Implications of Public Opinion for Space Program Planning, 1980 - 2000

The effect of public opinion on future space programs is discussed in terms of direct support, apathy, or opposition, and concern about the tax burden, budgetary pressures, and national priorities. Factors considered include: the salience and visibility of NASA as compared with other issues, the sources of general pressure on the federal budget which could affect NASA, the public's opinions regarding the size and priority of NASA'S budget, the degree to which the executive can exercise leverage over NASA's budget through influencing or disregarding public opinion, the effects of linkages to other issues on space programs, and the public's general attitudes toward the progress of science

La influencia de UBER como modelo de servicio en la preferencia de los usuarios del segmento B entre los 20-25 años de Ate Vitarte en el año 2018.

Al buscar en las tiendas de App que nos ofrecen los teléfonos móviles, el nombre de “UBER” en este navegador nos devuelve una gran cantidad de buenos comentarios. Frente a este buen número de comentarios, también aparece un notorio número de App’s, donde distinguimos la aparición de los sectores de Taxi. Como si se tratara de la venta de camisetas en los estadios, antes y después del evento deportivo, mucha variedad para elegir. Pero siempre al encontrar una buena opción dejas de lado otra, como en este caso sería la preferencia de App’s sobre el uso de taxis informales, casi habitual entre un fenómeno reciente de nuestra economía y un sector con muchos años a su espalda. Modernidad y tradición se enfrentan de nuevo, cuál enfrentamiento de animales hambrientos, algo que analizaremos en este documento, no es ningún fruto de casualidad

Why growth equals power - and why it shouldn't : constructing visions of China

When discussing the success of China's transition from socialism, there is a tendency to focus on growth figures as an indication of performance. Whilst these figures are indeed impressive, we should not confuse growth with development and assume that the former necessarily automatically generates the latter. Much has been done to reduce poverty in China, but the task is not as complete as some observers would suggest; particularly in terms of access to health, education and welfare, and also in dealing with relative (rather than absolute) depravation and poverty. Visions of China have been constructed that exaggerate Chinese development and power in the global system partly to serve political interests, but partly due to the failure to consider the relationship between growth and development, partly due to the failure to disaggregate who gets what in China, and partly due to the persistence of inter-national conceptions of globalised production, trade, and financial flows

How spiking neurons give rise to a temporal-feature map

A temporal-feature map is a topographic neuronal representation of temporal attributes of phenomena or objects that occur in the outside world. We explain the evolution of such maps by means of a spike-based Hebbian learning rule in conjunction with a presynaptically unspecific contribution in that, if a synapse changes, then all other synapses connected to the same axon change by a small fraction as well. The learning equation is solved for the case of an array of Poisson neurons. We discuss the evolution of a temporal-feature map and the synchronization of the single cells’ synaptic structures, in dependence upon the strength of presynaptic unspecific learning. We also give an upper bound for the magnitude of the presynaptic interaction by estimating its impact on the noise level of synaptic growth. Finally, we compare the results with those obtained from a learning equation for nonlinear neurons and show that synaptic structure formation may profit from the nonlinearity

Long term time variability of cosmic rays and possible relevance to the development of life on Earth

An analysis is made of the manner in which the cosmic ray intensity at Earth has varied over its existence and its possible relevance to both the origin and the evolution of life. Much of the analysis relates to the 'high energy' cosmic rays ($E>10^{14}eV;=0.1PeV$) and their variability due to the changing proximity of the solar system to supernova remnants which are generally believed to be responsible for most cosmic rays up to PeV energies. It is pointed out that, on a statistical basis, there will have been considerable variations in the likely 100 My between the Earth's biosphere reaching reasonable stability and the onset of very elementary life. Interestingly, there is the increasingly strong possibility that PeV cosmic rays are responsible for the initiation of terrestrial lightning strokes and the possibility arises of considerable increases in the frequency of lightnings and thereby the formation of some of the complex molecules which are the 'building blocks of life'. Attention is also given to the well known generation of the oxides of nitrogen by lightning strokes which are poisonous to animal life but helpful to plant growth; here, too, the violent swings of cosmic ray intensities may have had relevance to evolutionary changes. A particular variant of the cosmic ray acceleration model, put forward by us, predicts an increase in lightning rate in the past and this has been sought in Korean historical records. Finally, the time dependence of the overall cosmic ray intensity, which manifests itself mainly at sub-10 GeV energies, has been examined. The relevance of cosmic rays to the 'global electrical circuit' points to the importance of this concept.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, accepted by 'Surveys in Geophysics

The DOE Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) Project: Demonstration of dynamic information technology for the future power system

In 1989 the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) joined the US Department of Energy (DOE) in an assessment of longer-term research and development needs for future electric power system operation. The effort produced a progressively sharper vision of a future power system in which enhanced control and operation are the primary means for serving new customer demands, in an environment where increased competition, a wider range of services and vendors, and much narrower operating margins all contribute to increased system efficiencies and capacity. Technology and infrastructure for real time access to wide area dynamic information were identified as critical path elements in realizing that vision. In 1995 the DOE accordingly launched the Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) Project jointly with the two Power Marketing Administrations (PMAs) to address these issues in a practical operating environment--the western North America power system. The Project draws upon many years of PMA effort and related collaboration among the western utilities, plus an expanding infrastructure that includes regionally involved contractors, universities, and National Laboratories plus linkages to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The WAMS project also brings added focus and resources to the evolving Western System Dynamic Information Network, or WesDINet. This is a collective response of the Western Systems Coordinating Council (WSCC) member utilities to their shared needs for direct information about power system characteristics, model fidelity, and operational performance. The WAMS project is a key source of the technology and backbone communications needed to make WesDINet a well integrated, cost effective enterprise network demonstrating the role of dynamic information technology in the emerging utility environment

Micro-finance, women’s empowerment and fertility decline in Bangladesh: How important was women’s agency?

As Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has argued “[Bangladesh’s development achievements have] important lessons for other countries across the globe, [in particular a focus on] reducing gender inequality”. A major avenue through which this emphasis has been manifest lies, according to this narrative, in enhancements to women’s agency for instrumental and intrinsic reasons particularly through innovations in family planning and microfinance. The “Bangladesh paradox” of improved wellbeing despite low economic growth over the last four decades is claimed as a paradigmatic case of the spread of both modern family planning programmes and microfinance leading to women’s empowerment and fertility reduction. In this paper we show that the links between microfinance, empowerment and fertility reduction, are fraught with problems, and far from robust; hence the claimed causal links between microfinance and family planning via women’s empowerment needs to be further reconsidered

Asymmetric Excitatory Synaptic Dynamics Underlie Interaural Time Difference Processing in the Auditory System

In order to localize sounds in the environment, the auditory system detects and encodes differences in signals between each ear. The exquisite sensitivity of auditory brain stem neurons to the differences in rise time of the excitation signals from the two ears allows for neuronal encoding of microsecond interaural time differences