Legal Hurdles to Developing Wind Power as an Alternative Energy Source in the United States: Creative and Comparative Solutions

This article discusses how parties have used current domestic environmental laws to curb the development of a more environmentally-friendly alternative energy source: wind power. As the ever-increasing demand for oil and petroleum around the world leads to rising costs throughout the nation, investing in new energy sources is considered crucial to sustainable development in the United States. Wind power has the potential to serve as a clean, efficient, and renewable source of energy in the 21st Century. The further development of wind power could create a meaningful alternative energy supply, relaxing geopolitical and economic concerns over this country\u27s strict century-old diet of fossil fuels. Unfortunately for proponents, wind power projects, despite their environmentally-conscious potential, have been successfully stalled in recent years by the unlikeliest of foes--legislation designed to protect the environment

Orientalism in the Field of Classics: Cultural Entanglement and Visual Hybridity between Greeks and Egyptians, ca. 625-525 BCE

Abstract: Cultural hybridization involves the encounter of one culture with another and often results in the mixing of languages and religion, as well as the production of new images and objects. This thesis takes a new approach. It investigates the cultural entanglement and visual hybridity that characterized Graeco-Egyptian interactions between 625 and 525 BCE and demonstrates it was the intellectual and creative environment shared by Greeks and Egyptians that enabled the developments in architecture, sculpture, and sanctuary construction of the Aegean. A brief overview of scholarly literature in Chapter 2 summarizes the ways in which Orientalist bias hindered previous scholars&rsquo; recognition of the contribution Egypt made to Greek artistic and architectural developments in the Archaic period. Chapter 3 offers a detailed description of the Greek trade city of Naukratis, on the Nile, as it looked during the Archaic period; the contact between Greeks and Egyptians at Naukratis offers the context of cultural entanglement that allowed for production of a new hybrid visual culture. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate this phenomenon in several case studies of Greek temple architecture and life-sized marble statuary. As the Conclusion makes clear, it is only through understanding Graeco-Egyptian interactions at Naukratis and beyond that the cultural expressions of the Archaic period in Greece can be understood.</p

Legal Hurdles to Developing Wind Power as an Alternative Energy Source in the United States: Creative and Comparative Solutions

This article discusses how parties have used current domestic environmental laws to curb the development of a more environmentally-friendly alternative energy source: wind power. As the ever-increasing demand for oil and petroleum around the world leads to rising costs throughout the nation, investing in new energy sources is considered crucial to sustainable development in the United States. Wind power has the potential to serve as a clean, efficient, and renewable source of energy in the 21st Century. The further development of wind power could create a meaningful alternative energy supply, relaxing geopolitical and economic concerns over this country\u27s strict century-old diet of fossil fuels. Unfortunately for proponents, wind power projects, despite their environmentally-conscious potential, have been successfully stalled in recent years by the unlikeliest of foes--legislation designed to protect the environment

Expert pilot identification techniques

Objective: The main objective of this thesis is to evaluate cognitive capacities of perceived expert pilots in comparison to non-expert pilots and non-pilots. Further, this thesis also examines the perceptions of those three groups on what may be considered as an expert, both in terms of pilot skills and experts in general. The present research aims to highlight experts’ capabilities to enable a better understanding of how the findings may relate to training with the final objective being to better identify cognitive factors that may contribute to accidents due to human error. Background: Human Error accidents are not declining as rapidly as mechanical ones, despite the advent of the newer glass cockpit. The implementation of the glass cockpit has changed the way in which the pilot cognitively interacts with it yet has not reduced the workload as initially anticipated. However, within the domain of aviation experts have demonstrated their ability to circumvent some of the cognitive limitations that can cause human error accidents. This research draws on the multiple theories of expertise with the template theory providing a superior explanation for randomly presented information as variable information can be recalled within slots in the template. Ultimately training programs could be designed by analysing what an expert pilot perceives or considers salient. Method: Participants included thirty non-pilots, 24 pilots and 6 pilots who were voted for as expert pilots. The differences between expert pilots and non-experts were examined regarding their perception of cockpit gauges. The seven gauges were arranged from normal to completely random, presented in different formats to access and establish the extent of their short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). This enabled the determination of the salient aspects of an expert’s skill and knowledge, including the size and type of information stored within a chunk. How experts were perceived was additionally examined. A further study was conducted with 191 pilot participants who were asked to state the skills and characteristics of an expert pilot. Results: The results demonstrated that expert pilots are significantly different within the quantitative studies: the six expert pilots had significantly less chunks that were, larger in size. The experts also generally recalled significantly more numbers from the gauge dials than the remaining 24 pilots and 30 non-pilots. Errors on behalf of the expert pilot group were associated with drawing the gauges back in the correct location, indicative of phantom memory, and may be caused by the Constraint Attunement Hypothesis (CAH) and the Einstellung Effect. The implication of this finding is that the expert pilots had an abstract understanding of what is occurring in reference to the aircraft rather than merely recalling the gauge information. Within the qualitative studies, when examining perceptions of experts, each of the three groups perceived the expert pilots skills and characteristics differently. For example the expert pilot group considered expert pilots to have greater work characteristics (experience, qualifications, education, training, performance and skill), while the pilots and non-pilots considered mental characteristics (knowledge, intelligence, situational awareness, recognition and decision making) to be the most important attribute. In reference to the experts in general, all three groups of participants on average considered mental characteristics to be the most important. Within the second study it became apparent that all 191 pilots considered mental characteristics to be the most important characteristic when describing an expert pilot. Conclusion: The findings suggest that expert pilots differ from non-expert pilots (and non-pilots) as they are analysing information rather than recalling information from the gauges. However, experts might experience limitations going from traditional to glass cockpits as they may falter in the expectations of where information might be found. The findings support the link between circumventing the limitations of short-term memory and expertise through the process of chunking. Application: The results have potential implication for the aviation industry, specifically with understanding cognition and memory for the purpose of designing and developing training programs that are modelled on experts

Can Tantra Make a Mātā Middle-Class?: Jogaṇī Mātā, a Uniquely Gujarati Chinnamastā

The Gujarati mātās, village goddesses traditionally popular among scheduled castes and often worshipped through rites of possession and animal sacrifice, have recently acquired Sanskritic Tantric resonances. The contemporary iconography of the goddess Jogaṇī Mātā, for instance, is virtually identical to that of the Mahāvidyā Chinnamastā. Yantra and mantra also feature prominently in Jogaṇī worship, which has begun to attract upwardly mobile urban middle-class devotees. Drawing on ethnography from three Jogaṇī sites in and around Ahmedabad, this paper identifies a tendency among worshippers and pūjārīs to acknowledge Jogaṇī’s tantric associations only to the extent that they instantiate a safe, Sanskritic, and Brahmanically-oriented Tantra. The appeal of these temples and shrines nonetheless remains the immediacy with which Jogaṇī can solve problems that are this-worldly, reminiscent of the link identified by Philip Lutgendorf between Tantra and modern Indians’ desire for ‘quick-fix’ religion. This research not only documents a rare regional iteration of Chinnamastā, but also speaks to the cachet that Tantra increasingly wields, consciously or unconsciously, within the burgeoning Gujarati and Indian urban middle-classes