The New Hampshire Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Fund: Year 3 (July 2011-June 2012) Evaluation

The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Fund (GHGERF) was created by the New Hampshire legislature in 2008 and has been administered by the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The purpose of the Fund was to support energy efficiency, energy conservation, and demand response programs to reduce New Hampshire’s greenhouse gas emissions. Funding was derived from the State’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cooperative effort by nine northeastern states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the electric power sector via a cap and trade program. As of June 2012, RGGI auctions have resulted in revenues to New Hampshire of $38.7 million, of which$21.8 million had been paid out to grants through June 2012. These funds have been distributed primarily through a competitive grant process administered by the PUC. The total amount of GHGERF grant awards is equal to 0.5% of the $6 billion that New Hampshire spends annually on energy across all sectors. These grants funded a wide variety of projects and programs which directly benefitted New Hampshire homes, schools, businesses, towns, and non-profit organizations. Details for each grant award are available at the PUC’s website. Completed projects supported by GHGERF funds (as of June 2012) have resulted in annual reductions of fossil fuel energy use in NH by 227,400 million BTUs (MMBTUs). Additionally, the GHGERF creates annual energy savings for NH residents and businesses of over$6.7 million and reduces annual carbon dioxide emissions by 22,900 metric tons. Cumulative energy savings due to projects completed as of June 2012 are estimated to be 4.0 million MMBTUs through 2030. NH residents and businesses are expected to save $107.8 million through 2030 based on current energy prices. Carbon dioxide emissions reductions are estimated to be 366,500 metric tons through 2030. In addition to energy reductions, GHGERF has supported energy efficiency workforce development for 700 workers with over 11,300 training hours (as of June 2012). GHGERF has also financially supported almost 2,300 building benchmarking and energy audit evaluations. During the past three years, GHGERF has delivered significant energy savings and served a wide-base of residential, commercial, and industrial energy customers throughout New Hampshire. The experience and capacity built during the three year period allowed GHGERF to deliver the highest amount of energy saved per dollar spent during this past reporting period. The model of having a central specialized expert organization work with multiple energy customers, as seen in all of the grants awarded in 2010, has proven to be a successful one and should be considered as NH’s RGGI program shifts to the NH electric utility energy efficiency programs

Labour force participation and well-being among older New Zealanders

The population of New Zealand, along with those of other developed countries, is ageing rapidly. The rate of population ageing is unprecedented, with the number of New Zealanders aged 65 years and over projected to increase from 553,000 in 2009 to 1.07 million in 2031, and to 1.44 million in 2061. Importantly, the ratio of those aged 65 years and over to those aged 15–64 is projected to increase from 0.19 (older people per person aged 15–64) in 2009 to 0.34 in 2031 and to 0.43 in 2061. This more than doubling of the ratio of older people to those in the prime working and income-earning ages represents a dramatic demographic shift which has implications for New Zealand, particularly in terms of the ability to support New Zealand Superannuation (NZS) at current levels. • Michael P. Cameron teaches in the Department of Economics at the University of Waikato. Matthew Roskruge is with the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, University of Waikato

A framework for measuring quality in the emergency department

There is increasing concern that medical care is of variable quality, with variable outcomes, safety, costs and experience for patients. Despite substantial efforts to improve patient safety, some studies suggest little evidence of reductions in adverse events. Furthermore, there is limited agreement about what outcomes are expected and whether increased expenditure results in a real improvement in outcome or experience. In emergency medicine, many countries have developed specific indicators to help drive improvements in patient care. Most of these are time based and there is a lack of consensus regarding which indicators are high priority and what an appropriate framework for measuring quality should look like

Flow Field Measurements for a Cross Flow Turbine

Understanding the flow pattern around hydrokinetic devices is important for the development of tidal energy technology. The objective of the research is to provide the wake characteristics from laboratory measurements, including wake structure, and flow recovery in the near and far fields of a cross-flow turbine. The data can be used to assist in optimization of an array of turbines by providing experimental results for numerical models validation and industrial developers of tidal energy. Another critical use of this data will be to provide a basis for parameterization of energy extraction in coastal ocean models in resource assessment. The experimental flow field measurements presented were obtained in a tow tank. Measurements were performed with an Acoustic Doppler Velocity meter on a scale model of a cross-flow turbine. The turbine was operated near the predicted optimum efficiency with varying solidity and tip speed ratios. The shape and recovery of the wake were seen in the near field and the decay of the induced turbulence was observed to continue into the far field. This work represents a step toward the full characterization of the flow patterns induced by the cross-flow turbine with near and far field effects

Ebola and War in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Avoiding Failure and Thinking Ahead

The Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is exceptionally dangerous, occurring within active armed conflict and geopolitical volatility, including a million displaced persons. With 421 cases, 240 deaths, and the numbers increasing, this Ebola outbreak is the second deadliest in history. Recent spread to Butembo, home to 1.2 million people, raised concerns. The DRC, World Health Organization (WHO), and partners are leading a vigorous international response, yet despite deploying an experimental vaccine, cases doubled in October 2018 and many cases had unknown origin. Uncontrolled Ebola outbreaks can expand quickly, as occurred in West Africa in 2014. Averting that outcome in the DRC requires rapid action including a strengthened public health response, security, and community outreach. If violence escalates, it could compromise a fragile response. Yet resources are insufficient. The United States and other countries are not permitting personnel deployment to the epicenter, including from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and US Agency for International Development (USAID). In this Viewpoint, we review recommendations of experts convened by Georgetown University and listed at the end of this article. The United States and international community should launch high-level political mobilization, with diplomatic, human, and economic resources. It is critical to recognize that future health crises will occur in fragile, insecure settings. To prepare, the international community needs long-term planning and enhanced capacities to improve the safety and effectiveness of epidemic response operations

MANAGING DAIRY PROFIT RISK USING WEATHER DERIVATIVES

Replaced with revised version of paper 05/26/04.Risk and Uncertainty,

Learning Policies from Self-Play with Policy Gradients and MCTS Value Estimates

In recent years, state-of-the-art game-playing agents often involve policies that are trained in self-playing processes where Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms and trained policies iteratively improve each other. The strongest results have been obtained when policies are trained to mimic the search behaviour of MCTS by minimising a cross-entropy loss. Because MCTS, by design, includes an element of exploration, policies trained in this manner are also likely to exhibit a similar extent of exploration. In this paper, we are interested in learning policies for a project with future goals including the extraction of interpretable strategies, rather than state-of-the-art game-playing performance. For these goals, we argue that such an extent of exploration is undesirable, and we propose a novel objective function for training policies that are not exploratory. We derive a policy gradient expression for maximising this objective function, which can be estimated using MCTS value estimates, rather than MCTS visit counts. We empirically evaluate various properties of resulting policies, in a variety of board games.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 201