Cost-effectiveness of virtual power plants (VPPs) based on residential aggregators

The domestic sector accounts for a third of the UK's energy consumption and with increasing pressure from net-zero targets, the potential of residential flexibility is more widely recognised by consumers, aggregators and governments. The development of near real-time metering systems and home energy management technologies provide new possibilities for residential demand-side control. Due to the increase in energy prices and government schemes for improving residential energy efficiency and flexibility, domestic consumers are more aware and willing to participate in balancing services. The aggregator business model is previously proven to be successful for commercial-scale markets, due to the adequate amount of flexibility during peak hours and the corresponding financial incentives. Similarly, the domestic aggregation market is expected to grow and there has been a few feasibility studies that demonstrate the benefits to the grid and economy. However, there is a need for a further in-depth study of the cost-effectiveness of residential aggregation to provide virtual power plant (VPP) actions to encourage the development of residential demand response (DR). Here, we model and compare profitable cost-effective VPP methods using residential aggregation through the integration of a novel market entity called the residential aggregator

Regulating Data Exchange in Service Oriented Applications

We define a type system for COWS, a formalism for specifying and combining services, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. Our types permit to express policies constraining data exchanges in terms of sets of service partner names attachable to each single datum. Service programmers explicitly write only the annotations necessary to specify the wanted policies for communicable data, while a type inference system (statically) derives the minimal additional annotations that ensure consistency of services initial configuration. Then, the language dynamic semantics only performs very simple checks to authorize or block communication. We prove that the type system and the operational semantics are sound. As a consequence, we have the following data protection property: services always comply with the policies regulating the exchange of data among interacting services. We illustrate our approach through a simplified but realistic scenario for a service-based electronic marketplace

Specifying and Analysing SOC Applications with COWS

COWS is a recently defined process calculus for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. Since its introduction, a number of methods and tools have been devised to analyse COWS specifications, like e.g. a type system to check confidentiality properties, a logic and a model checker to express and check functional properties of services. In this paper, by means of a case study in the area of automotive systems, we demonstrate that COWS, with some mild linguistic additions, can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We also provide a flavour of the properties that can be analysed by using the tools mentioned above

Rapporteur summaries of plenary, symposia, and oral sessions from the XXIIIrd World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics Meeting in Toronto, Canada, 16-20 October 2015

The XXIIIrd World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics meeting, sponsored by the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, was held in Toronto, ON, Canada, on 16-20 October 2015. Approximately 700 participants attended to discuss the latest state-of-the-art findings in this rapidly advancing and evolving field. The following report was written by trainee travel awardees. Each was assigned one session as a rapporteur. This manuscript represents the highlights and topics that were covered in the plenary sessions, symposia, and oral sessions during the conference, and contains major notable and new findings. © 2016 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc

The Impact of Restarting the High-Risk Procedures for COVID-19 Infection in Dental Practice on the Anxiety of Dental Employees:A Study with Repeated Measures

Background: As SARS-CoV-2 is detected in the infected patients' saliva, dental employees performing aerosol-generating procedures are at high risk of being infected/spreading the infection. Aims: This study aimed to assess the impact of restarting the high-risk procedures for COVID-19 infection in dental practice during the pandemic on the anxiety levels of dental employees. Methods: All dental employees (dentists, nurses, data entry/cleaning staff) working in a university dental clinic were invited to the study and eighty-one employees (response rate: 97.5%) participated in the study. The volunteers' anxiety was measured consecutively twice with the State-Trait Anxiety Scale: First, on the day prior to restarting the high-risk procedures and the second, on the day these procedures began. Data were analyzed using t tests and the repeated measures ANOVA. Results: The state anxiety level of the dental employees increased significantly on the day that the high risk procedures were restarted (mean 42.6 vs. 49.0, d = 0.6, P < 0.001). Concerning the subgroups, the increase in state anxiety levels was significant for females (t = 3,7; d = 0,8; P < 0.001), dentists working in departments of endodontics and restorative dental care (t = 3,5; d = 0,9; P < 0.001) and nurses (t = 2,8; d = 0,9; P < 0.001). The analysis showed no significant difference in trait anxiety levels between the assessment days (mean 44.0 vs. 44.2, P = 0.9). Conclusions: Restarting the high-risk procedures for COVID-19 infection in dental practice during the pandemic seems to be an extra stressor for dental employees' who already have high anxiety levels during the pandemic

Management of bacterial speck of tomato in greenhouses under four individual polythene glazing materials

Most electromagnetic radiation can be detrimental to living organisms, especially for microorganisms. UV radiation is used as a strategy for microbial control to eliminate plant pathogens. The most effective wavelength for UV radiation is 250-60 nm (253.7 nm), as this wavelength is absorbed most efficiently by DNA. The tomato bacterial speck disease agent, Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato, causes severe damage in nurseries, commercial greenhouses and several regions with highly rainy summers. In this study, the effects of four individual polythene (PE) glazing materials used in greenhouses for bacterial speck disease management were investigated. The study was performed from January to June 2015. Bacterial inoculum was sprayed onto 1-m-tall tomato plants and disease development was monitored. Disease severity was scored according to speck symptoms on the leaves using a 0-5 scale. Disease severity ranged from 22-33% in the four greenhouses. The most successful PE glazing, with enhanced red/infrared radiation, reduced disease development by 32.5%. This latter treatment was also analyzed in different statistical groups using ANOVA statistics. PE glazing with different UV transmittance filtering reduced disease symptoms by up to 9.20%, statistically significantly different. However, disease severity was high, up to 32%, in PE glazing with no UV radiation transmittance and in traditional PE glazing greenhouses