Interim report of the South Carolina State Health and Human Services Finance Commission

This report summarizes the Commission's activities through June 30, 1984.

Annual report of the State Health and Human Services Finance Commission ... 1984-1985

This report summarizes the Commission's activities during the fiscal year which ended on June 30, 1985.

Effects of Information and Time of Use Pricing on Irish Electricity Demand and Supply

In this dissertation I quantify residential behavior response to interventions designed to reduce electricity demand at different periods of the day. In the first chapter, I examine the effect of information provision coupled with bimonthly billing, monthly billing, and in-home displays, as well as a time-of-use (TOU) pricing scheme to measure consumption over each month of the Irish Consumer Behavior Trial. I find that time-of-use pricing with real time usage information reduces electricity usage up to 8.7 percent during peak times at the start of the trial but the effect decays over the first three months and after three months the in-home display group is indistinguishable from the monthly treatment group. Monthly and bi-monthly billing treatments are not found to be statistically different from another. These findings suggest that increasing billing reports to the monthly level may be more cost effective for electricity generators who wish to decrease expenses and consumption, rather than providing in-home displays. In the following chapter, I examine the response of residential households after exposure to time of use tariffs at different hours of the day. I find that these treatments reduce electricity consumption during peak hours by almost four percent, significantly lowering demand. Within the model, I find evidence of overall conservation in electricity used. In addition, weekday peak reductions appear to carry over to the weekend when peak pricing is not present, suggesting changes in consumer habit. The final chapter of my dissertation imposes a system wide time of use plan to analyze the potential reduction in carbon emissions from load shifting based on the Ireland and Northern Single Electricity Market. I find that CO2 emissions savings are highest during the winter months when load demand is highest and dirtier power plants are scheduled to meet peak demand. TOU pricing allows for shifting in usage from peak usage to off peak usage and this shift in load can be met with cleaner and cheaper generated electricity from imports, high efficiency gas units, and hydro units.

ASSOCIATION OF BIRTH WEIGHT AND TIME OF BREASTFEEDING WITH CURRENT NUTRITIONAL STATUS OF CHILDREN

Objetivo: Analisar a relação entre o peso ao nascer (PN) e o tempo de aleitamento materno (AM) com o atual estado nutricional de crianças de dois a seis anos de idade. Métodos: Estudo observacional, quantitativo e do tipo transversal, realizado com crianças, independentemente do sexo, com idades entre dois a seis anos, matriculadas em sete escolas de educação infantil da rede municipal de um município do interior do Rio Grande do Sul (RS), no período de junho a agosto de 2014. Participaram 353 crianças, aferindo-se peso e altura, após os pais terem respondido a um questionário de Peso ao Nascer (PN) e tempo de aleitamento materno. Resultados: A média de aleitamento materno exclusivo foi de 3,47 ± 2,81 meses. A maioria das crianças (50,7%, n=179) encontrou-se em risco de sobrepeso ou sobrepeso para a idade, conforme o Índice de Massa Corporal (IMC). O PN apresentou correlação positiva com a altura atual (r=0,164, p=0,002) e com o peso atual (r=0,180, p=0,001). O PN foi significativamente maior entre os meninos (p=0,003), e o tempo de AM associado à alimentação complementar foi significativamente maior entre as meninas (p=0,024). Conclusão: Os resultados sugerem que o peso ao nascer influencia o ganho de peso nos seis primeiros anos de vida, com maior destaque para os meninos; e o tempo de amamentação associado à alimentação complementar foi maior entre as meninas.

Transcript of proceedings of Emergency Board No. 106, appointed by the President of the United States. Chicago, Illinois, 1954. Vacations, holidays, health and welfare benefits, rules. Fifteen cooperating railway labor organizations, vs. designated railroads.

Mode of access: Internet.

Social Policy and Time

Time is crucial to the implementation, operation and effectiveness of social policies, yet the subject has often treated the meaning of time as theoretically unproblematic. It focuses more upon what policies do and less upon the contexts within which the practices and assumptions of social actors are embedded. The article offers a more sophisticated theoretical account of time upon which is based an exploration of the main temporal features of welfare capitalism. It then goes on to examine three recent and prominent research projects in order to show how and why they fail to incorporate a convincing social theory of time.

Quantification of air quality in space and time and its effects on health

The long-term adverse effects on health associated with air pollution exposure can be estimated using either cohort or spatio-temporal ecological designs. In a cohort study, the health status of a cohort of people are assessed periodically over a number of years, and then related to estimated ambient pollution concentrations in the cities in which they live. However, such cohort studies are expensive and time consuming to implement, due to the long-term follow up required for the cohort. Therefore, spatio-temporal ecological studies are also being used to estimate the long-term health effects of air pollution as they are easy to implement due to the routine availability of the required data. Spatio-temporal ecological studies estimate the health impact of air pollution by utilising geographical and temporal contrasts in air pollution and disease risk across $n$ contiguous small-areas, such as census tracts or electoral wards, for multiple time periods. The disease data are counts of the numbers of disease cases occurring in each areal unit and time period, and thus Poisson log-linear models are typically used for the analysis. The linear predictor includes pollutant concentrations and known confounders such as socio-economic deprivation. However, as the disease data typically contain residual spatial or spatio-temporal autocorrelation after the covariate effects have been accounted for, these known covariates are augmented by a set of random effects. One key problem in these studies is estimating spatially representative pollution concentrations in each areal which are typically estimated by applying Kriging to data from a sparse monitoring network, or by computing averages over modelled concentrations (grid level) from an atmospheric dispersion model. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the health effects of long-term exposure to Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Particular matter (PM10) in mainland Scotland, UK. In order to have an initial impression about the air pollution health effects in mainland Scotland, chapter 3 presents a standard epidemiological study using a benchmark method. The remaining main chapters (4, 5, 6) cover the main methodological focus in this thesis which has been threefold: (i) how to better estimate pollution by developing a multivariate spatio-temporal fusion model that relates monitored and modelled pollution data over space, time and pollutant; (ii) how to simultaneously estimate the joint effects of multiple pollutants; and (iii) how to allow for the uncertainty in the estimated pollution concentrations when estimating their health effects. Specifically, chapters 4 and 5 are developed to achieve (i), while chapter 6 focuses on (ii) and (iii). In chapter 4, I propose an integrated model for estimating the long-term health effects of NO2, that fuses modelled and measured pollution data to provide improved predictions of areal level pollution concentrations and hence health effects. The air pollution fusion model proposed is a Bayesian space-time linear regression model for relating the measured concentrations to the modelled concentrations for a single pollutant, whilst allowing for additional covariate information such as site type (e.g. roadside, rural, etc) and temperature. However, it is known that some pollutants might be correlated because they may be generated by common processes or be driven by similar factors such as meteorology. The correlation between pollutants can help to predict one pollutant by borrowing strength from the others. Therefore, in chapter 5, I propose a multi-pollutant model which is a multivariate spatio-temporal fusion model that extends the single pollutant model in chapter 4, which relates monitored and modelled pollution data over space, time and pollutant to predict pollution across mainland Scotland. Considering that we are exposed to multiple pollutants simultaneously because the air we breathe contains a complex mixture of particle and gas phase pollutants, the health effects of exposure to multiple pollutants have been investigated in chapter 6. Therefore, this is a natural extension to the single pollutant health effects in chapter 4. Given NO2 and PM10 are highly correlated (multicollinearity issue) in my data, I first propose a temporally-varying linear model to regress one pollutant (e.g. NO2) against another (e.g. PM10) and then use the residuals in the disease model as well as PM10, thus investigating the health effects of exposure to both pollutants simultaneously. Another issue considered in chapter 6 is to allow for the uncertainty in the estimated pollution concentrations when estimating their health effects. There are in total four approaches being developed to adjust the exposure uncertainty. Finally, chapter 7 summarises the work contained within this thesis and discusses the implications for future research.

Further exploration of the Dendritic Cell Algorithm: antigen multiplier and time windows

As an immune-inspired algorithm, the Dendritic Cell Algorithm (DCA), produces promising performance in the field of anomaly detection. This paper presents the application of the DCA to a standard data set, the KDD 99 data set. The results of different implementation versions of the DCA, including antigen multiplier and moving time windows, are reported. The real-valued Negative Selection Algorithm (NSA) using constant-sized detectors and the C4.5 decision tree algorithm are used, to conduct a baseline comparison. The results suggest that the DCA is applicable to KDD 99 data set, and the antigen multiplier and moving time windows have the same effect on the DCA for this particular data set. The real-valued NSA with contant-sized detectors is not applicable to the data set. And the C4.5 decision tree algorithm provides a benchmark of the classification performance for this data set.

Place in Time: The Role of Architecture in Establishing an Emotional Connection between Man and Time

This thesis explores the role of architecture as a means of reconnecting humans to the passage of time. A neglect of the temporal in our built environment obscures understanding of the human condition in all of its sensory aspects. The exploration and design of a series of ritual engagements, both culturally, and architecturally, begin to offer a venue through which designers can engage human senses. Rituals act as a means of demarcating the passage of time. It is through the engagement with these moments that people can begin to gain a richer understanding of the ephemeral nature of their own existence. The Pritzker Architecture Prize serves as the selected ritual of exploration because of its celebration of humanity and the art of architecture. However, the notion of ritual is explored down to the level of detail of engagement with handrails and door handles.

JOINT ENERGY BEAMFORMING AND TIME ASSIGNMENT FOR COOPERATIVE WIRELESS POWERED NETWORKS

Wireless power transfer (WPT) and radio frequency (RF)-based energy har- vesting arouses a new wireless network paradigm termed as wireless powered com- munication network (WPCN), where some energy-constrained nodes are enabled to harvest energy from the RF signals transferred by other energy-sufficient nodes to support the communication operations in the network, which brings a promising approach for future energy-constrained wireless network design. In this paper, we focus on the optimal WPCN design. We consider a net- work composed of two communication groups, where the first group has sufficient power supply but no available bandwidth, and the second group has licensed band- width but very limited power to perform required information transmission. For such a system, we introduce the power and bandwidth cooperation between the two groups so that both group can accomplish their expected information delivering tasks. Multiple antennas are employed at the hybrid access point (H-AP) to en- hance both energy and information transfer efficiency and the cooperative relaying is employed to help the power-limited group to enhance its information transmission throughput. Compared with existing works, cooperative relaying, time assignment, power allocation, and energy beamforming are jointly designed in a single system. Firstly, we propose a cooperative transmission protocol for the considered system, where group 1 transmits some power to group 2 to help group 2 with information transmission and then group 2 gives some bandwidth to group 1 in return. Sec- ondly, to explore the information transmission performance limit of the system, we formulate two optimization problems to maximize the system weighted sum rate by jointly optimizing the time assignment, power allocation, and energy beamforming under two different power constraints, i.e., the fixed power constraint and the aver- age power constraint, respectively. In order to make the cooperation between the two groups meaningful and guarantee the quality of service (QoS) requirements of both groups, the minimal required data rates of the two groups are considered as constraints for the optimal system design. As both problems are non-convex and have no known solutions, we solve it by using proper variable substitutions and the semi-definite relaxation (SDR). We theoretically prove that our proposed solution method can guarantee to find the global optimal solution. Thirdly, consider that the WPCN has promising application potentials in future energy-constrained net- works, e.g., wireless sensor network (WSN), wireless body area network (WBAN) and Internet of Things (IoT), where the power consumption is very critical. We investigate the minimal power consumption optimal design for the considered co- operation WPCN. For this, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total consumed power by jointly optimizing the time assignment, power allocation, and energy beamforming under required data rate constraints. As the problem is also non-convex and has no known solutions, we solve it by using some variable substitutions and the SDR method. We also theoretically prove that our proposed solution method for the minimal power consumption design guarantees the global optimal solution. Extensive experimental results are provided to discuss the system performance behaviors, which provide some useful insights for future WPCN design. It shows that the average power constrained system achieves higher weighted sum rate than the fixed power constrained system. Besides, it also shows that in such a WPCN, relay should be placed closer to the multi-antenna H-AP to achieve higher weighted sum rate and consume lower total power.

Accountability Report to State Budget and Control Board

Winthrop University annually presents an accountability report to the governor and General Assembly with descriptions and budget of each program, objectives, and performance measures.

Accountability Report to the State Budget and Control Board

Winthrop University annually presents an accountability report to the governor and General Assembly with descriptions and budget of each program, objectives, and performance measures.

Qubit state estimation and enhancement by quantum thermal noise

International audience

A short treatise on the game of whist : containing the laws of the game and also some rules whereby a beginner may, with due attention to them attain to the playing it well ... /

In folder.