Pacific Northwest GridWise™ Testbed Demonstration Projects; Part II. Grid Friendly™ Appliance Project

Fifty residential electric water heaters and 150 new residential clothes dryers were modified to respond to signals received from underfrequency, load-shedding appliance controllers. Each controller monitored the power-grid voltage signal and requested that electrical load be shed by its appliance whenever electric power-grid frequency fell below 59.95 Hz. The controllers and their appliances were installed and monitored for more than a year at residential sites at three locations in Washington and Oregon. The controllers and their appliances responded reliably to each shallow underfrequency event—an average of one event per day—and shed their loads for the durations of these events. Appliance owners reported that the appliance responses were unnoticed and caused little or no inconvenience for the homes’ occupants

A possible role for river restoration enhancing biodiversity through interaction with wildfire

BackgroundHistorically, wildfire regimes produced important landscape-scale disturbances in many regions globally. The “pyrodiversity begets biodiversity” hypothesis suggests that wildfires that generate temporally and spatially heterogeneous mosaics of wildfire severity and post-burn recovery enhance biodiversity at landscape scales. However, river management has often led to channel incision that disconnects rivers from their floodplains, desiccating floodplain habitats and depleting groundwater. In conjunction with predicted increases in frequency, intensity and extent of wildfires under climate change, this increases the likelihood of deep, uniform burns that reduce biodiversity.Predicted synergy of river restoration and biodiversity increaseRecent focus on floodplain re-wetting and restoration of successional floodplain habitat mosaics, developed for river management and flood prevention, could reduce wildfire intensity in restored floodplains and make the burns less uniform, increasing climate-change resilience; an important synergy. According to theory, this would also enhance biodiversity. However, this possibility is yet to be tested empirically. We suggest potential research avenues.Illustration and future directionsWe illustrate the interaction between wildfire and river restoration using a restoration project in Oregon, USA. A project to reconnect the South Fork McKenzie River and its floodplain suffered a major burn (“Holiday Farm” wildfire, 2020), offering a rare opportunity to study the interaction between this type of river restoration and wildfire; specifically, the predicted increases in pyrodiversity and biodiversity. Given the importance of river and wetland ecosystems for biodiversity globally, a research priority should be to increase our understanding of potential mechanisms for a “triple win” of flood reduction, wildfire alleviation and biodiversity promotion

Pacific Northwest GridWise™ Testbed Demonstration Projects; Part I. Olympic Peninsula Project

This report describes the implementation and results of a field demonstration wherein residential electric water heaters and thermostats, commercial building space conditioning, municipal water pump loads, and several distributed generators were coordinated to manage constrained feeder electrical distribution through the two-way communication of load status and electric price signals. The field demonstration took place in Washington and Oregon and was paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy and several northwest utilities. Price is found to be an effective control signal for managing transmission or distribution congestion. Real-time signals at 5-minute intervals are shown to shift controlled load in time. The behaviors of customers and their responses under fixed, time-of-use, and real-time price contracts are compared. Peak loads are effectively reduced on the experimental feeder. A novel application of portfolio theory is applied to the selection of an optimal mix of customer contract types

Legal linked data ecosystems and the rule of law

This chapter introduces the notions of meta-rule of law and socio-legal ecosystems to both foster and regulate linked democracy. It explores the way of stimulating innovative regulations and building a regulatory quadrant for the rule of law. The chapter summarises briefly (i) the notions of responsive, better and smart regulation; (ii) requirements for legal interchange languages (legal interoperability); (iii) and cognitive ecology approaches. It shows how the protections of the substantive rule of law can be embedded into the semantic languages of the web of data and reflects on the conditions that make possible their enactment and implementation as a socio-legal ecosystem. The chapter suggests in the end a reusable multi-levelled meta-model and four notions of legal validity: positive, composite, formal, and ecological

Dividend Omissions and Intraindustry Information Transfers

We examine potential information transfers from companies that announce dividend omissions to their industry rivals. Specifically, we examine the abnormal stock returns and abnormal earnings forecast revisions of rivals after a company makes a dividend-omission announcement. Our results show negative and significant abnormal stock returns and negative and significant abnormal forecast revisions for rival companies in response to the announcement, and a significant and positive relation between the two. We conclude that a dividend-omission announcement transmits unfavorable information across the announcing company's industry that affects cash flow expectations and ultimately stock prices. 2003 The Southern Finance Association and the Southwestern Finance Association.

Adrenal Medullary Transplants as a Treatment for Advanced Parkinson\u27s Disease

Abstract: Open autologous adrenal medullary to caudate nucleus transplantation was performed in 12 patients with advanced Parkinson\u27s disease (PD). Ten of these patients had diurnal response fluctuations including €œwearing off\u27€™and €œon/off\u27€™phenomena. All of the patients were no longer satisfactorily responding to levodopa/carbidopa and dopamine agonists. The mean age of the patients was 55.1 years (range 37€65 yrs); mean duration of PD was 11.7 years (range 4€40 yrs); mean stage €œon\u27€™was 3.3 (range 2€4); mean stage €œoff\u27€™was 4.8 (range 4€“5). Mean duration of follow up from surgery was 10.4 months (range 2€17 months). Three patients improved dramatically with major changes in their lifestyle. The course of improvement in these 3 patients was different in each, implying that different mechanisms were responsible for the improvement. One of the patients died unexpectedly. In this patient, there were no surviving adrenal cells. Three patients improved moderately. Patients reported that they were €œon\u27€™longer and had to take medication less often and were less dependent on individual doses of levodopa/carbidopa. The improvement has been sustained in two patients. However, in one of these patients there had to be frequent changes in scheduling to maintain the improvement. Two patients after technically successful inplants did not improve. One of these patients subsequently died. In this patient there were a few surviving adrenal medullary cells. Four patients suffered major complications. One patient had a cerebral infarction and two had cerebral hemorrhages. One of these patients has shown a good recovery. One patient with autonomic insufficiency had a cardiac arrest with cerebral anoxia one week after surgery. This patient has shown a partial recovery. Open adrenal medullary inplantation can influence the course of PD. However, the results are too inconsistent and the risks too high for this procedure to become standard treatment. Increased knowledge about the factors governing successful inplantation and modifications in the procedure to reduce its risks are outgrowths of the surgery. Autologous adrenal medullary inplantation must be viewed as a step in the successful development of neural transplantation