a Rotman School of Management and Department of Economics, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3E6, Canada b Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), 180 Dundas Street West, Suite 1400, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1Z8, Canada c NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambrigde, MA, 02138-5398, USA d Department of Economics, Michigan State University, Marshall-Adams H...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate acoustic characteristics which distinguish ejectives from pulmonic stops in Ingush (a Northeast Caucasian language), and to compare Ingush ejectives to those of other languages. The articulation of ejectives is relatively well understood, but their acoustic effects are less clear. Working with a native speaker of Ingush, ejectives and pulmonic voicele...

The Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 brought about huge power shortage. In order to avoid blackouts, the Japanese society reduced its power demand by 12 % in the summer of 2011. TOKYO and TOHOKU areas, where power shortage was especially severe and mandatory rationing of 15 % was introduced, reduced its power demand by almost 20 %. This paper gives overview of the power saving activiti...

The power grid defines one of the most important technological networks of our times and sustains our complex society. It has evolved for more than a century into an extremely huge and seemingly robust and well understood system. But it becomes extremely fragile as well, when unexpected, usually minimal, failures turn into unknown dynamical behaviours leading, for example, to sudden and massive...

We present a general theory of exact penalty functions with vectorial (multidimensional) parameter for optimization problems in infinite dimensional spaces. In comparison the scalar case, use parameters provides much more flexibility, allows one to adaptively and independently take into account violation each constraint during an process, often leads better overall performance method using func...

Reliable electricity supply is a fundamental need in industrialized countries. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to keep electric power systems in a secure state, even in case of disturbances. For this reason, electric power systems have been designed with redundancies and are able to guarantee a reliable electricity supply most of the time. However, large blackouts still occur all over the w...

During the atmospheric entry phase at hypersonic speed, radio communication from/to a space vehicle can be disrupted due to formation of plasma sheath within surrounding flow field. In order characterize such blackout phases, this work presents numerical methodology combining Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations ionized chemically reacting flows by means Object-Oriented Libraries for D...

On September 8, 2011, the Great San Diego/Southwest Blackout occurred affecting approximately 5 million people. This paper explores the availability and use of social media as a crisis response tool following such a crisis event. Contrary to expectations, Internet and the cell phone system had less than the expected availability and as a result, users had a difficult time using social media to ...