Child death, grief, and the community in high and late Medieval England

"William of Canterbury, one of the authors of the Thomas Becket miracle collection, reports in a twelfth-century miracle that an eight-year-old boy named Phillip was looking at rocks by a lake located in the county of Cheshire, when he slipped and was overtaken by the water (aquis obrutus est). When he did not return home, his father, Hugh Scot, searched for him everywhere in the village and found his body submerged in the lake. Hugh was sighing and groaning (suspiriis et gemitu) after extracting him from the water, and when Phillip's mother heard about his death, she indulged in tears and wailing (lacrymis indulget et plactui).1 Rather than preparing the boy's corpse for a funeral, his parents attempted to revive him by suspending him by his feet in order to drain the liquid from his body, and when that did not work, by giving him holy water associated with Thomas Becket (aqua sancti Thomoe). According to William of Canterbury, because of the devotion of the parents (devotio parentum) and divine intervention, Phillip began to show signs of life, making his father leap forth (exsiliente) from his seat with excitement." -- IntroductionIncludes bibliographical reference

Examining trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of urban form

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages

Machine learning approaches to understand the influence of urban environments on human’s physiological response

This research proposes a framework for signal processing and information fusion of spatial-temporal multi-sensor data pertaining to understanding patterns of humans physiological changes in an urban environment. The framework includes signal frequency unification, signal pairing, signal filtering, signal quantification, and data labeling. Furthermore, this paper contributes to human-environment interaction research, where a field study to understand the influence of environmental features such as varying sound level, illuminance, field-of-view, or environmental conditions on humans’ perception was proposed. In the study, participants of various demographic backgrounds walked through an urban environment in Zürich, Switzerland while wearing physiological and environmental sensors. Apart from signal processing, four machine learning techniques, classification, fuzzy rule-based inference, feature selection, and clustering, were applied to discover relevant patterns and relationship between the participants’ physiological responses and environmental conditions. The predictive models with high accuracies indicate that the change in the field-of-view corresponds to increased participant arousal. Among all features, the participants’ physiological responses were primarily affected by the change in environmental conditions and field-of-view

Implementing community-scale PV systems as a sustainable and governable urban common

Distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems are essential to meet future energy targets. Among these systems, there is a growing trend in community organized installations. This indicates benefits for collective action and economies of scale. From a technical perspective, load aggregation from multiple tenants increases self-consumption (SC). However, additional opportunities for community-scale PV (CSPV) include local innovation, sustainable social norms, joint-investments, and self-governance. The work presented in this thesis implements a holistic approach to evaluate CSPV to provide further insights for emerging installations in Switzerland and more broadly. This thesis applies common pool resource (CPR) theory and adapts the associated design principles to analyse CSPVs in Switzerland. I review the potential conditions for which this theory applies through an analysis of 25 case studies. The main findings from the theoretical framework include the following. First, joint-ownership is an essential pre-requisite for intelligent utilization of electricity produced from a CSPV system, where connected users are economically dependent on the the rates of return of the PV production. Secondly, from the case studies included in this analysis, all are categorized as fragile or failed CPRs, where only two case studies fully meet five of the eight adapted design principles. The analysis also indicates, that tenants lack real-time consumption, production and SC data to make actionable changes to improve the usage of the shared resource. Two of the identified gaps in the CPR theory were investigated further in two subsequent studies. The first study tests the effects of an intra-community mobile application, Our Energy, with real-time electricity production and consumption data which shows individual and community performance. The method highlights the time-sensitive nature of electricity production from PV and directs users how to consume more intelligently by load-shifting to increase SC and decrease peak electricity consumption from the grid. This study utilized the community-based social marketing approach to support the app design, development, evaluation and deployment for a specific user group from a representative Swiss city. This study included a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of 83 recruited participants for two separate two-week studies. The pilot study tests the effect of a community ranking system compared to individual PV users without this feature. The main study focused on load-shifting to increase SC compared to a baseline for all participants. The results from the pilot study indicate that community app users increased their SC for the first five days of the two-week study. The main study on the other hand, does not show as clear of a learning effect, although six of the 23 participants did increase SC during the treatment period compared to the baseline. The theory section also initially aimed to understand the boundary conditions for successful CPR management as a function of building/complex size, number of users and the size of the PV resource system. However, from an empirical perspective, the sample size was too small to make generalizable conclusions. Although this study highlights the features of each case study, implementation heuristics for future installations are still missing. Therefore, the second study in this thesis explores the boundary conditions for which CSPV may be implemented at scale. This was conducted as a two-part analysis to test the self-consumption potential of 1) varying community sizes and prosumer-to-consumer ratios and 2) given future projections for electricity demand, and physical boundaries within a real urban context. The first analysis applies a statistical model which uses electric load profiles measured from 4190 residential buildings, combined with simulated PV production data. The second analysis uses a deterministic model to simulate the energy demand and PV potential of a predominantly residential building district of 4919 buildings given building-specific data. The outcomes indicate that the prosumer-to-consumer ratio is more important than the absolute microgrid size. Residential units with prosumer-to-consumer ratios between 40%-60% have the best performance at varying production to demand ratios. When looking at future electric system demands and projected weather data from 2050, there is increased potential for self-consumption when compared to the baseline building stock scenario. However, in the 2050 scenario, many of the electric demands do not coincide with PV production and are even more dependent on the grid to meet increased electricity demands. In both analyses, the aggregate self-consumption is higher compared to the individual strategy

Análisis del proceso de atención a las peticiones, quejas y reclamos en la Industria de Licores del Valle [recurso electrónico]: Pasantía Empresarial

La INDUSTRIA DE LICORES DEL VALLE es una empresa industrial del estado, especializada en la producción y comercialización de alcoholes y licores que se encuentra establecida desde 1921 utilizando en la actualidad las tecnologías avanzadas, garantizando que los productos que procesan sean de alta calidad y en busca de la constante satisfacción del cliente, estos aspectos son de gran importancia ya que hoy en día, lograr la plena "satisfacción del cliente" es un requerimiento indispensable para ganarse un lugar en la "mente" de los clientes y por consiguiente, en el mercado meta. Por ello, el objetivo de mantener ¿satisfecho a cada cliente¿ debe ir más allá del departamento de mercadotecnia y empezar a constituirse en uno de los principales objetivos de todas las áreas funcionales (producción, finanzas, talento humano, entre otros) de las empresas y más aun, en las empresas exitosas. Por ese motivo, resulta de vital importancia que todas las personas que trabajan en una empresa u organización, conozcan cuáles son los beneficios de lograr la satisfacción del cliente, cómo definirla, cuáles son los niveles de satisfacción, cómo se forman las expectativas en los clientes y en qué consiste el rendimiento percibido, para que de esa manera, estén mejor capacitadas para coadyuvar activamente con todas las tareas que apuntan a lograr la tan anhelada satisfacción del cliente. Una de las principales causas de percepción de satisfacción o insatisfacción se da en el servicio al cliente; en un mundo donde competir y marcar la diferencia son la clave para alcanzar un espacio dentro del universo empresarial y corporativo, nada como un buen servicio al cliente para ser diferenciales. Pero para ello, dicen los expertos, la satisfacción integral frente a un producto o servicio no se da solo por atender un reclamo o cambiar un artículo que ha resultado defectuoso. Es ir más allá. Una simple acción postventa no es suficiente para ser reconocidos por una atención asertiva y oportuna que, al final, es lo que un cliente valora de una marca o servicio. Así las cosas se requieren más que ¿buenas intenciones?

Let it grow: How community solar policy can increase PV adoption in cities

Decarbonizing urban energy consumption is critical for addressing climate change, yet renewable power installations in cities are rare due to limited space and economic unattractiveness. Community solar, where multiple electricity users share the electricity generated by their rooftop PV systems, could help overcome these barriers and accelerate PV adoption in cities. Using an agent-based model, we simulated the decision-making of nearly 5000 building owners in a city district in Zurich, Switzerland, and assessed three locally relevant policy scenarios: no community solar, community solar with adjacent buildings, and community solar with buildings within a 100-meter radius. The results show that allowing community solar with adjacent buildings increases the installed PV capacity in 2035 by 1%, as greater economies of scale and higher self-consumption make PV adoption more economically attractive. A more permissive policy, allowing community solar with buildings within a 100-meter radius, provides more opportunities to communities to grow over time and results in 21% more PV installed capacity in 2035 than without community solar. These findings demonstrate the potential of community solar to accelerate PV adoption in cities and underscore the significant role of policy design in achieving this goal.ISSN:0301-421

The Impact of self-consumption regulation on individual and community solar PV adoption in Switzerland: An agent-based model

The new Energy Act in Switzerland came into force in January 2018 with very encouraging provisions for community solar PV systems – clearer financial and legal structures under the ZEV (Zusammenschluss zum Eigenverbrauch). However, there is no ex-ante scientific research as to how this new policy will fare, especially with changing electricity prices and falling solar PV costs. Agent-based modelling is a useful technique to simulate the adoption of new technologies and is used for community solar PV adoption in this work. The agent-based model developed in this research uses energy data generated from a district model of nearly 2000 building blocks in the city of Zürich using the City Energy Analyst (CEA). This approach is used to analyse the dynamic levels of adoption of individual and community solar PV systems when modelling factors such as geographical location of agents, environmental attitudes and peer effects, electricity and solar PV prices as well as legal regulations. A scenario without any such regulation is also modelled for comparison. The current work indicates that adoption levels are exceeded with the large building blocks considered, and the ZEV regulations do incentivize community PV system adoption for greater adoption levels at better system economics.ISSN:1742-6588ISSN:1742-659

Aggregation Effects For Microgrid Communities At Varying Sizes And Prosumer‐Consumer Ratios

Self-consumption is an increasingly economically attractive solution for electricity generated by distributed energy resources, which also reduces transmission losses, power line overload and grid instability. Yet, at single-building scale, production and demand do often not coincide. Microgrids are proposed as a means to trade surplus energy produced with local prosumers and consumers, to take advantage of complementary load profiles. Here we define a consumer as a single metered residential unit, a prosumer as a consumer with a photovoltaic system, which first uses the on-site energy generated prior to exporting the surplus, and the microgrid as a clearly defined number of both prosumers and consumers. In this article, we systematically analyze to what extent varying microgrid sizes and prosumer-consumer ratios affect local self-consumption and self-sufficiency rates. To that end, we developed a simulation model that uses real-world load profiles from 4190 residential buildings as input data. We find that the prosumer-to-consumer ratio is more important than the absolute microgrid size, for microgrids sizes greater than ten. The results also indicate that prosumer-to-consumer ratios in the range of 40%-60% have the best performance. Each simulation is also compared to the baseline scenario of a stand-alone prosumer, which shows significantly better self-consumption ratios and self-sufficiency ratios for microgrids due to aggregation effects. Finally, this work may also be used as a reference to design residential microgrid communities for various prosumer-consumer compositions and various production-to-demand ratios.ISSN:1876-610