Energy efficiency improvement ways in industrial clusters of the region

© 2015, Mediterranean Center of Social and Educational Research. All rights reserved. Performance results of Companies in territorial and industrial clusters of Russia in many ways determine the different level budgeting, including in particular regional ones, dramatically influencing the development of the social and cultural sectors of the region. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that their efficiency in performance is in the focused attention of regional administration authorities. A number of external and internal factors influence the operating efficiency of the companies in regional clusters. Recently, a particularly strong influence on the final results of their work has a constant rise in prices for energy resources, suppressing the growing competitiveness of the products in the world markets. The article analyzes the dynamics of changes in the main indicators characterizing the efficiency of energy use of the large industrial company, forming the core of the petrochemical cluster in one of the Russian regions. The factors with the greatest impact on improving production energy efficiency have been identified. The perspectives to reduce energy consumption in the conditions of electricity and power market liberalization have been reviewed. It is shown, that the adaptation of the companies’ activity in regional clusters to the changes in macroeconomic conditions of economic entities functioning, predetermine the necessity to address a whole range of fundamentally new methodological problems, methodic and organizational strategies to build their behavior in competitive electrical power market

From eco-efficiency to eco-effectiveness: The policy-performance paradox

The internalisation level of sustainability issues varies among topics and among countries. Companies give up less internalised issues for more internalised ones. Discrepancies between legal, market and cultural internalisation lead to different escape strategies: firms develop a high level environmental management system and they have nice sustainability policy and reports. These achievements cover the fact that their total emission keeps increasing and they do not proceed in solving the most crucial global community or corporate governance problems. ‘Escaper’ firms are often qualified as ‘leading’ ones, as a current stream of research is also ‘escapist’: it puts too much emphasis on sustainability efforts as compared to sustainability performance. Genuine strategies focus on hardcore sustainability issues and absolute effects rather than on issues easily solved and having high PR effects. They allow for growth in innovative firms, if they crowd out less efficient or more polluting ones. They produce positive environmental value added when sector average eco-efficiency is used as benchmark and do not accelerate market expansion and consumerism

Crime reduction through design: insights from ecodesign

The recognition for humankind to act in more sustainable ways has evolved new theory and practice within design. This new type of design is commonly described as ecodesign. This paper describes the different approaches to ecodesign and places them within a framework illustrating a broad range of initiatives. Approaches to crime are explored in relation to the ecodesign framework and conceptual links are made between these two fields of study. To ascertain how such initiatives may inform design and development in decreasing the number of crime and disorder events, an overview of ecodesign policies, tools and drivers is presented, and the transferability of these discussed

Workload-aware Automatic Parallelization for Multi-GPU DNN Training

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as successful solutions for variety of artificial intelligence applications, but their very large and deep models impose high computational requirements during training. Multi-GPU parallelization is a popular option to accelerate demanding computations in DNN training, but most state-of-the-art multi-GPU deep learning frameworks not only require users to have an in-depth understanding of the implementation of the frameworks themselves, but also apply parallelization in a straight-forward way without optimizing GPU utilization. In this work, we propose a workload-aware auto-parallelization framework (WAP) for DNN training, where the work is automatically distributed to multiple GPUs based on the workload characteristics. We evaluate WAP using TensorFlow with popular DNN benchmarks (AlexNet and VGG-16), and show competitive training throughput compared with the state-of-the-art frameworks, and also demonstrate that WAP automatically optimizes GPU assignment based on the workload's compute requirements, thereby improving energy efficiency.Comment: This paper is accepted in ICASSP201

Iowa Department of Natural Resources Performance Report, FY2008

Agency Performance Repor

Planning for Excellence: Insights from an International Review of Regulators’ Strategic Plans

What constitutes regulatory excellence? Answering this question is an indispensable first step for any public regulatory agency that is measuring, striving towards, and, ultimately, achieving excellence. One useful way to answer this question would be to draw on the broader literature on regulatory design, enforcement, and management. But, perhaps a more authentic way would be to look at how regulators themselves define excellence. However, we actually know remarkably little about how the regulatory officials who are immersed in the task of regulation conceive of their own success. In this Article, we investigate regulators’ definitions of regulatory excellence by drawing on a unique source of data that provides an important window on regulators’ own aspirations: their strategic plans. Strategic plans have been required or voluntarily undertaken for the past decade or longer by regulators around the globe. In these plans, regulators offer mission statements, strategic goals, and measurable and achievable outcomes, all of which indicate what regulators value and are striving to become. Occasionally, they even state explicitly where they have fallen short of “best-in-class” status and how they intend to improve. To date, a voluminous literature exists examining agency practices in strategic planning, but we are aware of no study that tries to glean from the substance of a sizeable number of plans how regulators themselves construe regulatory excellence. The main task of this Article is undertaking this effort. This Article draws on twenty plans from different regulators in nine countries. We found most generally that excellent regulators describe themselves (though not necessarily using exactly these words) as institutions that are more (1) efficient, (2) educative, (3) multiplicative, (4) proportional, (5) vital, (6) just, and (7) honest. In addition to these seven shared attribute categories, our reading of the plans also revealed five other “unusual” attributes that only one or two agencies mentioned. Beyond merely cataloguing the attributes identified by agencies, this Article also discusses commonalities (and differences) between plan structures, emphases, and framings. We found that the plans differed widely in features such as the specificity of their mission statements, the extent to which they emphasized actions over outcomes (or vice versa), and the extent to which commitments were organized along organizational fiefdoms or cut across bureaucratic lines. We urge future scholarship to explore alternative methods of text mining, and to study strategic plans over time within agencies, in order to track how agencies’ notions of regulatory excellence respond to changes in the regulatory context and the larger circumstances within which agencies operate. Looking longitudinally will also shed light on how agencies handle strategic goals that are either met or that prove to be unattainable