Solar Training and Hiring Insights

The research report, Solar Training and Hiring Insights 2017, aims to increase understanding of U.S. solar training, hiring practices, and market trends to help the industry make better, more informed decisions. The report aggregates and analyzes data from several research efforts, including an extensive survey of more than 400 solar installers; in-depth case studies of 10 solar installation firms; interviews with dozens of solar employers, trainers, and workforce development boards; and The Solar Foundation's National Solar Jobs Census series.The report also provides a state-by-state index that helps decision makers predict which states are most likely to experience shortages of qualified solar workers (see map below). These states are the most likely to need additional resources for training and workforce development in the coming years

Wavelet Localization of the Radon Transform

In this paper we develop an algorithm which significantly reduces radiation exposure in x-ray tomography, when a local region of the body is to be imaged. The algorithm uses the properties of wavelets to essentially localize the Radon transform. The algorithm differs from previous algorithms for doing local tomography because it recovers an approximation to the original image, not the image modulo the nullspace of the local tomography operator, or the Lambda transform of the image. This is possible because we do not truly invert the interior Radon transform, but rather sample the Radon transform sparsely away from the local region of interest. Much attention in the field has been directed towards localizes tomography. We believe that this technique represents a significant contribution towards this effort

Working Towards Organizational Excellence

This presentation looks at what it takes to achieve organizational excellence in a government department, office, or company. This presentation will explore the basic steps which can be taken by any organization to work toward excellence. Organizational excellence helps keep organizations functioning efficiently when staff and leaders retire, quit, or are cut

GeneSeer: A sage for gene names and genomic resources

BACKGROUND: Independent identification of genes in different organisms and assays has led to a multitude of names for each gene. This balkanization makes it difficult to use gene names to locate genomic resources, homologs in other species and relevant publications. METHODS: We solve the naming problem by collecting data from a variety of sources and building a name-translation database. We have also built a table of homologs across several model organisms: H. sapiens, M. musculus, R. norvegicus, D. melanogaster, C. elegans, S. cerevisiae, S. pombe and A. thaliana. This allows GeneSeer to draw phylogenetic trees and identify the closest homologs. This, in turn, allows the use of names from one species to identify homologous genes in another species. A website is connected to the database to allow user-friendly access to our tools and external genomic resources using familiar gene names. CONCLUSION: GeneSeer allows access to gene information through common names and can map sequences to names. GeneSeer also allows identification of homologs and paralogs for a given gene. A variety of genomic data such as sequences, SNPs, splice variants, expression patterns and others can be accessed through the GeneSeer interface. It is freely available over the web and can be incorporated in other tools through an http-based software interface described on the website. It is currently used as the search engine in the RNAi codex resource, which is a portal for short hairpin RNA (shRNA) gene-silencing constructs

Residents Informing the Planning Process: Pleasant Valley and Its Natural Resources

As a society, we are slowly learning the importance of the interaction between the natural and built environments. We need a new model for planning and development that gives more weight to natural resource considerations than has traditionally occurred in the development process. An opportunity exists in Pleasant Valley to bring focus to natural resources in future planning efforts by tapping into the local knowledge of residents who know and love the land. Because the area will begin to urbanize in the near future, it is necessary to learn about the area before development occurs or people move away. The purpose of this project was to gather the local knowledge of natural resources and distill it into key findings to guide future plans

U.S. Drinking Water Challenges in the Twenty-First Century

The access of almost all 270 million U.S. residents to reliable, safe drinking water distinguishes the United States in the twentieth century from that of the nineteenth century. The United States is a relatively water-abundant country with moderate population growth; nonetheless, current trends are sufficient to strain water resources over time, especially on a regional basis. We have examined the areas of public water infrastructure, global climate effects, waterborne disease (including emerging and resurging pathogens), land use, groundwater, surface water, and the U.S. regulatory history and its horizon. These issues are integrally interrelated and cross all levels of public and private jurisdictions. We conclude that U.S. public drinking water supplies will face challenges in these areas in the next century and that solutions to at least some of them will require institutional changes

A prototype telerobotic platform for live transmission line maintenance: review of design and development.

This paper reports technical design of a novel experimental test facility, using haptic-enabled teleoperation of robotic manipulators, for live transmission line maintenance. The goal is to study and develop appropriate techniques in repair overhead power transmission lines by allowing linemen to wirelessly guide a remote manipulator, installed on a crane bucket, to execute dexterous maintenance tasks, such as twisting a tie wire around a cable. Challenges and solutions for developing such a system are outlined. The test facility consists of a PHANToM Desktop haptic device (master site), an industrial hydraulic manipulator (slave site) mounted atop a Stewart platform, and a wireless communication channel connecting the master and slave sites. The teleoperated system is tested under different force feedback schemes, while the base is excited and the communication channel is delayed and/or lossy to emulate realistic network behaviors. The force feedback schemes are: virtual fixture, augmentation force and augmented virtual fixture. Performance of each scheme is evaluated under three measures: task completion time, number of failed trials and displacement of the slave manipulator end-effector. The developed test rig has been shown to be successful in performing haptic-enabled teleoperation for live-line maintenance in a laboratory setting. The authors aim at establishing a benchmark test facility for objective evaluation of ideas and concepts in the teleoperation of live-line maintenance tasks