The frequency of "brilliant" and "genius" in teaching evaluations predicts the representation of women and African Americans across academia

Because of the negative stereotypes against women’s and African Americans’ intellectual abilities, academic fields that prize brilliance and genius might be unwelcoming to members of these stigmatized groups. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided initial support for this possibility, insofar as the fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success in their field were also the fields where women and African Americans were least likely to obtain Ph.D.’s. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and arguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, we measured field-by-field variability in the emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying college students’ use of the words “brilliant” and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessors.com. Consistent with prior work, this simple word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’ representation at the Ph.D. level across the academic spectrum: Fields where the words “brilliant” and “genius” were frequent in undergraduates’ evaluations also had fewer female and African American Ph.D.’s. This relationship held even when accounting for a field’s intellectual rigor (as indexed by students’ average scores on the Quantitative Graduate Record Examination [GRE]), as well as several other explanations concerning group differences in representation. The fact that such a simple, naturalistic measure of a field’s focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity

Emission-aware Energy Storage Scheduling for a Greener Grid

Reducing our reliance on carbon-intensive energy sources is vital for reducing the carbon footprint of the electric grid. Although the grid is seeing increasing deployments of clean, renewable sources of energy, a significant portion of the grid demand is still met using traditional carbon-intensive energy sources. In this paper, we study the problem of using energy storage deployed in the grid to reduce the grid's carbon emissions. While energy storage has previously been used for grid optimizations such as peak shaving and smoothing intermittent sources, our insight is to use distributed storage to enable utilities to reduce their reliance on their less efficient and most carbon-intensive power plants and thereby reduce their overall emission footprint. We formulate the problem of emission-aware scheduling of distributed energy storage as an optimization problem, and use a robust optimization approach that is well-suited for handling the uncertainty in load predictions, especially in the presence of intermittent renewables such as solar and wind. We evaluate our approach using a state of the art neural network load forecasting technique and real load traces from a distribution grid with 1,341 homes. Our results show a reduction of >0.5 million kg in annual carbon emissions -- equivalent to a drop of 23.3% in our electric grid emissions.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure, This paper will appear in the Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy 20) June 2020, Australi

Buoyant energy - balancing wind power and other renewable in Europe's oceans

Buoyant Energy is a new approach to store electrical energy offshore and at a decentralised location, based on the well established technologies of pumped-storage hydro-power. The following work focuses on the basic concept and discusses some of the key features addressed. The unique adaptability and important synergies with other offshore activities are discussed. A basic cost assessment estimates the life cycle costs in order to demonstrate the economic feasibility. Finally, a case study evaluates the effects of integrating deep offshore wind balanced by Buoyant Energy units in a central Mediterranean archipelago ́s electricity generating system.peer-reviewe

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Constraints on Four Fermion Contact Interactions from Precise Electroweak Measurements

We establish constraints on a general four-fermion contact interaction from precise measurements of electroweak parameters. We compute the one-loop contribution for the leptonic $Z$ width, anomalous magnetic, weak-magnetic, electric and weak dipole moments of leptons in order to extract bounds on the energy scale of these effective interactions.Comment: 16 pages, RevTeX, two figure