Ensuring Energy Security in Europe: The EU between a Market-based and a Geopolitical Approach. EU Diplomacy Paper 03/2013

The question of energy security of the European Union (EU) has come high on the European political agenda since the mid-2000s as developments in the international energy sector have increasingly been perceived as a threat by the EU institutions and by the Member State governments. The externalisation of the EU’s internal energy market has in that context been presented as a means to ensure energy security. This approach, which can be called ‘post-modern’ with reference to Robert Cooper’s division of the world into different ‘ages’,1 however, shows insufficiencies in terms of energy security as a number of EU energy partners belonging to the ‘modern’ world do not accept to play the same rules. This consequently poses the questions of the relevance of the market-based approach and of the need for alternative solutions. This paper therefore argues that the market-based approach, based on the liberalisation of the European energy market, needs to be complemented by a geopolitical approach to ensure the security of the EU’s energy supplies. Such a geopolitical approach, however, still faces important challenges

Bringing Electricity to Alafiarou: The Solar Microgrid Project

Despite the great technological advancements and discoveries that have been made throughout the last century, 1.2 billion people still live without access to electricity, 95% of which live in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia.1 In this paper, we discuss how we designed and implemented a self-sustaining, affordable and highly replicable solar microgrid in order to accelerate the electrification of rural communities in the most environmentally conscious way possible. Our project focused on developing a microgrid for a small community of 10 households in rural Benin that previously had no access to electricity. We travelled to this village in December of 2015 and successfully installed our design. Direct current (DC) was used to transmit power and the microgrid consists of a central power station containing a photovoltaic array, batteries and a charge controller to power light bulbs and cell phone chargers for the villagers. Our hope is that the installed microgrid will serve as a template for the electrification of nearby communities

Stratégie de rupture basée sur des innovations radicales : Etude du cas de l'entreprise Salomon à la lumière de ses compétences et capacités organisationnelles

This paper concentrates on the analysis of organizational resources, competencies and capabilities as well as on the organizational architectures which facilitate their acquisition and use. On the basis of these concepts, the paper proposes an analysis grid which is then applied to a case study of Salomon, world leader in the winter sports equipment market. This grid is used to gain an understanding of Salomon's success in implementing breakthrough strategies based on radical innovations. Focusing on the study of internal resources leads to an investigation into Salomon's learning capabilities.organizational competency; organizational capabilities; innovation; Salomon

Conservative values and education policy 1979-1990

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This study provides a systematic description of the Conservative Government's education policies and their initial implementation during the period 1979-90. It charts elements of coherence between the Government's values and policies and examples of dissonance. By analysing the underlying values, it identifies conflicts which go some way toward explaining the apparent contradictions. Government policy reflects a marked switch in emphasis from regionalized provision to institutional provision within a strong, centralized framework which reflects a move from communal provision in response to individual needs to a market model where individual effort is intended to bring its own rewards. This analysis reveals the way in which policies apparently concerned with separate aspects of public services (structure, management, funding and mechanisms of reporting and accountability) culminated in the creation of a mixed market economy as a basis for transferring responsibility for the provision of welfare services from the state to commercial and voluntary agencies, as well as to individuals and their families. Whilst responsibility for the provision of education has not itself been delegated to parents, their involvement through choice, participation and voluntary financial contributions has steadily increased throughout the period in question. The transfer from the state to commercial and voluntary agencies is also evident in the provision of services to schools (meals, maintenance, cleaning) by commercial agencies under contract and the delegation to voluntary, lay governors of many of the responsibilities formerly exercised by local education authorities

La fertilité revisitée : innovation et crise des agricultures de l'Altiplano bolivien

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceAt the south of Bolivian Altiplano, Intersalar territories represent a symbolic zone for the study of a vulnerable socio ecological system where durability is a stake heighten by the weakening of a rural agriculture dropped into world trade. Intersalar is a desired space despite the demanding environment (cold, aridity, high altitude, salinity, etc.). The great price increase of quinoa and the mechanization of agricultural practices, seen by Aymaras producers as a great opportunity, threaten the fragile stability of an ecological and social system which is influenced by a fertility crisis (yield decrease, soil erosion, increase of conflicts in access of land, etc.). The significant decrease of agriculture/livestock breeding cooperation comes along with an individualization and monetarization of some agricultural practices which transform the conditions of fertility renewal. The capacity of innovation shown by the producers in their modes of renewal of individual and collective fertility management is a core problem for the preservation of the agricultural activity. We propose a critical analysis of the historical movement of the notion of fertility, deeply polysemous, then to inquire the meaning and the stakes in the Intersalar zone. Furthermore, we suggest a critical review of fertility concept in order to show the deep gap between the meaning given by producers and the common sense conferred by the agronomists and the development agents. These theoretical and empirical results invite of new paradigms to think fertility and to support the Aymaras producers of the Intersalar area

Enhancing new user cold-start based on decision trees active learning by using past warm-users predictions

The cold-start is the situation in which the recommender system has no or not enough information about the (new) users/items, i.e. their ratings/feedback; hence, the recommendations are not accurate. Active learning techniques for recommender systems propose to interact with new users by asking them to rate sequentially a few items while the system tries to detect her preferences. This bootstraps recommender systems and alleviate the new user cold-start. Compared to current state of the art, the presented approach takes into account the users' ratings predictions in addition to the available users' ratings. The experimentation shows that our approach achieves better performance in terms of precision and limits the number of questions asked to the users

An item/user representation for recommender systems based on bloom filters

This paper focuses on the items/users representation in the domain of recommender systems. These systems compute similarities between items (and/or users) to recommend new items to users based on their previous preferences. It is often useful to consider the characteristics (a.k.a features or attributes) of the items and/or users. This represents items/users by vectors that can be very large, sparse and space-consuming. In this paper, we propose a new accurate method for representing items/users with low size data structures that relies on two concepts: (1) item/user representation is based on bloom filter vectors, and (2) the usage of these filters to compute bitwise AND similarities and bitwise XNOR similarities. This work is motivated by three ideas: (1) detailed vector representations are large and sparse, (2) comparing more features of items/users may achieve better accuracy for items similarities, and (3) similarities are not only in common existing aspects, but also in common missing aspects. We have experimented this approach on the publicly available MovieLens dataset. The results show a good performance in comparison with existing approaches such as standard vector representation and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)

Vortical and Wave Modes in 3D Rotating Stratified Flows: Random Large Scale Forcing

Utilizing an eigenfunction decomposition, we study the growth and spectra of energy in the vortical and wave modes of a 3D rotating stratified fluid as a function of $\epsilon = f/N$. Working in regimes characterized by moderate Burger numbers, i.e. $Bu = 1/\epsilon^2 < 1$ or $Bu \ge 1$, our results indicate profound change in the character of vortical and wave mode interactions with respect to $Bu = 1$. As with the reference state of $\epsilon=1$, for $\epsilon < 1$ the wave mode energy saturates quite quickly and the ensuing forward cascade continues to act as an efficient means of dissipating ageostrophic energy. Further, these saturated spectra steepen as $\epsilon$ decreases: we see a shift from $k^{-1}$ to $k^{-5/3}$ scaling for $k_f < k < k_d$ (where $k_f$ and $k_d$ are the forcing and dissipation scales, respectively). On the other hand, when $\epsilon > 1$ the wave mode energy never saturates and comes to dominate the total energy in the system. In fact, in a sense the wave modes behave in an asymmetric manner about $\epsilon = 1$. With regard to the vortical modes, for $\epsilon \le 1$, the signatures of 3D quasigeostrophy are clearly evident. Specifically, we see a $k^{-3}$ scaling for $k_f < k < k_d$ and, in accord with an inverse transfer of energy, the vortical mode energy never saturates but rather increases for all $k < k_f$. In contrast, for $\epsilon > 1$ and increasing, the vortical modes contain a progressively smaller fraction of the total energy indicating that the 3D quasigeostrophic subsystem plays an energetically smaller role in the overall dynamics.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figs. (abbreviated abstract

Bio-Hydrogen & Bio-Butanol Generation by Bacteria Isolated from Spent Mushroom Substrate.

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN