464 research outputs found
Assessing the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility in the US building sector
The building sector consumes 75% of US electricity, offering substantial energy, cost, and CO2 emissions savings potential. New technologies enable buildings to flexibly manage electric loads across different times of day and season in support of a low-cost, low-carbon electric grid. Assessing the value of such technologies requires an understanding of building electric load variability at a higher temporal resolution than is demonstrated in previous studies of US building efficiency potential. We adapt Scout, an open-access model of US building energy use, to characterize sub-annual variations in baseline building electricity use, costs, and emissions at the national scale. We apply this baseline in time-sensitive analyses of the energy, cost, and CO2 emissions savings potential of various degrees of energy efficiency and flexibility, finding that efficiency continues to have strong value in a time-sensitive assessment framework while the value of flexibility depends on assumed electricity rates, measure magnitude and duration, and the amount of savings already captured by efficiency
SLP 570.50: Clinical Processes in Professional Practice I & IIFASST Model (Friday Afternoon Specialty Skills Training)
Assessing the threat of lone-actor terrorism: the reliability and validity of the TRAP-18
Terrorism, especially lone-actor terrorism, is considered a major national security threat in both North America and Europe. The threat of terrorism has many faces and violence can arise from all ideological extremes. The authors present the theoretical model and current empirical validation of the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP-18), a structured professional judgment instrument for those engaged in risk assessment of persons of concern for acts of terrorist violence. It can be used independently of a particular ideology. The TRAP-18 consists of 8 proximal warning behaviors and 10 distal characteristics, and has been designed to help prioritize the imminency of risk in specific cases, and therefore determine the intensity of monitoring and active management a case requires. Research has demonstrated excellent interrater reliability, and promising content, criterion, discriminant, and predictive validity. More research is in progress. The TRAP-18 is currently used by counterterrorism experts in North America and Europe. It offers a useful approach for professionals who may be assessing and treating individuals of national security concern
The Interstellar Lines of the Feige Stars
New measurements of the equivalent widths and radial velocities of the interstellar lines of Ca ii and Na i in the spectra of Feige stars are presented. The upper limits to the Na i interstellar line imply that the gas in the halo has a much larger value of the ratio of the column density of Ca ii to that of Na i than does the plane, and that this ratio is larger than the intermediate value obtained previously from a group of brighter halo stars. From this we deduce that there is gas up to at least 1 kpc above the plane, and that this gas has much more Ca ii relative to Na i than does the plane. The interstellar equivalent width corresponding to looking out of the Galaxy from the plane at b^(II) = 90° is about 300 mĂ
for the stronger of the Ca n lines. The velocity measurements imply that this gas is moving slowly toward the plane in a time scale such that replenishment of the halo gas is necessary
Nuclear Black Hole Formation in Clumpy Galaxies at High Redshift
Massive stellar clumps in high redshift galaxies interact and migrate to the
center to form a bulge and exponential disk in <1 Gyr. Here we consider the
fate of intermediate mass black holes (BHs) that might form by massive-star
coalescence in the dense young clusters of these disk clumps. We find that the
BHs move inward with the clumps and reach the inner few hundred parsecs in only
a few orbit times. There they could merge into a supermassive BH by dynamical
friction. The ratio of BH mass to stellar mass in the disk clumps is
approximately preserved in the final ratio of BH to bulge mass. Because this
ratio for individual clusters has been estimated to be ~10^{-3}, the observed
BH-to-bulge mass ratio results. We also obtain a relation between BH mass and
bulge velocity dispersion that is compatible with observations of present-day
galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted by Ap
A Turbulent Origin for Flocculent Spiral Structure in Galaxies: II. Observations and Models of M33
Fourier transform power spectra of azimuthal scans of the optical structure
of M33 are evaluated for B, V, and R passbands and fit to fractal models of
continuum emission with superposed star formation. Power spectra are also
determined for Halpha. The best models have intrinsic power spectra with 1D
slopes of around -0.7pm0.7, significantly shallower than the Kolmogorov
spectrum (slope =-1.7) but steeper than pure noise (slope=0). A fit to the
power spectrum of the flocculent galaxy NGC 5055 gives a steeper slope of
around -1.5pm0.2, which could be from turbulence. Both cases model the optical
light as a superposition of continuous and point-like stellar sources that
follow an underlying fractal pattern. Foreground bright stars are clipped in
the images, but they are so prominent in M33 that even their residual affects
the power spectrum, making it shallower than what is intrinsic to the galaxy. A
model consisting of random foreground stars added to the best model of NGC 5055
fits the observed power spectrum of M33 as well as the shallower intrinsic
power spectrum that was made without foreground stars. Thus the optical
structure in M33 could result from turbulence too.Comment: accepted by ApJ, 13 pages, 10 figure
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