4,154 research outputs found
The roles and potentials of renewable energy in less-developed economies
Increasing the renewable energy share in national energy mix remains one of the major energy policy goals across many economies. This paper assesses the roles and potentials of renewable energy sources in less-developed economies while citing Nepal as an example. Renewable energy has a significant role to play in the electrification of rural areas in developing economies and contribute towards sustainable development. Realizing full potentials of renewable, however, requires addressing both the associated demand-side and supply–side constraints. Innovative subsidies and tax incentives, adequate entrepreneurial support, strengthening institutional arrangement and promoting local community-based organizations such as the cooperatives are the necessary factors in promoting the green technologies in countries like Nepal. International factors such as large scale investment and adequate technology transfer are equally crucial to create a rapid spread and increase affordability of decentralised renewable energy technologies in less-developed economies.renewable; electrification; research and development
Energy efficiency in transition: do market-oriented economic reforms matter?
Global climate change and security of supply concerns pose significant challenges for sustainable development as well as the need to improve energy efficiency in transition and developing economies. Meanwhile, economic theory suggests that market-based economic policies and reforms are crucial for accelerating energy efficiency in developing and transition countries. Hence, this paper analyses the impacts of several market-oriented economic reforms on energy efficiency in the transition countries. The transition countries experienced a rapid marketization process that saw their economies transformed from central planning towards more market based economies since the early 1990s. The econometric results from the bias corrected fixed-effect analysis (LSDVC) suggest that both large and small scale privatisation process has been the sole driver of energy efficiency in transition countries. However, the lack of suitable institutions to support overall-market reforms implies that other market based economic reforms remain ineffective in improving energy efficiency in transition countries.market reforms, energy efficiency, transition countries, institutions
Recommended from our members
Hot Issue and Burning Options in Waste Management: A Social Cost Benefit Analysis of Waste-to-Energy in the UK.
Parafermion stabilizer codes
We define and study parafermion stabilizer codes which can be viewed as
generalizations of Kitaev's one dimensional model of unpaired Majorana
fermions. Parafermion stabilizer codes can protect against low-weight errors
acting on a small subset of parafermion modes in analogy to qudit stabilizer
codes. Examples of several smallest parafermion stabilizer codes are given. A
locality preserving embedding of qudit operators into parafermion operators is
established which allows one to map known qudit stabilizer codes to parafermion
codes. We also present a local 2D parafermion construction that combines
topological protection of Kitaev's toric code with additional protection
relying on parity conservation
Knowledge on Perimenopausal Symptoms among Women Attending Lumbini Medical College Teaching Hospital
Introduction: Perimenopause is an unavoidable stage of a woman's reproductive life that starts several years before menopause. Due to declining estrogen level, women experience physiological and psychological changes during perimenopausal period and sometimes symptoms are very distressing that affect the women’s quality of life negatively. This study was done to assess the knowledge of women about perimenopausal symptoms.
Methods: A cross-sectional analytical study was done at Lumbini Medical college (LMC) throughout the months of November and December, 2013. Women of age 40-60 years, attending various clinics in LMC and ready to take part in the study were included. A total of 142 women were selected purposefully. The data was collected using the semi structured interview schedule.
Results: The study revealed that half of respondents were between age group 40-44 years, 141 (99.3%) were married and 82 (57.7%) were literate. Three quarter of respondents (74.6%) were menstruating women. The main source of information on perimenopausal symptoms was friends and relatives (81.2%). Majority of respondents (n=90, 63.4%) had poor, 52 (33.8%) had fair and only 2.8% had good level of knowledge on perimenopausal symptoms. The respondents’ level of knowledge on perimenopausal symptoms was statistically significant with educational status (p<0.001), level of education (p=0.048) and economic status (p=0.02).
Conclusion: Many women have poor knowledge on perimenopausal symptoms. The role of health care provider is that they should seriously discuss about mid-life women’s health problems including perimenopausal symptoms and treatment modality including hormonal replacement therapy so the quality of life of women can be improved
Boundary twists, instabilities, and creation of skyrmions and antiskyrmions
We formulate and study the general boundary conditions dictating the
magnetization profile in the vicinity of an interface between magnets with
dissimilar properties. Boundary twists in the vicinity of an edge due to
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions have been first discussed in [Wilson et al.,
Phys. Rev. B 88, 214420 (2013)] and in [Rohart and Thiaville, Phys. Rev. B 88,
184422 (2013)]. We show that in general case the boundary conditions lead to
the magnetization profile corresponding to the N\'eel, Bloch, or intermediate
twist. We explore how such twists can be utilized for creation of skyrmions and
antiskyrmions, e.g., in a view of magnetic memory applications. To this end, we
study various scenarios how skyrmions and antiskyrmions can be created from
interface magnetization twists due to local instabilities. We also show that a
judicious choice of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya tensor (hence a carefully designed
material) can lead to local instabilities generating certain types of skyrmions
or antiskyrmions. The local instabilities are shown to appear in solutions of
the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes equations describing ellipticity of magnon modes bound
to interfaces. In one considered scenario, a skyrmion-antiskyrmion pair can be
created due to instabilities at an interface between materials with properly
engineered Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. We use micromagnetics
simulations to confirm our analytical predictions.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure
- …