37,703 research outputs found
A Historical Survey of Water Utilization in the Cook Inlet - Susitna Basin, Alaska
Completion Report
OWRT Agreement No. 14-34-0001-6002
Project No. A-056-ALASThe objectives of the study encompassed a scholarly investigation
of the appropriate archival and published literature on the Cook-Inlet-Susitna
Basin, and the publication of the articles and a book-length
history of the utilization of water resources.
There are many aspects of Alaskan history to which historians have
not given serious attention. Certainly there has been no historical
consideration of the importance of water resources in Alaska. Issues
that have involved water use have either been treated journalistically
or have been the subject of scientific monographs. The understanding of
the public can sometimes be confused by the journalistic treatment of
events while scientific reports are seldom read. There is a definite
need for a well-researched, lively survey of an important spect of
Alaska's history.
Many years passed before systematic scientific work was carried out
in the Cook Inlet-Susitna region but the uses of its water resources for
sanitation, transport, food, and power were intensified as time passed.
The region has had significance for well over 200 years to the western
peoples who settled there and, of course, for much longer to its aboriginal
inhabitants. There has never been a substantial history written
of the region, although some aspects of its past have been surveyed in a
few pub1ished works, and there has never been a historical survey of
water utilization for any region of Alaska.
Increasingly, the development of the region will involve political
decision. The public scrutiny of the environmental impact of new dam
and other construction is not likely to decline. Further petroleum
leasing in the outer continental shelf areas will raise questions of the
best uses which can be made of the water and other resources. The
wisdom of these decisions depends upon our knowledge of all of the
factors involved. An understanding of what has happened in the past as
people have made use of the water resources could contribute to the
effectiveness of judgments made in the future.The work upon which this completion report is based was supported
by funds provided by the U. S. Department of the Interior, Office of
Water Research and Technology as authorized under the Water Resources
Research Act of 1964, Public Law 88-379, as amended
Observability for two dimensional systems
Sufficient conditions that a two-dimensional system with output is locally observable are presented. Known results depend on time derivatives of the output and the inverse function theorem. In some cases, no informaton is provided by these theories, and one must study observability by other methods. The observability problem is dualized to the controllability problem, and the deep results of Hermes on local controllability are applied to prove a theorem concerning local observability
The human right to medicines
This article considers the component of the right to the highest standard of health that relates to medicines, including essential medicines. Using the right-to-health analytical framework that has been developed in recent years, the first section focuses on the responsibilities of States. The second section provides a brief introduction to the responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies
A canonical form for nonlinear systems
The conceptions of transformation and canonical form have been much used to analyze the structure of linear systems. A coordinate system and a corresponding canonical form are developed for general nonlinear control systems. Their usefulness is demonstrated by showing that every feedback linearizable system becomes a system with only feedback paths in the canonical form
Are drug companies living up to their human rights responsibilities? The perspective of the former United Nations Special Rapporteur (2002-2008).
BACKGROUND TO THE DEBATE: The human rights responsibilities of drug companies have been considered for years by nongovernmental organizations, but were most sharply defined in a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, submitted to the United Nations General Assembly in August 2008. The "Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines" include responsibilities for transparency, management, monitoring and accountability, pricing, and ethical marketing, and against lobbying for more protection in intellectual property laws, applying for patents for trivial modifications of existing medicines, inappropriate drug promotion, and excessive pricing. Two years after the release of the Guidelines, the PLoS Medicine Debate asks whether drug companies are living up to their human rights responsibilities. Sofia Gruskin and Zyde Raad from the Harvard School of Public Health say more assessment is needed of such responsibilities; Geralyn Ritter, Vice President of Global Public Policy and Corporate Responsibility at Merck & Co. argues that multiple stakeholders could do more to help States deliver the right to health; and Paul Hunt and Rajat Khosla introduce Mr. Hunt's work as the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, regarding the human rights responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies and access to medicines
Linear approximations of nonlinear systems
The development of a method for designing an automatic flight controller for short and vertical take off aircraft is discussed. This technique involves transformations of nonlinear systems to controllable linear systems and takes into account the nonlinearities of the aircraft. In general, the transformations cannot always be given in closed form. Using partial differential equations, an approximate linear system called the modified tangent model was introduced. A linear transformation of this tangent model to Brunovsky canonical form can be constructed, and from this the linear part (about a state space point x sub 0) of an exact transformation for the nonlinear system can be found. It is shown that a canonical expansion in Lie brackets about the point x sub 0 yields the same modified tangent model
Extending the functional equivalence of radial basis functionnetworks and fuzzy inference systems
We establish the functional equivalence of a generalized class of Gaussian radial basis function (RBFs) networks and the full Takagi-Sugeno model (1983) of fuzzy inference. This generalizes an existing result which applies to the standard Gaussian RBF network and a restricted form of the Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system. The more general framework allows the removal of some of the restrictive conditions of the previous result
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