What is prosumerism for? Exploring the normative dimensions of decentralised energy transitions

Energy systems are in transformation towards increasingly renewable, decentralised, demand responsive and smart configurations. This has led to advocacy of the ‘prosumer’ phenomenon: characterised by actors who both consume and produce renewable energy. In parallel a range of prosumer business models are emerging, governed by a range of market, municipal and community actors. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and documentary analysis - centred on a case study of Bristol in the UK - this paper critically evaluates the normative dimensions of prosumer business models, modes of governance and understandings of value. We discuss how competing ‘value logics’ are present within imagined futures of prosumer-ism, and through a novel conceptual framework, how these modes of governance may lead to divergent material outcomes in a decentralised energy transition. We argue that a more explicit recognition of competing theories of value, agency and change is needed in future discussions of prosumer-ism

Resetting the compass for the business information landscape

The compilation of a new textbook on business information sources (Navigating business information sources: a practical guide for information managers, Library Association, 1998) provided the authors with an opportunity to consider and review developments in business information, including the current and possible future issues of importance to those involved in its provision. Considers the context in which business organizations are operating at the close of the twentieth century, including technical advances and deregulation combined with increased trade freedom in much of the world. Companies can now take advantage of the sophisticated global information technology infrastructures, such as the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) for the movement of resources such as capital and information. Notes the transition from print to electronic media as the dominant format for information storage and retrieval and the convergence of previously separate media, such as text graphics and sound into multimedia resources such as: Reuters Equity Focus and Bloomberg Financial Markets. End-users now have a wide range of information tools and business information managers must prove the worth of their services in providing information that can lead to better decision-making and exploitation of new business opportunities

Prosumers in the post subsidy era: an exploration of new prosumer business models in the UK.

This paper explores the evolving renewable energy ‘prosumer’ phenomenon in the United Kingdom (UK). It identifies and evaluates how prosumer business models can exist beyond direct subsidy and the range of prosumer business model archetypes currently in operation. Through a series of in-depth interviews and document analysis, the paper identifies the key opportunities and challenges for these innovative energy business models. The analysis shows that recent developments in technology such as the diffusion of smart meters, li-ion batteries, peer-to-peer trading platforms and electric vehicles are opening up a range of new value propositions, which in turn are beginning to be exploited by a range of new business models. In many cases the regulatory, financing and institutional governance landscape of the UK lags behind, however, inhibiting these emerging business models. Moreover, these business models rely on managing a complex set of values for consumers that reach deeper into their lives than traditional tariffs. Thus, successful business models must manage this complexity if they are to be adopted by the disengaged majority. Energy policy and energy practitioners can leverage these emerging trends in service of a low carbon energy transition by adopting ‘ten principles’ of prosumerism; and six UK policy recommendations

Value-based analysis of routine pathologic septal and inferior turbinate specimens.

This article was presented at the 2012 AAO-HNSF Annual Meeting & OTO EXPO; September 9-12, 2012; Washington, DC. Objective To determine the frequency and clinical relevance of unanticipated histopathologic results in routine sinonasal surgery and evaluate the necessity for histologic processing of nasal septal cartilage, bone, and inferior turbinate specimens. Study Design Case series with chart review. Setting Tertiary care academic medical center. Subjects and Methods A retrospective review of surgical pathology reports on adult patients undergoing sinonasal surgery during a 5-year period from 2005 to 2010 was performed. All cases with the preoperative diagnosis of sinonasal neoplasia, autoimmune disease, or directed septal biopsies were excluded from review. Results A total of 1194 pathology reports were reviewed from 1172 individual patients. This included histopathologic evaluation of 1194 septal cartilage and bone specimens and 714 inferior turbinate specimens. None of the patients had unanticipated histopathologic findings that were clinically significant. Conclusion Many surgeons obtain histopathologic diagnoses on all tissue removed from a patient. Based on our institutional case series, histopathology of the septum and inferior turbinates in routine sinonasal cases may not be necessary. A value-based approach to processing grossly unremarkable septal and turbinate tissue by waiving histologic processing and subsequent microscopic evaluation could provide significant cost savings

Color Differences Highlight Concomitant Polymorphism of Chalcones

The meta- and para-nitro isomers of (E)-3′-dimethylamino-nitrochalcone (Gm8m and Gm8p) are shown to exhibit concomitant color polymorphism, with Gm8m appearing as yellow (P2_{1}/c) or orange (P1̅) crystals and Gm8p appearing as red (P2_{1}/n) or black (P2_{1}/c) crystals. Each of the polymorphs was characterized optically via UV–vis spectroscopy, and their thermal behavior was characterized via differential scanning calorimetry and low-temperature powder X-ray diffraction. To assess the effect of molecular configuration and crystal packing on the colors of crystals of the different polymorphs, time dependent density functional theory (ωB97x) calculations were carried out on isolated molecules, dimers, stacks, and small clusters cut from the crystal structures of the four polymorphs. The calculated color comes from several excitations and is affected by conformation and most intermolecular contacts within the crystal, with the color differences between polymorphs mainly being due to the differences in the π–π stacking. The visual differences between these related polymorphic systems make them particularly useful for studying polymorph behavior such as phase transitions and concomitant polymorph growth

Weakly Supervised Learning by a Confusion Matrix of Contexts

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Context consideration can help provide more background and related information for weakly supervised learning. The inclusion of less documented historical and environmental context in researching diabetes amongst Pima Indians uncovered reasons which were more likely to explain why some Pima Indians had much higher rates of diabetes than Caucasians, primarily due to historical, environmental and social causes rather than their specific genetic patterns or ethnicity as suggested by many medical studies. If historical and environmental factors are considered as external contexts when not included as part of a dataset for research, some forms of internal contexts may also exist inside the dataset without being declared. This paper discusses a context construction model that transforms a confusion matrix into a matrix of categorical, incremental and correlational context to emulate a kind of internal context to search for more informative patterns in order to improve weakly supervised learning from limited labeled samples for unlabeled data. When the negative and positive labeled samples and misclassification errors are compared to “happy families” and “unhappy families”, the contexts constructed by this model in the classification experiments reflected the Anna Karenina principle well - “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, an encouraging sign to further explore contexts associated with harmonizing patterns and divisive causes for knowledge discovery in a world of uncertainty

Planck Scale Boundary Conditions and the Higgs Mass

If the LHC does only find a Higgs boson in the low mass region and no other new physics, then one should reconsider scenarios where the Standard Model with three right-handed neutrinos is valid up to Planck scale. We assume in this spirit that the Standard Model couplings are remnants of quantum gravity which implies certain generic boundary conditions for the Higgs quartic coupling at Planck scale. This leads to Higgs mass predictions at the electroweak scale via renormalization group equations. We find that several physically well motivated conditions yield a range of Higgs masses from 127-142 GeV. We also argue that a random quartic Higgs coupling at the Planck scale favors M_H > 150 GeV, which is clearly excluded. We discuss also the prospects for differentiating different boundary conditions imposed for \lambda(M_{pl}) at the LHC. A striking example is M_H = 127\pm 5 GeV corresponding to \lambda(M_{pl})=0, which would imply that the quartic Higgs coupling at the electroweak scale is entirely radiatively generated.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures; references added and other minor improvements, matches version published in JHE

Two-loop RGEs with Dirac gaugino masses

The set of renormalisation group equations to two loop order for general supersymmetric theories broken by soft and supersoft operators is completed. As an example, the explicit expressions for the RGEs in a Dirac gaugino extension of the (N)MSSM are presented.Comment: 10 pages + 24 pages of RGEs in appendix; no figure