Green revolution 2.0: a sustainable energy path

This repository item contains a single issue of Sustainable Development Insights, a series of short policy essays that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The series seeks to promote a broad interdisciplinary dialogue on how to accelerate sustainable development at all levels.The Green Revolution in agriculture greatly increased crop yields and averted mass starvation, but it also turned small farms into factory farms that concentrated production in a few locations and reduced the diversity of crops. In this paper, Professor Nalin Kulatilaka, Co-Director of BU’s Clean Energy & Environmental Sustainability Initiative, calls for a Green Energy Revolution that decentralizes energy supplies through a smart electricity network. He argues that such a revolution could provide for a diversity of energy sources located closer to users, which in turn could shift consumption patterns, reduce losses and decrease overall energy demand. He concludes that shifting to such a system “will adopt clean energy technologies while fostering new businesses, creating new jobs and ultimately empowering society to reach new heights in energy conservation and sustainability“

The use of extra-galactic star formation tracers on star forming regions in the Milky Way

We studied three groups of star forming clouds in the Milky Way: 5 clouds from Spitzer c2d Legacy survey, 10 clouds from Gould Belt survey, and 32 massive dense clumps. We determined the total diffuse 24[Greek letter mu] emission for each cloud and calculated the corresponding SFR using an extragalactic relation. Then the resulting SFRs were compared with SFRs calculated using the method of counting number of YSOs for c2d and Gould Belt clouds and using total infrared luminosity for massive dense clumps. The comparison shows quite a good correlation for the massive dense clumps, which are high-mass star forming regions, with the average ratio of SFR(L_IR)/SFR(25[Greek letter mu]) = 0.896+/-0.663. The result for low-mass star forming clouds (c2d and Gould Belt) shows very little to no correlation between L_24[Greek letter mu] and SFR(YSO count). Comparing 24[Greek letter mu] images with extinction maps shows that a significant portion of 24[Greek letter mu] emission does not come from star-forming regions in the cloud.Astronom

Testing 24 micron and Infrared Luminosity as Star Formation Tracers for Galactic Star Forming Regions

We have tested some relations for star formation rates used in extra-galactic studies for regions within the Galaxy. In nearby molecular clouds, where the IMF is not fully-sampled, the dust emission at 24 micron greatly underestimates star formation rates (by a factor of 100 on average) when compared to star formation rates determined from counting YSOs. The total infrared emission does no better. In contrast, the total far-infrared method agrees within a factor of 2 on average with star formation rates based on radio continuum emission for massive, dense clumps that are forming enough massive stars to have the total infrared luminosity exceed 10^4.5 Lsun. The total infrared and 24 micron also agree well with each other for both nearby, low-mass star forming regions and the massive, dense clumps regions

Changing users' security behaviour towards security questions: A game based learning approach

Fallback authentication is used to retrieve forgotten passwords. Security questions are one of the main techniques used to conduct fallback authentication. In this paper, we propose a serious game design that uses system-generated security questions with the aim of improving the usability of fallback authentication. For this purpose, we adopted the popular picture-based "4 Pics 1 word" mobile game. This game was selected because of its use of pictures and cues, which previous psychology research found to be crucial to aid memorability. This game asks users to pick the word that relates to the given pictures. We then customized this game by adding features which help maximize the following memory retrieval skills: (a) verbal cues - by providing hints with verbal descriptions, (b) spatial cues - by maintaining the same order of pictures, (c) graphical cues - by showing 4 images for each challenge, (d) interactivity/engaging nature of the game.Comment: 6, Military Communications and Information Systems Conference (MilCIS), 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1707.0807