Alcohol-related amnesia—alcohol blackout—is a common claim of criminal defendants. The generally held belief is that during an alcohol blackout, other cognitive functioning is severely impaired or absent. The presentation of alcohol blackout as scientific evidence in court requires that the science meets legal reliability standards (Frye, FRE702/Daubert). To determine whether “alcohol blackout”...

Do transitory economic shocks affect neonatal outcomes? I show that an unexpected, monthlong blackout in Tanzania caused a sharp but temporary drop in work hours for workers in electricity-dependent jobs. Using records from a maternity ward, I document a reduction in birth weights for children exposed in utero to the blackout, and an increase in the probability of low birth weight. The reductio...

In order to study the complex global dynamics of a series of blackouts in power transmission systems a dynamical model of such a system has been developed. This model includes a simple representation of the dynamical evolution by incorporating the growth of power demand, the engineering response to system failures, and the upgrade of generator capacity. Two types of blackouts have been identifi...

A program may have a low error rate but, at the same time, require little of the student and teach him little. A measure to supplement error rate in evaluating a program has recently been developed. This measure, called the blackout ratio, is the percentage of material that may be deleted without increasing the error rate. In high blackout-ratio programs, obtaining a correct answer is contingen...

Some criminal suspects claim to have had an alcohol-induced blackout during crimes they have committed. Are alcoholic blackouts a frequently occurring phenomenon, or are they merely used as an excuse to minimize responsibility? Frequency and type of blackout were surveyed retrospectively in two healthy samples (n = 256 and n = 100). Also, a comparison of blood alcohol concentrations was made be...

We propose BlackOut, an approximation algorithm to efficiently train massive recurrent neural network language models (RNNLMs) with million word vocabularies. BlackOut is motivated by using a discriminative loss, and we describe a weighted sampling strategy which significantly reduces computation while improving stability, sample efficiency, and rate of convergence. One way to understand BlackO...

With the advent of advanced technology in smart grid, the implementation of renewable energy in a stressed and complicated power system operation, aggravated by a competitive electricity market and critical system contingencies, this will inflict higher probabilities of the occurrence of a severe dynamic power system blackout. This paper presents the proposed stochastic event tree technique use...

In order to estimate and evaluate the blackout consequence in distribution network, a comprehensive evaluation index system including seven indexes was built, in which the blackouts loss for both users and power companies are fully considered. A comprehensive evaluation model based on AHP and improved grey clustering decision model was provided to evaluate the blackout consequence of different ...