Academic literature on the topic 'Watt governor system'

This chapter discusses how, during the crisis spawned by Hurricane Agnes, the untrained, ill-prepared, and uncommunicative local officials were forced to make decisions and take action with only the limited resources they had at their disposal, often with tragic results. Their situation was the result of federalism, a political system which divides powers, responsibilities, and jurisdictions between the national and state governments. Natural disasters that threaten health and safety are ultimately the responsibility of local officials, who turned to state and federal authorities and to the private sector to assist them in reorganizing and rebuilding after the flooding from Agnes. State governments may have the resources to cope with the disaster, but due to political considerations, most elected officials want to maximize the amount of financial support from the federal government while minimizing the cost at the state level. Scholars have termed this response to disaster “the crying poor” syndrome, in which states exaggerate the cost of a disaster to demonstrate that they are not capable of paying for recovery. Moreover, in 1972, few state governments had kept pace with the changing nature of disasters. The chapter then looks at how Governor Milton Shapp, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and state senator Bill Smith responded to the flooding.

The ideas of moral peace, a system of trust, and public justification explain the need for a legal system that corrects and stabilizes moral rules that form the basis for social trust. Legal rules gain authority when they improve upon the system of moral rules. But some of society’s moral commitments merit protection over and above the law by constitutional rules that govern the ratification, reform, and repeal of laws. This chapter develops an account of the most fundamental constraints on justifiable constitutional rules—primary rights. Primary rights are rights that anyone with a rational plan of life would want for herself to pursue her conception of the good and justice, and ones she is willing to extend to others on reciprocal terms. These rights merit moral, legal, and constitutional protection, and begin the process of constitutional choice.

The preceding chapters have emphasized the often unappreciated extent to which subnational jurisdictions engage in behaviors that resemble those of sovereign nation-states with respect to shared water resources. The United States, the world’s first modern federation, provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how institutional arrangements create the conditions for such behavior to be exercised. Even in comparison to other federal systems, the U.S. Constitution grants an unusual degree of power to state governments. This asymmetry is codified in the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which assigns all powers not specifically granted to the federal government to the states instead. The greater power of American states, even relative to their counterparts in other federal systems, is also reflected in the fact that they maintain not only independent executive and legislative bodies but also judiciaries, a feature that has resulted in the uniquely complicated American legal system wherein different states recognize different bodies of law, especially in the case of water rights (Watts 2008). Despite this fundamental asymmetry, the power of the federal government relative to the states has grown over time, especially following the expansion of federal authority during the New Deal era (Sharansky 1970; Elazar 1984; Zimmerman 2011). The United States also lacks several of the mechanisms that ensure a greater degree of coordination and cooperation between states in other federal systems. In particular, the United States lacks the prominent intergovernmental organizations, like the Council of Australian Governments, that are a feature of many other federal systems and that help to address interjurisdictional issues like water resource management. Hydropolitics in the United States presents a twofold puzzle. First, unlike the other countries examined in this book, the United States features a notable diversity of institutional models for governing its river basins. While many American river basins, including the Colorado, are governed either by a patchwork of institutions or by none at all, organizations like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) represent some of the most powerful river basin governance institutions in the world (Delli Priscoli 2007).

John Holland's work has combined what appears to be a complicated but technical contribution to giving approximate solutions for a class of difficult problems with a deepening of our understanding of the way we all do induction, of how the experience of the world modifies and improves our behavior and our decisions. Such a comprehension necessarily alters the viewpoint of the behavioral sciences. In this chapter, I want to concentrate on some of the already apparent ways in which he has altered our understanding of the complex dynamic system that constitutes the economic world. Of course, the genetic algorithm can be and has been used as a means of solving hard problems in economic analysis, as in any other field. That is, it is an aid to the analyst, and a powerful one. I want, however, to emphasize the second aspect of Holland's work, the implications of the genetic algorithm as a description of human problem-solving behavior in a complicated world. The economic world is complicated partly because it depends on the physical and biological world which governs the techniques of production. More interestingly, though, the economic world is complicated because the individuals in it are interacting through markets. It is an old observation among economists, going back to Adam Smith's observation of the invisible hand, that economic events are the results of human actions but are not necessarily an achievement of human intentions. In the murk of the economic world, individuals have to act. They have to make choices as to what they will consume, how much they will save, what goods they will produce and how they will produce them, and then what investments they will make. They make these choices with a view to their consequences, personal satisfaction today or in their future or the satisfaction of their heirs, the profits to be made now or in the future by producing goods, and the returns on their investments. These choices have an important time dimension; people and many of the things they buy, make, or sell last, and the outcomes of current decisions depend on events which will occur in the future. The life of the decisionmaker is uncertain, so is his or her health.

This book is about the professions and the systems and people that will replace them. Our focus is on doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, tax advisers, management consultants, architects, journalists, and the clergy (amongst others), on the organizations in which they work, and the institutions that govern their conduct. Our main claim is that we are on the brink of a period of fundamental and irreversible change in the way that the expertise of these specialists is made available in society. Technology will be the main driver of this change. And, in the long run, we will neither need nor want professionals to work in the way that they did in the twentieth century and before. There is growing evidence that a transformation is already under way. More people signed up for Harvard’s online courses in a single year, for example, than have attended the actual university in its 377 years of existence. In the same spirit, there are a greater number of unique visits each month to the WebMD network, a collection of health websites, than to all the doctors working in the United States. In the legal world, three times as many disagreements each year amongst eBay traders are resolved using ‘online dispute resolution’ than there are lawsuits filed in the entire US court system. On its sixth birthday, the Huffington Post had more unique monthly visitors than the website of the New York Times, which is almost 164 years of age. The British tax authorities use a fraud-detection system that holds more data than the British Library (which has copies of every book ever published in the UK). In 2014 the US tax authorities received electronic tax returns from almost 48 million people who had used online tax preparation software rather than a tax professional to help them. At WikiHouse, an online community designed a house that could be ‘printed’ and assembled for less than £50,000 (built successfully in London during September 2014). The architectural firm Gramazio & Kohler used a group of autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure out of 1,500 bricks.

The impact of cloudiness on the global radiative budget and its climatic consequences have been widely discussed during the last three decades. It was gradually recognized that the climatic effect of cloudiness depends on its height: low- and middle-level cloudiness have a total cooling effect on the Earth climatic system, while the upper-level clouds, cirrus, may have mostly a warming effect (IPCC 1995). The net effect of cirrus (i.e., warming or cooling), is much less clear because neither their microphysical and optical properties, nor the processes that govern their formation, are well understood and parameterized in climate models. These uncertainties have stimulated several major field projects performed within the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP; Rossow and Schiffer 1991) with subsequent data analysis reports [e.g., FIRE IFO-I (1990), FIRE IFO-II (1995), and EUCREX (Raschke et al. 1996)]. The relevant theoretical works, and even the simplest climate models, indicate that the climatic impact of cirrus depends on their microstructure: clouds composed of small crystals with effective radii less than about 16 μm have a total cooling effect, but clouds of larger crystals have a warming effect (Stephens et al. 1990). It was shown that the total cloud forcing at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) is positive from a few to a few tens of watts per square meter for the large crystals and decreases with decreasing crystal radius (Fu and Liou 1993). Most of the previous theoretical studies of cirrus radiative properties, after choosing some model of microphysics and some values for the mass extinction and absorption coefficients, then prescribed them to the whole cloud, neglecting any vertical variations. Simulations with general circulation models (GCMs) showed that cirrus clouds with their optical properties parameterized in such a way (i.e., constant with height) have a total warming effect and positive feedbacks with respect to greenhouse gas-induced global warming (e.g., Ramanathan et al. 1983; Wetherald and Manabe 1988). Today, the estimation of the warming/cooling effect of cirrus has become even more complicated due to two factors. First, for many years the usual in situ probes allowed the measurement of ice crystals with radii only larger than 25-50 μm, so the smallest and most optically and radiatively active crystals were unresolved.

Chapter 4 presented an extensive account of current understanding of climate change. The evidence that humans are having an important impact on the global climate system is scientifically compelling. And yet there are those who disagree and refuse to accept the evidence. Some of the dissent is based on a visceral feeling that the world is too big for humans to have the capacity to change it. Some is grounded, I believe, on ideology, on an instinctive distrust of science combined with a suspicion of govern¬ment, amplified by a feeling that those in authority are trying to use the issue to advance some other agenda, to increase taxes, for example. More insidious are dissenting views expressed by scientists on the opinion pages of influential newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). If scientists disagree, the implication for the public is that there is no urgency: we can afford to wait until the dust settles before deciding to take action— or not, as the case may be. Missing in the discourse triggered by these communications is the fact that, with few exceptions, the authors of these articles are not well informed on climate science. To put it bluntly, their views reflect personal opinion and in some cases explicit prejudice rather than objective analysis. Their communications are influential, nonetheless, and demand a response. I begin by addressing some of the general sentiments expressed by those who are either on the fence as to the significance of human- induced climate change or who may already have made up their minds that the issue is part of an elaborate hoax to mislead the public. There are a number of recurrent themes: The data purporting to show that the world is warming have been manipu-lated by climate scientists to enhance their funding or for other self- serving reasons.Climate science is complicated; scientists cannot predict the weather. Why should we believe that they could tell us what is going to happen a decade or more in the future? The planet has been warmer in the past; we survived and maybe even prospered.

As the penetration ratio of renewable energy sources becomes larger, the fluctuations of grid load also become larger and larger because of the intermittent generation of wind power and photovoltaic power. These fluctuations cause instability of voltage and frequency in the power grid. Recently, there has been considerable research into solving these challenges, leading to development such as batteries, flywheels, and improved flexibility of thermal power plants. The batteries and the flywheels are confronted with the challenge of high initial cost for the Mega-Watt class. Improving flexibilit