Modeling Time-dependent CO2_2 Intensities in Multi-modal Energy Systems with Storage

CO$_2$ emission reduction and increasing volatile renewable energy generation mandate stronger energy sector coupling and the use of energy storage. In such multi-modal energy systems, it is challenging to determine the effect of an individual player's consumption pattern onto overall CO$_2$ emissions. This, however, is often important to evaluate the suitability of local CO$_2$ reduction measures. Due to renewables' volatility, the traditional approach of using annual average CO$_2$ intensities per energy form is no longer accurate, but the time of consumption should be considered. Moreover, CO$_2$ intensities are highly coupled over time and different energy forms due to sector coupling and energy storage. We introduce and compare two novel methods for computing time-dependent CO$_2$ intensities, that address different objectives: the first method determines CO$_2$ intensities of the energy system as is. The second method analyzes how overall CO$_2$ emissions would change in response to infinitesimal demand changes. Given a digital twin of the energy system in form of a linear program, we show how to compute these sensitivities very efficiently. We present the results of both methods for two simulated test energy systems and discuss their different implications.Comment: This work has been submitted to the Elsevier Applied Energy for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

LEADING THE FATHER THE PAWNEE HOMELAND, COUREURS DE BOIS, AND THE VILLASUR EXPEDITION OF 1720

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l\u27Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota.1 Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l\u27Arc if he knew the white people of the seacoast. When the chief replied that \u27[tlhe French who are on the seacoast are numerous\u27 and have \u27many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer,\u27 Louis-Joseph believed he had at last found evidence of the Mer de l\u27Ouest and the people living on its shores. But his hopes were quickly dashed when the chief proceeded to speak a few words of the whites\u27 language. As Louis-Joseph explained to Charles de la Boische Beauharnois, the governor of Canada, I recognized that he was speaking Spanish, and what confirmed me in my opinion was the account he gave of the massacre of the Spanish who were going in search of the Missouri, a matter I had heard mentioned. He concluded, All this considerably lessened my eagerness, concerning a sea already known by the Spaniards.

LEADING THE FATHER THE PAWNEE HOMELAND, COUREURS DE BOIS, AND THE VILLASUR EXPEDITION OF 1720

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l\u27Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota.1 Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l\u27Arc if he knew the white people of the seacoast. When the chief replied that \u27[tlhe French who are on the seacoast are numerous\u27 and have \u27many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer,\u27 Louis-Joseph believed he had at last found evidence of the Mer de l\u27Ouest and the people living on its shores. But his hopes were quickly dashed when the chief proceeded to speak a few words of the whites\u27 language. As Louis-Joseph explained to Charles de la Boische Beauharnois, the governor of Canada, I recognized that he was speaking Spanish, and what confirmed me in my opinion was the account he gave of the massacre of the Spanish who were going in search of the Missouri, a matter I had heard mentioned. He concluded, All this considerably lessened my eagerness, concerning a sea already known by the Spaniards.

Review of \u3ci\u3eSeth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman\u3c/i\u3e by David A. Wolff

In this short biography of Seth Bullock, the first sheriff of Deadwood, South Dakota, David A. Wolff challenges a few of the myths surrounding a former frontier icon. Bullock did not in fact clean up Deadwood, Wolff concludes, nor did he single-handedly prevent skirmishes with nearby Lakotas. His role in establishing Yellowstone National Park was a greatly exaggerated part of his legend. And his reputation as a military man was mostly unwarranted; he spent most of the Spanish-American War in Georgia and never saw action. In Wolff\u27s retelling, Bullock emerges as an opportunistic frontier capitalist more than anything else, someone who took advantage of political connections to protect his economic interests in the hardware business and mining. Relying primarily on newspaper accounts (Bullock\u27s letters, in private collections, were inaccessible to the author, making this biography less revealing than it might have been), Wolff describes Bullock\u27s first foray into politics in Montana; his move to Deadwood, where he would serve as sheriff and later manage a mining company; his tenure as supervisor of the Black Hills Forest Reserve, when he worked with Gifford Pinchot; and his close friendship, late in life, with Theodore Roosevelt. This biography also works as a short history of Deadwood itself. Wolff details the numerous challenges facing the town in its early years, including devastating fires and flooding, banking and mining failures, and its competition for the railroad

Review of \u3ci\u3eSeth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman\u3c/i\u3e by David A. Wolff

In this short biography of Seth Bullock, the first sheriff of Deadwood, South Dakota, David A. Wolff challenges a few of the myths surrounding a former frontier icon. Bullock did not in fact clean up Deadwood, Wolff concludes, nor did he single-handedly prevent skirmishes with nearby Lakotas. His role in establishing Yellowstone National Park was a greatly exaggerated part of his legend. And his reputation as a military man was mostly unwarranted; he spent most of the Spanish-American War in Georgia and never saw action. In Wolff\u27s retelling, Bullock emerges as an opportunistic frontier capitalist more than anything else, someone who took advantage of political connections to protect his economic interests in the hardware business and mining. Relying primarily on newspaper accounts (Bullock\u27s letters, in private collections, were inaccessible to the author, making this biography less revealing than it might have been), Wolff describes Bullock\u27s first foray into politics in Montana; his move to Deadwood, where he would serve as sheriff and later manage a mining company; his tenure as supervisor of the Black Hills Forest Reserve, when he worked with Gifford Pinchot; and his close friendship, late in life, with Theodore Roosevelt. This biography also works as a short history of Deadwood itself. Wolff details the numerous challenges facing the town in its early years, including devastating fires and flooding, banking and mining failures, and its competition for the railroad

Street-level bureaucrats in der Arbeitsverwaltung: Dienstleis-tungsprozesse und reformierte Arbeitsvermittlung aus Sicht der Vermittler

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Bedeutung der Vermittlungsfachkräfte für die Umsetzung von Reformen innerhalb der Bundesagentur für Arbeit. Zum einen wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie Arbeitsvermittler die Neuausrichtung des Geschäftssystems, in dem sie sich bewegen, beurteilen. Zum anderen wird ihre Selbstsicht vor dem Hintergrund theoretischer Annahmen analysiert. Eine erfolgreiche Umsetzung von Reformen hängt davon ab, wie die Mitarbeiter auf operativen Ebenen Neuerungen interpretieren. Wir zeigen anhand empirischer Ergebnisse aus einer Vermittlerbefragung, dass die Reformen grundsätzlich mitgetragen werden. Es scheint jedoch Teilbereiche zu geben, bei denen die Fachkräfte die konzeptionellen Neuerungen nur bedingt nachvollziehen können.This article deals with the role of caseworkers in Germany's Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) in the process of implementing administrative reforms. We argue that a successful outcome of reforms depends heavily on how caseworkers understand and interpret innovations. Our new data reveal how caseworkers assess the impact of the reforms and how they see themselves in the process. The results suggest that particularly the recent reforms' acceptance by street-level-bureaucrats is a necessary background for its successful implementation

Privacy Amplification for Matrix Mechanisms

Privacy amplification exploits randomness in data selection to provide tighter differential privacy (DP) guarantees. This analysis is key to DP-SGD's success in machine learning, but, is not readily applicable to the newer state-of-the-art algorithms. This is because these algorithms, known as DP-FTRL, use the matrix mechanism to add correlated noise instead of independent noise as in DP-SGD. In this paper, we propose "MMCC", the first algorithm to analyze privacy amplification via sampling for any generic matrix mechanism. MMCC is nearly tight in that it approaches a lower bound as $\epsilon\to0$. To analyze correlated outputs in MMCC, we prove that they can be analyzed as if they were independent, by conditioning them on prior outputs. Our "conditional composition theorem" has broad utility: we use it to show that the noise added to binary-tree-DP-FTRL can asymptotically match the noise added to DP-SGD with amplification. Our amplification algorithm also has practical empirical utility: we show it leads to significant improvement in the privacy-utility trade-offs for DP-FTRL algorithms on standard benchmarks

Temperature dependence of the hydrogen bond network in Trimethylamine N-oxide and guanidine hydrochloride - water solutions

We present an X-ray Compton scattering study on aqueous Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) and guanidine hydrochloride solutions (GdnHCl) as a function of temperature. Independent from the concentration of the solvent, Compton profiles almost resemble results for liquid water as a function of temperature. However, The number of hydrogen bonds per water molecule extracted from the Compton profiles suggests a decrease of hydrogen bonds with rising temperatures for all studied samples, the differences between water and the solutions are weak. Nevertheless, the data indicate a reduced bond weakening with rising TMAO concentration up to 5M of 7.2% compared to 8 % for pure water. In contrast, the addition of GdnHCl appears to behave differently for concentrations up to 3.1 M with a weaker impact on the temperature response of the hydrogen bond structure

Correlated Noise Provably Beats Independent Noise for Differentially Private Learning

Differentially private learning algorithms inject noise into the learning process. While the most common private learning algorithm, DP-SGD, adds independent Gaussian noise in each iteration, recent work on matrix factorization mechanisms has shown empirically that introducing correlations in the noise can greatly improve their utility. We characterize the asymptotic learning utility for any choice of the correlation function, giving precise analytical bounds for linear regression and as the solution to a convex program for general convex functions. We show, using these bounds, how correlated noise provably improves upon vanilla DP-SGD as a function of problem parameters such as the effective dimension and condition number. Moreover, our analytical expression for the near-optimal correlation function circumvents the cubic complexity of the semi-definite program used to optimize the noise correlation matrix in previous work. We validate our theory with experiments on private deep learning. Our work matches or outperforms prior work while being efficient both in terms of compute and memory.Comment: Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Krishnamurthy Dvijotham, and Krishna Pillutla contributed equall