The Resource Adequacy Requirement in FERC\u27s Standard Market Design: Help for Competition or a Return to Command and Control?

Although electricity markets\u27 march toward competition has not been a complete success, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ( FERC ) remains committed to easing wholesale electricity markets toward that goal. Indeed, FERC\u27s Standard Market Design Notice of Proposed Rulemaking makes some headway: Locational marginal pricing, for example, will force load to internalize the congestion costs of its consumption and will signal the need for new transmission and generation. FERC, however, has embraced price caps in spot markets and, to make the markets work despite the price caps, has proposed a Resource Adequacy Requirement ( RAR ) to ensure that adequate generation exists to deliver electricity to load. If RAR achieves FERC\u27s objective, it will stunt the growth of demand response, a necessary component of stable competition. Further, RAR will permit the perpetuation of the current price-cap regime, which distorts price signals. The claim that RAR together with price caps are only temporary measures to help put wholesale markets on surer footing seems misguided; until price caps are raised significantly above present levels, load-serving entities and load itself lack the incentive to invest in technologies necessary to make demand response a reality. If this were not enough to counsel against promulgating the PAR, the proposal is internally contradictory and, according to the relevant statutes, lies outside FERC\u27s jurisdiction to implement or enforce. FERC should discard the RAR and current price caps and instead adopt a reformist program that will better allow scarcity spot prices to ensure generation adequacy

The role of dynamic trade-offs in creating safety - a qualitative study of handover across care boundaries in emergency care

The paper aims to demonstrate how the study of everyday clinical work can contribute novel insights into a common and stubborn patient safety problem – the vulnerabilities of handover across care boundaries in emergency care. Based on a dialectical interpretation of the empirical evidence gathered in five National Health Service organisations, the paper argues that performance variability is an essential component in the delivery of safe care, as practitioners translate tensions they encounter in their everyday work into safe practices through dynamic trade-offs based on their experience and the requirements of the specific situation. The findings may shed new light on the vulnerabilities of the handover process, and they might help explain why improvements to handover have remained largely elusive and what type of future recommendations may be appropriate for improving patient safety

LAKE SEDIMENT ARCHIVES OF ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTION FROM THE PERUVIAN AND BOLIVIAN ANDES

Despite a richly-documented history of metallurgy following Hispanic conquest of the Inca, little is known concerning the loci and intensities of earlier metallurgical activities. Lake sediments offer one strategy to reconstruct this history because the deposition of trace elements associated with smelting form a continuous archive that can be assessed in the context of regional archaeology. To reconstruct regional histories of late Holocene atmospheric pollution, two lake sediment cores were collected from mining areas in the central Peruvian Andes. Lake sediment stratigraphies of elemental concentrations and isotopic ratios preserve a regional record of pre-Incan, Incan, and Colonial smelting practices. Our records provide the first evidence for intensive, pre-Colonial smelting in the central Peruvian Andes, and corroborate earlier findings from Bolivia. Surprisingly, smelting appears to have operated independent of oversight from the Wari (500 to 1000 AD) or Inca (1460 to 1532 AD) Empires. With Spanish arrival, smelting activity increased dramatically, only to be superseded by post-industrial pollution.The two central Andean records were compared to two Bolivian records of atmospheric pollution. Initial Pb enrichment in Bolivia occurs contemporaneously with records from Peru ca. 400 AD. In Bolivia, this coincides with the expansion of the Tiwanaku Empire (ca. 400 to 1000 AD). Inca expansion across both Peru and Bolivia (~1450 AD) led to increased metallurgical activity at all four study sites. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of paleolimnological methods for reconstructing the timing and magnitude of smelting activity throughout the New World, and thus contribute directly to a fragmentary archaeological record

Interactive graphical model building using virtual reality

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-59).by Christopher Alexander Cooke.M.S

Clinical handover within the emergency care pathway and the potential risks of clinical handover failure (ECHO) : primary research

Background and objectives: Handover and communication failures are a recognised threat to patient safety. Handover in emergency care is a particularly vulnerable activity owing to the high-risk context and overcrowded conditions. In addition, handover frequently takes place across the boundaries of organisations that have different goals and motivations, and that exhibit different local cultures and behaviours. This study aimed to explore the risks associated with handover failure in the emergency care pathway, and to identify organisational factors that impact on the quality of handover. Methods: Three NHS emergency care pathways were studied. The study used a qualitative design. Risks were explored in nine focus group-based risk analysis sessions using failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA). A total of 270 handovers between ambulance and the emergency department (ED), and the ED and acute medicine were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed using conversation analysis. Organisational factors were explored through thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with a purposive convenience sample of 39 staff across the three pathways. Results: Handover can serve different functions, such as management of capacity and demand, transfer of responsibility and delegation of aspects of care, communication of different types of information, and the prioritisation of patients or highlighting of specific aspects of their care. Many of the identified handover failure modes are linked causally to capacity and patient flow issues. Across the sites, resuscitation handovers lasted between 38 seconds and 4 minutes, handovers for patients with major injuries lasted between 30 seconds and 6 minutes, and referrals to acute medicine lasted between 1 minute and approximately 7 minutes. Only between 1.5% and 5% of handover communication content related to the communication of social issues. Interview participants described a range of tensions inherent in handover that require dynamic trade-offs. These are related to documentation, the verbal communication, the transfer of responsibility and the different goals and motivations that a handover may serve. Participants also described the management of flow of patients and of information across organisational boundaries as one of the most important factors influencing the quality of handover. This includes management of patient flows in and out of departments, the influence of time-related performance targets, and the collaboration between organisations and departments. The two themes are related. The management of patient flow influences the way trade-offs around inner tensions are made, and, on the other hand, one of the goals of handover is ensuring adequate management of patient flows. Conclusions: The research findings suggest that handover should be understood as a sociotechnical activity embedded in clinical and organisational practice. Capacity, patient flow and national targets, and the quality of handover are intricately related, and should be addressed together. Improvement efforts should focus on providing practitioners with flexibility to make trade-offs in order to resolve tensions inherent in handover. Collaborative holistic system analysis and greater cultural awareness and collaboration across organisations should be pursued

Can Sinn Fein policy still be considered 'Republican'?

This thesis endeavoured to accurately gauge the extent to which modern Sinn Fein continues to adhere to the principles of Irish Republicanism in the modern age. This required an examination of the movement's origins and its development over time. Competing interpretations of Irish Republican history and ideology were analysed in an attempt to isolate those principles central to the movement, before a conclusion being drawn about the extent to which Sinn Fein remain truly 'Republican'. In charting the development of the Republican movement and the extent to which Sinn Fein have moved away from previous, 'hard-line' positions, the thesis also tackled the issue of nationalist convergence in Northern Ireland. Provisional Sinn Fein and the SDLP were both founded at the start of the 1970s, both primarily representing the nationalist community, but were seen as focusing on wholly different political agendas. The thesis measured the extent to which this was the case after a series of policy alterations by both parties, as well as the likelihood of two large parties continuing to vie for electoral supremacy within Northern Ireland's smaller ethnic bloc. The thesis also gave focus to the rising levels of 'dissident' activity in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. This is a modern phenomenon and as such, has not attracted a great deal of academic scrutiny. The range of 'dissident' groups operative in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement were investigated with a view to pinning down their aspirations, tactics and particular grievances against the Republican mainstream as embodied by Sinn Fein. The levels of sympathy and support for such groups were also considered as part of the process of assessing Sinn Fein's Republican credentials. Ultimately, the thesis was extremely successful in charting the evolving relationship between Sinn Fein and the SDLP over the forty years of their existence. Interviews with politicians and strategists and scrutiny of crucial policy documents revealed that each party has undertaken significant policy alterations over the course of their existences. Whilst a common perception is that Sinn Fein morphed from an extreme party into a moderate one emulating long-standing SDLP policies, in truth it was the SDLP that first underwent a significant change in approach. Originally participatory and primarily concerned with social democratic goals within the Northern Irish state, the party later employed abstentionism on occasion and became more 'green', demanding an Irish dimension to any political deal as a prerequisite for talks. Ultimately a firm conclusion on whether Sinn Fein remains true to Republican principles could not be offered. Having spoken to a range of republicans of different ilk, it was concluded that elements above and beyond delivering Irish unity via an all-island plebiscite could be discarded as marginal, however popular amongst supporters, activists and representatives. Consequently, whilst the party continues to work towards that goal, any judgement on the legitimacy of its claim to represent Republican principles in a modern setting must be reserved. What was concluded, however, was that as of 2011 it remained unclear precisely how the party would be able to deliver on traditional goals

How safe are clinical systems?

Th is study was commissioned by the Health Foundation to examine the extent, type and causes of failures in reliability in different healthcare systems: failures which have the potential to create risk or cause patient harm

Structural, item, and test generalizability of the psychopathology checklist - revised to offenders with intellectual disabilities

The Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) is the most widely used measure of psychopathy in forensic clinical practice, but the generalizability of the measure to offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID) has not been clearly established. This study examined the structural equivalence and scalar equivalence of the PCL-R in a sample of 185 male offenders with ID in forensic mental health settings, as compared with a sample of 1,212 male prisoners without ID. Three models of the PCL-R’s factor structure were evaluated with confirmatory factor analysis. The 3-factor hierarchical model of psychopathy was found to be a good fit to the ID PCL-R data, whereas neither the 4-factor model nor the traditional 2-factor model fitted. There were no cross-group differences in the factor structure, providing evidence of structural equivalence. However, item response theory analyses indicated metric differences in the ratings of psychopathy symptoms between the ID group and the comparison prisoner group. This finding has potential implications for the interpretation of PCL-R scores obtained with people with ID in forensic psychiatric settings

High-Redshift Metals. II. Probing Reionization Galaxies with Low-Ionization Absorption Lines at Redshift Six

We present a survey for low-ionization metal absorption line systems towards 17 QSOs at redshifts z_em=5.8-6.4. Nine of our objects were observed at high resolution with either Keck/HIRES or Magellan/MIKE, and the remainder at moderate resolution with Keck/ESI. The survey spans 5.3 < z_abs < 6.4 and has a pathlength interval \Delta X=39.5, or \Delta z=8.0. In total we detect ten systems, five of which are new discoveries. The line-of-sight number density is consistent with the combined number density at z~3 of DLAs and sub-DLAs, which comprise the main population of low-ionization systems at lower redshifts. This apparent lack of evolution may occur because low ionization systems are hosted by lower-mass halos at higher redshifts, or because the mean cross section of low-ionization gas at a given halo mass increases with redshift due to the higher densities and lower ionizing background. The roughly constant number density notably contrasts with the sharp decline at z > 5.3 in the number density of highly-ionized systems traced by C IV. The low-ionization systems at z~6 span a similar range of velocity widths as lower-redshift sub-DLAs but have significantly weaker lines at a given width. This implies that the mass-metallicity relation of the host galaxies evolves towards lower metallicities at higher redshifts. These systems lack strong Si IV and C IV, which are common among lower-redshift DLAs and sub-DLAs. This is consistent, however, with a similar decrease in the metallicity of the low- and high-ionization phases, and does not necessarily indicate a lack of nearby, highly-ionized gas. The high number density of low-ionization systems at z~6 suggests that we may be detecting galaxies below the current limits of i-dropout and Ly-alpha emission galaxy surveys. These systems may therefore be the first direct probes of the `typical' galaxies responsible for hydrogen reionization.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, submitted to Ap

Switch-on Luminescent Sensing of Unlabelled Bacterial Lectin by Terbium(iii) Glycoconjugate Systems

Interactions of lectins with glycoconjugate-terbium(III) self-assembly complexes lead to sensing through enhanced lanthanide luminescence. This glycan-directed sensing paradigm detects an unlabelled lectin (LecA) associated with pathogen P. aeruginosa in solution, without any bactericidal activity. Further development of these probes could have potential as a diagnostic tool