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"Date originated 06/05/79; date updated 07/21/80." ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Description based on print resource; title from title page.

Political uncertainties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) continue to affect the short term economic prospects in the region, while major developments in the global economy over the past six months have put the region on a two-track growth path for 2012. These developments include a significant rise in crude oil prices on fears of oil supply disruptions and weak economic activity in the Eurozone. Economic growth of MENA's oil exporting countries will be strong as it rebounds from the average of 3.4 percent in 2011 to 5.4 percent in 2012. Overall growth in the region is expected to be 4.8 percent in 2012, surpassing the 3 percent growth achieved in 2011. Improvement in the growth prospects of oil exporters is due to strength in oil markets. The fiscal situation is expected to remain tenuous for oil importing countries, especially those going through transitions. Overall, inflation is expected to remain subdued in 2012, with the notable exceptions of Iran and Egypt. Subsidies are currently dampening currently dampening the effects of increased global food and energy prices in many MENA countries.

A brochure describing the benefits of using solar electricity in your home.

This project investigated the landscape of motivations, strategies, and goals of informal ocean science centers in Orange County, Ca. The projected is situated within a larger context of expectations and definitions of environmental education, and the knowledge-to-action pathway, framed by education and social movement mobilization theories. The objective was to understand how ocean education is put into action on-the-ground across the county, and how cohesive the expectations for outcomes are within the environmental education for sustainability framework. Director or equivalent level employees of five centers were interviewed. While the centers’ missions vary, they all hope for ultimately the same things, employ similar strategies, and programs address similar issues. Responses indicate, first, that integration with formal schooling while a factor in content creation helps bolster the efforts of environmental education but also highlights a need to attend to both formal and informal structures for broader social and environmental change. Second, emotional connection is considered a critical element to move visitors to action. Third, the center-based informal ocean educators serve or intend to serve as change incubators for improved knowledge formation, delivery, and training.

Typically, a model of the energy use of a building is created using the building's characteristics and climate information for its location. However, models of existing homes can be created using monitored energy and climactic data in a process called inverse modeling. Such a technique has potential for those seeking to evaluate the savings a home before and after a retrofit (Meier, Busch, & Conner, 1988).Several programs use an inverse modeling technique to model a home's energy use based on total home energy use, heating and cooling energy use, and indoor/outdoor temperature data from a home (Kissock, Haberl, & Claridge, 2003). For example PRISM, the PRInceton Scorekeeping Method, was used widely in the 1980s and 90s to evaluate the performance of residential energy efficiency improvements (Fels, 1986). In 2006, researchers from Building America evaluated several homes using a least-squares regression technique on monitored data from these homes. The researchers compared the performance of low-energy homes working towards the Building America goal of 70% whole-house efficiency to homes built to minimum code requirements. The 2006 study found a correlation between the efficiency of a home to the performance reported by the least-squares regression, but asserted that more analysis into the method was needed in order to ascertain its accuracy, especially regarding floor type, climate, and house size (Chasar, et al., 2006).This paper seeks to evaluate the accuracy of the regression technique used in 2006 by using the same least-squares regression analysis on data created from hourly energy simulation software. Synthetic data allows researchers to cheaply and quickly obtain more data for analysis and to isolate the effects of single characteristics on a home's performance in a regression analysis model.

In order to meet whole-house energy savings targets beyond 50% in residential buildings, it will be essential that new technologies and systems approaches be developed to address miscellaneous electric loads (MELs). These MELs are comprised of the small and diverse collection of energy-consuming devices found in homes, including what are commonly known as plug loads (televisions, stereos, microwaves), along with all hard-wired loads that do not fit into other major end-use categories (doorbells, security systems, garage door openers). MELs present special challenges because their purchase and operation are largely under the control of the occupants. If no steps are taken to address MELs, they can constitute 40-50% of the remaining source energy use in homes that achieve 60-70% whole-house energy savings, and this percentage is likely to increase in the future as home electronics become even more sophisticated and their use becomes more widespread. Building America (BA), a U.S. Department of Energy research program that targets 50% energy savings by 2015 and 90% savings by 2025, has begun to identify and develop advanced solutions that can reduce MELs.

Tables. ; Includes bibliographical references and index. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Since 1994, most of the major steel industries in Taiwan have installed portal monitor to detect the abnormal radiation in metal scrap feed. As a result, the discovery of NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) has increased in recent years. In order to save the natural resources and promote radiation protection, an experimental melting process for the NORM contaminated steel scraps was carried out by the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) Taiwan, ROC. The experimental melting process has a pretreatment step that includes a series of cutting and removal of scales, sludge, as well as combustible and volatile materials on/in the steel scraps. After pretreatment the surface of the steel scraps are relatively clean. Then the scraps are melted by a pilot-type induction furnace. This experiment finally produced seven ingots with a total weight of 2,849 kg and 96.8% recovery. All of the surface dose rates are of the background values. The activity concentrations of these ingots are also below the regulatory criteria. Thus, these NORM-bearing steel scraps are ready for recycling. This study has been granted by the regulatory authority.

COBRA, in general, performs a thermal-hydraulic analysis of an actual pin bundle by subdividing the bundle cross-section into coolant subchannels, pin sectors, duct wall sectors. Its calculation includes heat convected axially upward through coolant mass flow, heat flow between pin sectors and adjoining subchannels, and heat and mass flow between coolant subchannels. COBRA-3M is a version of COBRA built for LMFBR applications, that includes a sophisticated thermal model of fuel pins and duct wall. COBRA-3M that can explicitly model a wider variety of pin bundle configurations than 3M would allow and includes significant improvements to its thermal modeling. COBRA-PI is currently being used for thermal-hydraulic analysis of hypothetical LMFBR accident transients in both power and flow. Pin bundles currently being analyzed explicitly range from 7 to 37 pins of axial lengths ranging from approx. 0.3-2.0 meters.

In view of the enormous number of base pair replications per annum in hemopoietic stem cells with the likelihood of coding errors, the rarity of the leukemogenic event at the cellular level after high doses of radiation, the infrequent occurrence of radiation events in cells at low-level exposure (large fraction of cells uninvolved), biological protective mechanisms and the realization that exposure of human populations to radiation from nuclear power plants is a very small fraction of natural radioactivity and will for the foreseeable future remain small and that populations exposed to high natural background radiation show no detectable harmful effects, it is concluded that either there is no effect, or for statistical reasons one cannot detect an effect.