Search results for "Scarcity"
showing 10 items of 106 documents
Herbal Medicines: Boon or Bane for the Human Liver?
2016
Since ages, medicine is the most consistent companion of man. While in primeval time, disease was cured through natural preparations, onset of technology has made today’s formulations synthetic or nature derived. Across the ages, the plausibility of the “savior-turned-slayer” functionality of these drugs remained constant. With the increment in documentation, it becomes evident that many of the commonly used drugs are associated with toxicities. Thus, any drug, irrespective of its origin, needs to be thoroughly assessed. Rampant use of herbal drugs has often been a threat to human health owing to the scarcity in quality assessment. What needs to be understood is that everything natural is n…
Quantized Dissensus in Networks of Agents subject to Death and Duplication
2012
Dissensus is a modeling framework for networks of dynamic agents in competition for scarce resources. Originally inspired by biological cells behaviors, it fits also marketing, finance and many other application areas. Competition is often unstable in the sense that strong agents, those having access to large resources, gain more and more resources at the expense of weak agents. Thus, strong agents duplicate when reaching a critical amount of resources, whereas weak agents die when loosing all their resources. To capture all these phenomena we introduce systems with a discrete time gossip and unstable state dynamics interrupted by discrete events affecting the network topology. Invariancy o…
Combinatorial Double Auction Radio Resource Allocation Model in Crowd Networks
2018
International audience; Industrial Partners (IPs) with Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are extending the mobile network infrastructure with Small Cells (SCs) in order to meet the growing mobile traffic demand. Due to the increasing number of telecommunication market competitors and the scarcity of radio resources, static sharing schemes are no more efficient. New dynamic schemes should be considered to meet both user expectations and economic success. In a crowd networking context, we propose in this work a dynamic radio resource scheme based on combinatorial double auctions. The participants in these auctions are the MNOs considered as buyers and the IPs, providers of SCs, considered as se…
System dynamics models for decision making in product multiple lifecycles
2015
The main drivers for adopting product multiple lifecycles are to gain ecological and economic advantages. However, in most of the cases it is not straight forward to estimate the potential ecological and economic gain that may result from adopting product multiple lifecycles. Even though many researchers have concluded that product multiple lifecycles result in gain, there are examples which indicate that the gain is often marginal or even none in many cases. The purpose of this research is to develop system dynamics models that can assist decision makers in assessing and analysing the potential gain of product multiple lifecycles considering the dynamics of material scarcity. The foundatio…
The scarcity of worker cooperatives in the USA: enquiring into possible causes
2018
Even though the access of workers to capital has been promoted in some countries for over centuries, Governments and public bodies have started to promote it worldwide, as in previous occasions, more particularly as an aftermath of the Great Recession, usually in the form of worker cooperatives.However, workers’ access to capital in the USA in the form of worker cooperatives is still surprisingly rare. We cannot find any recent public policies at a federal level in order to promote them and the old ones that exist remain mostly obsolete and unknown. Only at a state and local level, we find in the latest years a series of actions directed to achieve this goal, as in the case of New York City…
Temptation and commitment in the laboratory
2010
Temptation and self-control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature. Nevertheless, there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations. This is unfortunate in light of the fact that in many natural environments, the same temptation must be repeatedly resisted. This paper fills that gap by reporting data from a novel laboratory study of economic decisions under repeat temptations. Subjects are repeatedly offered an option with instantaneous benefit that also entails a substantial reduction to overall earnings. We show that this option is "tempting" in …
Teoría de la educación : revista interuniversitaria
2017
En el campo de la educación nos encontramos actualmente con dos importantes requerimientos, sólidamente fundamentados, para introducir la Educación para la Sostenibilidad y la Educación en Derechos Humanos. Se trata, en efecto, de dos áreas educativas prioritarias, a las que UNESCO ha dedicado sendos decenios. Es preciso reconocer, sin embargo, la escasa conexión entre ambas, así como su insuficiente presencia en el sistema educativo, muy particularmente en el nivel universitario. Nuestro propósito en este trabajo es, precisamente, mostrar que, contrariamente a lo que, en general, se ha venido considerando, ambos campos de conocimiento y actividad social están estrechamente vinculados y deb…
Desalination in small islands: the case study of Lampedusa (Italy)
2018
Desalination represents a common solution to overcome the water scarcity in small island. A case study is presented, considering the island of Lampedusa, located at south of Sicily (Italy). As many small islands in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Lampedusa presents a small standalone electrical grid, entrusted to old diesel engines. For more, the renewable energy sources are extremely underdeveloped in this territory. Lampedusa is regularly affected by water scarcity, so freshwater is produced by desalination plant and sometimes transported by boat from Sicily. As sustainable solution, the paper firstly analyses the energy demand for desalination and then proposes the installation of a…
Evaluation of the Water Scarcity Energy Cost for Users
2013
Abstract: In systems experiencing water scarcity and consequent intermittent supply, users often adopt private tanks that collect water during service periods and supply users when the service is not available. The tank may be fed by gravity or by private pumping stations depending on the network pressure level. Once water resources are collected, the tank can supply users by gravity if it is located on the rooftop or by additional pumping if underground. Private tanks thus increase the energy cost of the water supply service for users by introducing several small pumping structures inside the network. The present paper aims to evaluate this users’ energy cost for different private tank con…
A mathematical model to evaluate apparent losses due to meter under-registration in intermittent water distribution networks
2013
Apparent losses consist of water volume drawn from the network, consumed by users but not paid for. Those due to water meter under-registration were evaluated by means of a mathematical model able to analyse the complexity of intermittent supply systems with private tanks. This supply scheme is very common in the Mediterranean area where unexpected water shortage often happens and intermittent water supply is a common practice. In order to analyse such complex systems, a demand model, reproducing the effect of private tanks, and an apparent losses module were developed and coupled with an hydraulic network model based on the Global Gradient Algorithm (GGA). In distribution networks pressure…