This paper examines the efŽ ciency of electric power generation plants in the United States. A 1996 data set from the Utility Data Institute and county-level wage data from the Bureau of Labor statistics provide the information needed to construct measures of cost, output, and input prices for 78 steam plants using natural gas as the primary fuel. This paper uses a Bayesian stochastic frontier ...

With over 150GW of installed capacity and around 723.8 BUs of electricity generation during 2008-09, India remains the 5 largest consumer of electricity in the world. Coal fired power plants account for more than half of the installed capacity and caters to more than 65% of the power demand. Against the prevalent practice of ratio analysis being used for the performance estimation, the study us...

This paper describes a new technology for analyzing alarm cascades in nuclear power plant control rooms in real-time, thereby making operation safer and more productive. The technology is based on multilevel flow models and a root cause analysis algorithm developed at Lund University and GoalArt. It enables the solution of the alarm cascade problem for full-scale nuclear power plants. In the ne...

Ants have long been renowned for their intimate mutualisms with trophobionts and plants and more recently appreciated for their widespread and diverse interactions with microbes. An open question in symbiosis research is the extent to which environmental influence, including the exchange of microbes between interacting macroorganisms, affects the composition and function of symbiotic microbial ...

Differences in root foraging behavior between species have been well documented, but the effects of these differences on belowground competitive ability are only beginning to be studied. Here we report the results of a competition experiment in homogeneous and heterogeneous soils between two species that differ in their ability to acquire nutrients from patchy environments. The perennial grasse...

Biowaste composting at several plants in Scandinavia has been troubled by low pH in the collected waste as well as after the composting process. Our hypothesis was that increased aeration would give a higher and faster rise in pH during the composting process, and that this would give a higher decomposition rate. The objective was to test this hypothesis by experiments in full scale, with an em...

The relationships between species richness and driving factors might vary with taxa and spatial scale. For this study we used plant species data of eight groups from nature reserves in China, namely pteridophytes, gymnosperms, angiosperms, vascular plants, Chinese endemic species, rare and endangered plants, woody plants, and herbaceous plants, and eight putative environmental predictors to exp...