Protecting and Maintaining Silicon Valley’s Liquid Gold

Public sector leaders and decision makers in the California water industry have learned from previous severe drought conditions that to sustain water supplies during extremely dry seasons, there is a substantial need for behavioral changes associated with water conservation efforts among the businesses and residents of the community to maintain an adequate water supply. The intent of this study is to compare four California water agencies that have been designated as sustainable groundwater agencies (GSA), and determine what current programs and/or practices those agencies are using to meet the mandated requirements of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 (Act of 2014). Under the Act of 2014, GSAs have been given authority to enforce their GSA approved groundwater sustainability plan. This study goes on to examine some of the methods that are used by three other water districts, located outside of the state of California. This was done to determine best practices that have been implemented to address severe drought conditions, like the circumstances that Californians experienced from 2010 to 2016; a period when California experienced one of the worst droughts ever recorded in the state’s history (McCullough, 2015)

Pioneers, subcultures and cooperatives: The grassroots augmentation of urban places

About the book: There have been numerous possible scenarios depicted on the impact of the internet on urban spaces. Considering ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile, wireless connectivity and the acceptance of the Internet as a non extraordinary part of our everyday lives mean that physical urban space is augmented, and digital in itself. This poses new problems as well as opportunities to those who have to deal with it. This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies

The Network Effects of Prefetching

Prefetching has been shown to be an effective technique for reducing user perceived latency in distributed systems. In this paper we show that even when prefetching adds no extra traffic to the network, it can have serious negative performance effects. Straightforward approaches to prefetching increase the burstiness of individual sources, leading to increased average queue sizes in network switches. However, we also show that applications can avoid the undesirable queueing effects of prefetching. In fact, we show that applications employing prefetching can significantly improve network performance, to a level much better than that obtained without any prefetching at all. This is because prefetching offers increased opportunities for traffic shaping that are not available in the absence of prefetching. Using a simple transport rate control mechanism, a prefetching application can modify its behavior from a distinctly ON/OFF entity to one whose data transfer rate changes less abruptly, while still delivering all data in advance of the user's actual requests

National Latino Leader? The Job is Open

Presents results of a survey of Latinos/Hispanics on whom they consider "the most important Latino leader in the country today," as well as their familiarity with prominent Latinos, by nativity and language

Coronary angiography in heart failure: when and why? Uncertainty reigns

No abstract available

Knowledge-intensive services and international competitiveness: a four country comparison

The nature and consequences of services innovation remains a woefully under-researchedtopic. The paper calls into question two statements that are frequentlyrepeated in the political-economic discourse on services. The first concerns thesuggestion that Germany is a ‘services laggard’ that needs to restructure its domesticeconomy if it is to remain internationally competitive. By contrast, the UK is frequentlyheld up as an example of a successfully restructured ‘services economy’. The paperdraws an important distinction between the quantity of services in a domestic economyand the degree of connectivity between services and other economic activities. Thelatter, it is argued, is far more important in determining the size of spillovers fromservices innovation enjoyed within a domestic economy and, hence, to internationalcompetitiveness. Particular attention is paid to the role and impact of knowledge-intensiveservice sectors in this regard. In addition to the UK and Germany, data isdrawn from the Netherlands and Japan. Using these four comparative cases we explorethe distinction between a high representation of services in the domestic economy, andthe innovation spillovers facilitated by a high degree of connectivity between servicesand other economic sectors within a domestic economy.economic development an growth ;

Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History

Analyzes the demographic composition of voters in the 2008 elections and compares trends in voter participation rates and shares among all voters by race/ethnicity, gender, and age