Valuing the attributes of renewable energy investments in Scotland

This study was funded by a grant from the Scottish Economic Policy Network (SEPN) with funding assistance provided by the University of Glasgow, Department of Economics (Professor Nick Hanley) and the University of Sterling (Robert Wright). The goal of the project was to determine the value of differing types of renewable energy projects by how they would effect environmental and community quality of life factors. The key issues examined include; air quality, landscape, wildlife, and long term local employment. Stated preference methods were employed through the use of a discrete choice experiment survey approach. Willingness-to-pay for different types of renewable energy projects was estimated, i.e., moderate onshore windmill farms, large onshore windmill farms, offshore windmill farms, and biomass fueled power plants. The most significant findings were that rural areas likely to be most highly impacted by the new energy projects were willing to accept low or moderate environmental damage in exchange for commercial development gains. Urban respondents on the other hand were more likely to oppose any disturbance to the landscape or wildlife and had no value placed on the economics development gains for the rural areas; income level of households showed no significant difference in environmental values

Interfacing requirements for MEMS components in system-on-chip methodologies

Modern VLSI design is moving towards a System-on-Chip design paradigm, where chip design involves the integration of separate macrocells from different manufacturers. This paper explores the obstacles to adopting this same methodology for systems incorporating MEMS components. These obstacles include the technology specific nature of most MEMS devices, interference between MEMS sensors, and the limited electronics device density of mixed MEMS/Microelectronics technologies. It is conjectured that one fruitful avenue for further work is the development of MEMS interface circuits which can be incorporated into a single SoC along with other electronics macrocells, and which men connect to discrete MEMS sensor chips

Measuring a coherent superposition

We propose a simple method for measuring the populations and the relative phase in a coherent superposition of two atomic states. The method is based on coupling the two states to a third common (excited) state by means of two laser pulses, and measuring the total fluorescence from the third state for several choices of the excitation pulses.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, twocolumn REVTe

Egret: A platform for reconfigurable system-on-chip

Reconfigurable System-on-Chip (rSoC) design is inherently a complex task with enormous freedom in design parameters such as processor, operating system, and backplane buses. Design efficiency can be improved by the use of an rSoC platform which constrains these choices, and allows new designs to leverage much of the expertise of previous designs. Egret is an rSoC prototyping platform being developed at the University of Queensland, Australia, and this paper explains and justifies the design decisions for the first version of Egret

Interfacing methodologies for IP re-use in reconfigurable system-on-chip

Initially, IP cores in Systems-on-Chip were interconnected through custom interface logic. The more recent use of standard on-chip buses has eased integration and eliminated inefficient glue logic, and hence boosted the production of IP functional cores. However, once an IP block is designed to target a particular on-chip bus standard, retargeting to a different bus is time-consuming and tedious. As new bus standards are introduced and different interconnection methods are proposed, this problem increases. Many solutions have been proposed, however these solutions either limit the IP block performance or are restricted to a particular platform. A new methodology is presented that can automate the connection of an IP block to a wide variety of interface architectures with low overhead through the use a special Interface Adaptor Logic layer

Effects of new physics in neutrino oscillations in matter

A new flavor changing electron neutrino interaction with matter would always dominate the nu_e oscillation probability at sufficiently high neutrino energies. Being suppressed by theta_{13}, the energy scale at which the new effect starts to be relevant may be within the reach of realistic experiments, where the peculiar dependence of the signal with energy could give rise to a clear signature in the nu_e --> nu_tau channel. The latter could be observed by means of a coarse large magnetized detector by exploiting tau --> mu decays. We discuss the possibility of identifying or constraining such effects with a high energy neutrino factory. We also comment on the model independent limits on them.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure