Fall 1978

Guidelines for Planning and Building a Golf Course (page 3) Turfgrass Field Day (6) Problems in Managing Turfgrass in Shade (9) Escape to the Islands--in Boston Harbor (15

Accessible decision support for sustainable energy systems in developing countries

With rising electricity demand through digitization and innovation, the urgency of climate change mitigation, and the recent geopolitical crisis, stakeholders in developing countries face the complex task to build reliable, affordable, and low-emission energy systems. Information inaccessibility, data unavailability, and scarce local expertise are major challenges for planning and transitioning to decentralized solutions. Motivated by the calls for more solution-oriented research regarding sustainability, we design, develop, and evaluate the web-based decision support system NESSI4Dweb+ that is tailored to the needs and capabilities of various stakeholders in developing countries. NESSI4Dweb+ is open access and considers location-specific circumstances to facilitate multi-energy planning. Its applicability is demonstrated with a case study of a representative rural village in southern Madagascar and evaluated through seven interviews with experts and stakeholders. We show that NESSI4Dweb+ can support the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and enable the very prerequisite of digitization: reliable electrification

Sustainable Energy System Planning in Developing Countries: A Decision Support System Considering Variations Over Time

Planning energy systems is subject to changes in components’ health and installation costs, fossil fuel prices, and load demand. Especially in developing countries, electrical loads are reported to increase drastically after electrification. Improper sizing of the energy system’s components can lead to reduced environmental sustainability, decreased reliability, and long-term project failures. As no tools for energy system planning exist that aim at developing countries and sufficiently account for temporal variations, we modify the software NESSI4D in a design science cycle to provide the comprehensive decision support system NESSI4D+. We conduct an applicability check with a representative rural village in mountainous Nepal that validates NESSI4D+’s relevance and shows the importance of considering temporal variations for economically, ecologically, and socially long-term sustainable energy projects

Tool-based renewable energy system planning using survey data: A case study in rural Vietnam

Renewable energies provide effective sustainable development by raising living standards, accelerating economic growth, and mitigating pollution. However, specifically in developing countries, the lack of information, data, and local expertise challenges the design process and long-term success of renewable energy systems. Following the call for inter-disciplinary, solution-oriented research, this work uses a design science research-approach to facilitate multi-energy planning. The decision support system NESSI4D is developed, which considers site-specific economic, environmental, technological, and social factors and is tuned for stakeholder needs in developing countries. Following a step-by-step process model manual, the artifact’s applicability is demonstrated in a use case for a rural community in Thua Thien-Hue, Vietnam. Missing load data are synthesized from the TVSEP with the software RAMP. The results show that the implementation of renewable energy technologies only enables affordable, low-emission electrification with governmental financial incentives. Several sensitivity tests illustrate the impact of changing assumptions and highlight the importance of detailed analyses with highly specialized tools. The demonstrating use case validates the method’s relevance for research and practice towards the goals of effective sustainable development

Sustainable Energy System Planning in Developing Countries: Facilitating Load Profile Generation in Energy System Simulations

Successful energy system planning is dependent on detailed electricity demand information. Especially in developing countries, pre-generated load profiles are often unsuitable as appliance ownership and usage vary significantly across borders, between urban and rural areas, and on household and industry levels. Synthesizing load profiles is often hindered by the inaccessibility of tools due to cost barriers, global unavailability, or required technical knowledge. As currently, no easily accessible and usable tool is available during energy system planning in rural areas of developing countries, we incorporate the open-source load profile generator RAMP into our web-based energy system simulator NESSI4Dweb+ to provide an intuitive user interface. We conduct an applicability check with self-collected data from a guesthouse in Sri Lanka, analyzing the impact of load distribution and magnitude on the economic, environmental, and reliable energy supply, that validates the artifact's relevance and ability to empower local decision-makers

Interactive Virtual Laboratory for Experience with a Smart Bridge Test

Virtual laboratory experiments can be cost effective, convenient instructional resources that have appeal to a wide range of learning styles. Expensive, time-consuming laboratory tests can be experienced repeatedly and remotely using interactive simulations and original video footage or animations. A virtual experiment can incorporate meaningful exercises, procedural options, and background hyperlinks to create a comprehensive hands on environment. Also, it may be used as preliminary training for the actual experiment. An interactive LabVIEW-based laboratory for a load test simulation of an existing demonstration bridge was created. This smart truss bridge is instrumented with fiber optic strain sensors situated on the trusses. The user interface incorporates a synchronized image of the loaded bridge and a graph of the associated strains. A static display mode allows the choice of load placement and of data for single or multiple sensors. A continuous display mode shows the dynamic images of the bridge and strains on truss members. Options include the display of experimental data or of theoretical calculations. Hyperlinks give access to information on the sensors, the bridge construction, and the theoretical analysis. The program interface can also be used in the actual experiment to display data. The intended application is a laboratory for an interdisciplinary class on smart materials and sensors. The Lab VIEW program can be easily modified for tests on other structures such as a full-scale bridge

The interplay of diversity training and diversity beliefs on team creativity in nationality diverse teams

Attaining value from nationality diversity requires active diversity management, which organizations often employ in the form of diversity training programs. Interestingly, however, the previously reported effects of diversity training are often weak and, sometimes, even negative. This situation calls for research on the conditions under which diversity training helps or harms teams. We propose that diversity training can increase team creativity, but only for teams with less positive pretraining diversity beliefs (i.e., teams with a greater need for such training) and that are sufficiently diverse in nationality. Comparing the creativity of teams that attended nationality diversity training versus control training, we found that for teams with less positive diversity beliefs, diversity training increased creative performance when the team’s nationality diversity was high, but undermined creativity when the team’s nationality diversity was low. Diversity training had less impact on teams with more positive diversity beliefs, and training effects were not contingent upon these teams’ diversity. Speaking to the underlying process, we showed that these interactive effects were driven by the experienced team efficacy of the team members. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for nationality diversity management

Augmenter of liver regeneration enhances the success rate of fetal pancreas transplantation in rodents

Background. Treatment of fetal pancreas (FP) isografts with insulin- like growth factor-I greatly improves the rate of conversion to euglycemia in diabetic rats. Complete knowledge of other factors that may facilitate the engraftment and function of FP in vivo is still embryonic. Augmenter of liver regeneration (ALR) is a newly described polypeptide growth factor found in weanling rat livers. ALR has trophic effects on regenerating liver. We studied the effects of in situ administration of this agent on FP isografts in rats. Methods. Streptozotocin-diabetic Lewis rats (blood glucose >300 mg/dl) received 16 FP isografts transplanted intramuscularly. ALR was delivered from day 1 through day 14, in doses of 40 or 400 ng/kg/d. Animals were followed for 3 months with serial weights and blood glucose monitoring. These animals were compared with those treated with vehicle alone. Results. Of the group treated with ALR at 40 ng/kg/day for 14 days, 89% (eight of nine) were euglycemic (P=0.0003). Of the group treated with ALR at 400 ng/kg/day for 14 days, 88% (seven of eight) were euglycemic (P=0.0007). Of the group treated with vehicle alone, none of the six were euglycemic. Euglycemia is defined here as glucose<200 mg/dl for 3 days. Pathology of the intramuscular transplant site showed patches of islet tissue embedded in fat. These patches demonstrated insulin immunoreactivity. Conclusions. Diabetes was reversed in a significantly greater proportion of FP + ALR-treated recipients than those animals treated with vehicle alone. Local delivery of growth factors my be used as an adjunct to FP transplantation to improve the rate of success. This in situ model may be useful to further evaluate other soluble factors

Lines pinning lines

A line g is a transversal to a family F of convex polytopes in 3-dimensional space if it intersects every member of F. If, in addition, g is an isolated point of the space of line transversals to F, we say that F is a pinning of g. We show that any minimal pinning of a line by convex polytopes such that no face of a polytope is coplanar with the line has size at most eight. If, in addition, the polytopes are disjoint, then it has size at most six. We completely characterize configurations of disjoint polytopes that form minimal pinnings of a line.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

Notes about the Caratheodory number

In this paper we give sufficient conditions for a compactum in $\mathbb R^n$ to have Carath\'{e}odory number less than $n+1$, generalizing an old result of Fenchel. Then we prove the corresponding versions of the colorful Carath\'{e}odory theorem and give a Tverberg type theorem for families of convex compacta