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"The Smart Grid has the potential to revolutionize electricity delivery systems, and the security of its infrastructure is a vital concern not only for cyber-security practitioners, engineers, policy makers, and utility executives, but also for the media and consumers. Smart Grid Security: An End-to-End View of Security in the New Electrical Grid explores the important techniques, challenges, and forces that will shape how we achieve a secure twenty-first century electric grid.Following an overview of the components of the Smart Grid, the book delves into the evolution of security standards and regulations and examines ways in which the Smart Grid might be regulated. The authors discuss the technical details about how metering technology is being implemented and the likely threats and vulnerabilities that utilities will face. They address the home area network (HAN) and examine distribution and transmission the foundation for the delivery of electricity, along with distributed generation, micro-grids, and operations.The book explores future concepts such as energy storage and the use of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs ) in addition to the concomitant risk for fraud and manipulation with stored energy. Consumer-related issues are discussed as they pertain to emerging ways of receiving and generating energy. The book examines dysfunctions ranging from inadvertent outages to cyber-attack and presents recommendations on how to respond to these incidents. It concludes with speculation of future cyber-security challenges and discusses new ways that the grid can be defended, such as better key management and protection.Written in a style rigorous enough for the practitioner yet accessible to a broad audience, this comprehensive volume covers a topic that is becoming more critical to industry and consumers everywhere"--

A conference paper on the impact of transnational corporations (TNC's) in Southern Africa. Paper presented at: Seminar on Southern African Responses to Imperialism, 22-24 April 1987, ; Transnational corporations (TNCs) are something of a paradox in the political economy of African countries. In the late 1960s TNCs were seen as a grave threat to national sovereignity and today, they are seen more as fellow travellers towards national development. The nationalisations of the 1960s were seen as 'an excellent weapon with which to attack a world economic system perceived to be operated by the rich, for the rich.'1 Today, Tanzania is imploring Lonrho to come back and run her tea estates, Zambia is privatising her manufacturing industries and Zimbabwe is doing good business with H.J. 2 Heinz. This strange turnabout is, it is alleged, largely due to necessary technological inputs that the TNCs have. This paper will argue that this position is based on a misunderstanding of the functioning of contemporary imperialism; and that if persued to its logical conclusion African countries cannot hope to develop. This paper is devided into three main parts. The first part will attempt to clear some conceptual issues relating to the changing face of contemporary capitalism. The second part will outline the major mechanisms through which TNCs commercialise technology in the Southern African region; and the third part will address some policy issues.

In examining the philosophy of Productive Welfare, this chapter will address three matters. First since this section of the book deals with comparative and international perspectives, the policy orientation of Productive Welfare is examined within a larger context, so that we might see where it stands in relation to both the conventional ideal of the progressive welfare state and to recent patterns of reform that are reshaping the conventional paradigm to varying degrees in almost all of the industrial democracies. Here a number of large-scale trends are summarized, which have been more thoroughly documented elsewhere (Gilbert 2002). Next, several assumptions in the philosophy of Productive Welfare are explored with an eye to clarifying issues raised concerning the value of work and unpaid labor. Finally, the chapter ends on a philosophical note that concerns the broader consequences of Productive Welfare for the relation between the state and market economy, and their normative implications for the character of modern social life.

The contemporary structure of scientific activity, including the publication of papers in academic journals, citation behaviour, the clustering of research into specialties and so on has been intensively studied over the last fifty years. A number of quantitative relationships between aspects of the system have been observed.This paper reports on a simulation designed to see whether it is possible to reproduce the form of these observed relationships using a small number of simple assumptions. The simulation succeeds in generating a specialty structure with 'areas' of science displaying growth and decline. It also reproduces Lotka's Law concerning the distribution of citations among authors.The simulation suggests that it is possible to generate many of the quantitative features of the present structure of science and that one way of looking at scientific activity is as a system in which scientific papers generate further papers, with authors (scientists) playing a necessary but incidental role. The theoretical implications of these suggestions are briefly explored.

In the early 1960s, the motivating theme of social services in the US welfare state was reduction of economic dependency. At that time services were highly selective, aimed mainly at poor people. Between 1960 & 1980 there was a drift toward universalism, as the welfare state expanded to serve an increasing number of Mc groups. This expansion was related to several social & demographic trends, & was accompanied by basic changes in the scope & purpose of social services. As the welfare state has moved toward universal entitlement to social services, a number of contradictions between the theory & practice of universalism in a capitalist society have surfaced. These contradictions lend a degree of support to the resurgence of selectivity the welfare state is currently experiencing. HA.

ABSTRACTA dramatic change in the hospital industry is the increasing emphasis on linking provider payment to quality performance metrics. This is one of several considerations leading hospitals to employ physicians. Yet, there is little evidence regarding whether physician employment as a form of hospital‐physician integration leads to better operational performance. Using data from 201 California hospitals that experienced a total of 405,766 eligible opportunities to conform to external performance metrics (conformance quality) for treating patients in the cardiovascular service area, we empirically evaluated the relationship between physician employment and conformance quality. We also evaluated whether the presence of core capabilities in the hospital's cardiovascular service area complements or substitutes for physician employment. Findings suggest that physician employment is not only positively associated with conformance quality, but also associated with more consistent conformance quality. Moreover, the presence of core capabilities in the service area substitutes for physician employment. Theoretical, managerial, and policy implications are discussed.

This study examines the extent to which individual's attitudes toward government responsibility for child care provisions are influenced by personal characteristics as well as the social contexts in which these attitudes are formed. The analysis draws on data from a random sample of 24, 240 respondents in 12 of the countries included in the European Social Survey (ESS) round 4 (2008-2009). The analytic framework focuses on individual-level factors related to self-interest, perceptions of the current care available and egalitarian ideology as well as the societal context reflected in the alternative institutional arrangements for social welfare represented by the countries clustered into different welfare state regimes. The findings indicate that among the individual level variables, although factors related to self interest were significant, egalitarian ideology had the relatively strongest impact on the respondents' level of support for government provision of child care. At the institutional level the introduction of welfare regimes increased the proportion of explained variance well beyond that accounted for by individual level factors. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.