Net Zero Energy Dairy Production: Powering Minnesota Dairy Farms with Renewable Energy

The goal of this project was to determine if the West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC) dairy production could achieve a net zero energy status, meaning that the dairy operation uses as much as energy on-site as the amount of energy that is produced on-site for the dairy operation. There are several ways to accomplish this goal, principally through energy conservation, by means of installing more energy efficient technologies, as well as the installation of on-site renewable energy. At the WCROC dairy, a new utility room has been installed to introduce energy efficient technologies to the dairy operation, as well as 54 kilowatts of solar photovoltaic (PV), and 20 kilowatts of wind energy to power the dairy operation. Through these installments, the WCROC dairy has reduced energy consumption and operational costs. On-site energy coming from the solar PV and wind turbines has been able to successfully power the dairy operation to create a net zero energy dairy production facility. It is important to explore the reasons why making these updates are important, and how saving energy honors the values and purpose of the rural farmer. To examine several of these reasons, an environmental ethics analysis was completed. This analysis provides insights as to why, morally and ethically, it is important to recognize and execute best practices on the farm with regard to energy and the environment. Economic analysis was key to this success at the WCROC dairy, and it is critical that economic viability analysis of energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy systems are completed to ensure the best value for any farm. At WCROC, economic viability included comparing costs of the baseline energy system to costs of the new energy system as well as the amount of money that renewable energy systems are offsetting in fossil fuel costs. The Net Present Value and the Internal Rate of Return were calculated for the renewable energy systems and energy efficiency upgrades on the WCROC dairy farm to determine if they were viable economic investments for the farm

PRESERVATION FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES, DIGITALIZATION, AND EXPERIMENTS WITH CONSUMERS AS PRODUCERS OF INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE DOCUMENTATION

As digital documentation and recording technologies have evolved, so has the perception that they are segregated and intended primarily for use in either engineering/scientific or amateur/consumer applications. In contrast to this notion, the three-dimensionality afforded by these technologies differs only when considering them in the order of priorities; laser scanners and related image acquisition technologies document and visualize while inversely, consumer cameras visualize and document. This broad field of digital acquisition technologies has evolved into a heterogeneity of tools that all capture aspects of the physical world with a line drawn between them becoming blurred. Within this evolution, these tools are becoming less expensive, easier to use, and depending upon the application, can be operated successfully by individuals having modest or semi-professional skills. The proliferation of digital documentation technologies, the ease of their use, and the ability to share visual data on the internet allow us to examine the inclusion of digital documentation into the preservation management of historic industrial resource, pushing heritage to the digitalized culture

Mammal distribution in the Alamogordo region, New Mexico

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56652/1/OP213.pd

A Template for Implementing Fast Lock-free Trees Using HTM

Algorithms that use hardware transactional memory (HTM) must provide a software-only fallback path to guarantee progress. The design of the fallback path can have a profound impact on performance. If the fallback path is allowed to run concurrently with hardware transactions, then hardware transactions must be instrumented, adding significant overhead. Otherwise, hardware transactions must wait for any processes on the fallback path, causing concurrency bottlenecks, or move to the fallback path. We introduce an approach that combines the best of both worlds. The key idea is to use three execution paths: an HTM fast path, an HTM middle path, and a software fallback path, such that the middle path can run concurrently with each of the other two. The fast path and fallback path do not run concurrently, so the fast path incurs no instrumentation overhead. Furthermore, fast path transactions can move to the middle path instead of waiting or moving to the software path. We demonstrate our approach by producing an accelerated version of the tree update template of Brown et al., which can be used to implement fast lock-free data structures based on down-trees. We used the accelerated template to implement two lock-free trees: a binary search tree (BST), and an (a,b)-tree (a generalization of a B-tree). Experiments show that, with 72 concurrent processes, our accelerated (a,b)-tree performs between 4.0x and 4.2x as many operations per second as an implementation obtained using the original tree update template