGA explores parallel computing with FPGAs as an interesting avenue to reduce the gap between the architecture and the application. Topics discussed are the power of functional and dataflow languages, the performance of high-level synthesis tools, the automatic creation of hardware multi-cores using C-slow retiming, dynamic power management to control the energy consumption, real-time reconfiguration of streaming image processing filters and memory optimized event image segmentation

Consumer populations and nutritional transition in Spain in the 20th century: A methodology for their reconstruction

One feature of the modern nutrition transition is the growing consumption of animal proteins. The most common approach in the quantitative analysis of this change used to be the study of averages of food consumption. But this kind of analysis seems to be incomplete without the knowledge of the number of consumers. Data about consumers are not usually published in historical statistics. This article introduces a methodological approach for reconstructing consumer populations. This methodology is based on some assumptions about the diffusion process of foodstuffs and the modeling of consumption patterns with a log-normal distribution. This estimating process is illustrated with the specific case of milk consumption in Spain between 1925 and 1981. These results fit quite well with other data and indirect sources available showing that this dietary change was a slow and late process. The reconstruction of consumer population could shed a new light in the study of nutritional transitions.

Medium Term Business Cycles in Developing Countries

We build a two country asymmetric DSGE model with two features: (i) endogenous and slow diffusion of technologies from the developed to the developing country, and (ii) adjustment costs to investment flows. We calibrate the model to match the Mexico-U.S. trade and FDI flows. The model is able to explain the following stylized facts: (i) U.S. and Mexican output co-move more than consumption; (ii) U.S. shocks have a larger effect on Mexico than in the U.S.; (iii) U.S. business cycles lead over medium term fluctuations in Mexico; (iv) Mexican consumption is more volatile than output.Business Cycles in Developing Countries, Co-movement between Developed and Developing economies, Volatility, Extensive Margin of Trade, Product Life Cycle, FDI.

By Force of Habit: A Consumption-Based Explanation of Aggregate Stock Market Behavior

We present a consumption-based model that explains the procyclical variation of stock prices, the long-horizon predictability of excess stock returns, and the countercyclical variation of stock market volatility. Our model has an i.i.d. consumption growth driving process, and adds a slow-moving external habit to the standard power utility function. The latter feature produces cyclical variation in risk aversion, and hence in the prices of risky assets. Our model also predicts many of the difficulties that beset the standard power utility model, including Euler equation rejections, no correlation between mean consumption growth and interest rates, very high estimates of risk aversion, and pricing errors that are larger than those of the static CAPM. Our model captures much of the history of stock prices, given only consumption data. Since our model captures the equity premium, it implies that fluctuations have important welfare costs. Unlike many habit-persistence models, our model does not necessarily produce cyclical variation in the risk free interest rate, nor does it produce an extremely skewed distribution or negative realizations of the marginal rate of substitution.