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The Safe Drinking Water / Food Law Nexus
Get PDFAt 2 AM on August 2, 2014, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency issued the following warning to the citizens of Toledo: “Do Not Drink.” The Ohio City\u27s tap water was contaminated with microcystin, a toxin that can cause diarrhea, vomiting, and abnormal liver function. The source was an algal bloom in Lake Erie resulting from high levels of agricultural fertilizers and animal waste. For three days, Toledo residents drank only bottled water.
This is just one of many similar examples of agricultural contamination of urban drinking water supplies. Creating a physical connection between urban and rural communities, this pollution highlights the need for an environmentally-minded and systems-based food and agriculture law
Innovative Financing for Renewable Energy
Get PDFThis paper discusses successful innovative methods for financing the high initial equipment costs of many renewable energy resources, with case studies of their application. Financial instruments for renewable energy installations are frequently dependent on physical and economic infrastructure. In response to this fundamental interconnectedness between infrastructure, economy, and financial instruments, this paper follows a rough structure of financing methods used in: Areas unserved by an electricity grid; Areas of modest means served by limited transmission interconnections; and Areas with developed regional or national grid connectedness.
Renewables have many benefits, but they also face challenges as they enter the existing market of entrenched and highly subsidized fossil fuels. Challenges take many forms but generally include: technical issues with balancing demand and electric system load; unpredictable or politically driven swings in tax structures; and resistance from existing corporate interests. This paper examines how innovative public and private financing can mitigate these issues and carry the industry forward
Driving Public Cloud Adoption through Qualitative and Quantitative Modeling
No full textCIO’s and IT managers alike are looking at cloud technologies as a way to reduce IT costs, add flexibility, and reduce their overall IT landscape. Public cloud platforms at leading cloud service provider’s, including Microsoft, AWS, and IBM, offer an attractive cost model that promises to reduce IT costs. However, there are issues that concern CIO’s and IT managers regarding the risks that a public cloud platform may inherently have. There are assumptions and general guidelines concerning public cloud adoption (e.g., security, data leaks, etc.) that are used as determining factors to migrate to a public cloud. As a result, CIO’s tend to forgo migrating critical IT assets to a public cloud. Many of the guidelines recommend not migrating critical IT assets to a public cloud for a number of reasons, most relating to risk and security. As a result, IT organizations tend to stay away from migrating critical IT assets to a public cloud; possibly losing the maximum economic benefits that a public cloud can offer. When using assumption and general guidelines to decide public cloud migration strategies, risk and reward is not fully analyzed in a comparative model (i.e., on-premise and cloud service provider comparison), which may result in lost opportunity to migrate critical IT assets to a public cloud and reduce IT costs. The lack of qualitative and quantitative modeling leaves (de facto) assumption and generally accepted guidelines as the decision-making model. This research focuses on enabling IT managers to do quantitative and qualitative analysis through modeling, where IT assets can be analyzed through comparative and sensitivity analysis to understand risk and reward, in an effort to drive public cloud adoption, and enable more economic benefits for reducing IT costs
The effects of computer simulations on students\u27 conceptual understanding of direct current resistive electric circuits
No full textResearchers are divided on two issues. First, there is a disagreement among researchers on the effectiveness of virtual manipulation when compared to hands-on manipulation. Second, there is an ongoing dispute among the researchers about the amount of teacher guidance during instruction. Therefore, the purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to compare the relative effectiveness of hands-on and simulation learning environments by examining how each environment contributed to changes in student’s conceptual understanding of direct current (DC) electric circuits (Zacharia, 2008; Jaakkola 2012); and (b) to explore whether and how changes in conceptual understanding in simulation and hands-on inquiry learning environments are mediated by unguided and guided instruction (Jaakkola, 2012). To design this pre-post test quasi-experimental study groups of students from a convenient sample of 173, 16- to 17-year-old participants from an urban public school district in northeastern of the United States, were randomized into four integrated inquiry-learning environments: hand-on with guided instruction (HEWGI), simulation with guided instruction (SEWGI), hands-on with unguided instruction (HEWUI), and simulation with unguided instruction (SEWUI). In these groups students developed conceptual understanding on their own through inquiry. Students investigated the concepts and constructed conceptual knowledge by carrying out experiments (University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education, The ThinkerTools Research Group, n.d.). Planned contrasts revealed that students in simulation inquiry-learning environments performed at least as well as students in hands-on inquiry-learning environments. Specifically the level of students’ understanding of DC electric circuits concepts in simulation inquiry environment with unguided instruction was not significantly different from the level of students’ conceptual understanding of DC electric circuits in hands-on inquiry-environment with unguided instruction. Students in a simulation environment with guided instruction showed a better understanding of the concepts of DC electric circuits than the students in a hands-on environment with guided instruction. Differences in conceptual understanding between students in hands-on environment with guided instruction and those in hands-on inquiry-learning environment with unguided instruction did not reach statistical significance. The results of this study showed the relative effectiveness of a simulation-learning environment in promoting the students’ conceptual understanding of DC electricity. This study demonstrated that in an integrated physics unit of study about electricity, learning with computer simulations was at least as effective as learning with traditional hands-on equipment. More importantly this study implies that, in situations where students use an all in one curriculum, such as PbI, to learn the concepts of DC electric circuits by inquiry on their own without teacher interference, the simulation inquiry-learning environment was as equally effective as the traditional hands-on inquiry-learning environment. Besides, in hands-on inquiry-learning environment, instructional guidance provided by the teacher did not contribute to better conceptual understanding than minimal or no guidance
Carbon-Tuning New York’s Electricity System: Uncovering New Opportunities for CO2 Emissions Reductions
Get PDFDistributed energy resources (DER), including technologies and services such as behind-the-meter generation, demand response, energy management, and energy efficiency, are touted as effective ways to improve electric system efficiencies and reduce harmful air emissions. The New York State Public Service Commission’s landmark Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) proceeding aims to unleash competitive forces that will invest in DER across the state with the explicit goal of reducing customer bills and the environmental impact of electricity production.
As initiatives like New York’s REV continue, understanding the emission impacts of DER deployment becomes vital to ensure these efforts achieve the greatest environmental benefit possible. In this report, we present an analysis of the emission characteristics of New York’s electricity system. Using a linear regression model, we estimate marginal emission rates for CO2 and other pollutants from large centralized power plants. Our results show that the marginal emission rate of the State’s electricity system—and thus the emission reduction potential of DER—is dependent on both the time and location of DER operation in New York
