A model has been developed to study the global complex dynamics of a series of blackouts in power transmission systems [1, 2]. This model has included a simple level of self-organization by incorporating the growth of power demand and the engineering response to system failures. Two types of blackouts have been identified with different dynamical properties. One type of blackout involves loss o...

Fifty percent of college students who drink report alcohol-induced blackouts, and alcohol abusers in general put a heavy burden on the medical care system. Using data drawn from a randomized, controlled alcohol intervention trial at five university sites, our study quantified the costs of visits to emergency departments by college students who experienced blackouts from drinking alcohol. Of 954...

The blackout risk in power systems is difficult to estimate by actual probabilistic methods because they usually neglect, or do not properly consider, the dependencies between failures and the dynamic evolution of the grid in the course of a transient. Our purpose is therefore to develop an integrated probabilistic approach to blackout analysis, capable of handling the coupling between events i...

Radar is a very important sensor in surveillance applications. Near-space vehicle-borne radar (NSVBR) is a novel installation of a radar system, which offers many benefits, like being highly suited to the remote sensing of extremely large areas, having a rapidly deployable capability and having low vulnerability to electronic countermeasures. Unfortunately, a target detection challenge arises b...

Determining whether power outages have significant fertility effects is an important policy question in developing countries, where blackouts are common and modern forms of family planning scarce. Using birth records from Zanzibar, this paper shows that a 2008 month-long blackout caused a significant, 20% increase in the number of births eight to ten months later. The increase is similar across...

Blackouts result from cascading failure in transmission power systems. The typical development of a cascading failure can be split in two phases. In an initial slow cascade phase, an initiating contingency triggers a thermal transient developing on characteristic times much larger than the electrical time constants. This transient increases significantly the likelihood of additional contingenci...

Pigeons' choices between a reliable alternative that always provided food after a delay (i.e., 100% reinforcement) and an unreliable one that provided food or blackout equally often after a delay (i.e., 50% reinforcement) was studied using a discrete-trials concurrent-chains procedure modified to prevent choice between alternatives following a blackout outcome. Initial links were fixed-ratio 1 ...

Many competitive breath-hold divers use 'glossopharyngeal insufflation', also called 'lung packing', to overfill their lungs above normal total lung capacity. This increases intrathoracic pressure, decreases venous return, compromises cardiac pumping, and reduces arterial blood pressure, possibly resulting in a syncope breath-hold divers call 'packing blackout'. We report a case with a breath-h...

in this paper a new algorithm based on phasor measurements for estimating the thévenin equivalent (te) and system inertia constant is proposed. the method estimates the network te seen from a generator terminal and equivalent system inertia constant by means of phasor data that is available at phasor data concentrator (pdc) center. it is shown that the parameters of the te could be estimated at...