Exploiting road traffic data for very short term load forecasting in smart grids

If accurate short term prediction of electricity consumption is available, the Smart Grid infrastructure can rapidly and reliably react to changing conditions. The economic importance of accurate predictions justifies research for more complex forecasting algorithms. This paper proposes road traffic data as a new input dimension that can help improve very short term load forecasting. We explore the dependencies between power demand and road traffic data and evaluate the predictive power of the added dimension compared with other common features, such as historical load and temperature profiles

‘A Very Internecine Policy’: Anglo-Russian Cold Wars before the Cold War

Whether or not each epoch is equal to God, as Leopold von Ranke once suggested, certainly each new generation of historians creates a new version of the past, one that suits its needs or tastes or that, at any rate, suggests itself as a plausible reconstruction of past occurrences. This is also relevant for the study of the post-1945 East-West conflict. The Cold War is generally seen as the key organising principle of the second half of the short twentieth century. So ingrained, indeed, is this view in the intellectual habits of today’s political leaders and commentators — and not a few scholars, too — that they tend to cast back wistful glances at the ‘familiar certainties of the Cold War and its alliances.