Happiness and Utility brings together experts on utilitarianism to explore the concept of happiness within the utilitarian tradition, situating it in earlier eighteenth-century thinkers and working through some of its developments at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of philosophical and historical approaches to the study of the central idea of utilitarianism, the chapters provide a rich set of insights into a founding component of ethics and modern political and economic thought, as well as political and economic practice. In doing so, the chapters examine the multiple dimensions of utilitarianism and the contested interpretations of this standard for judgement in morality and public policy.
The Military Utility Assessment of Future Technologies (MUAFT) method was developed as a cost-efficientalternative to methods such as NATO's Disruptive Technology Assessment Games, to be used as a part of theSwedish Armed Forces' long-term capability development process. The question addressed in this study iswhether MUAFT can be considered to have validity in its context and thus if it has potential to be useful to othersmall to medium size states. The analysis was based on an operationalization of Clark's framework for scienceand technology intelligence analysis, combined with a military capability centric view of military utility. MUAFTreports from 2012 to 2018 were reviewed in terms of how they satisfy five key criteria. The study shows thatMUAFT provides utility, if used by a suitably composed group of experts, who are aware of the method's limitations.The limitations mainly originate from a lack of explicit support for assessing the impact of forces forchange, other than technological forces, on military capability development. The expert group serves as thesynthesizing bridge between technology forecasts and military utility assessments. Therefore, comprehensiveexpertise is needed in various military technology specialisations, in the sponsor's military capabilities and insubjects necessary to master in order to assess other influential societal forces for change. ; Värdering av militär nytta
36 pp. Appendices, charts, table. ; This Integrated Resource Plan presents a long-term forecast of the lowest reasonable cost combination of resources necessary to meet the needs of Springfield Utility Board's (SUB) customers. The Plan evaluates SUB's electric resource portfolio based on a very dynamic power-supply marketplace and integrates these options with forecasted energy demands of customers expected to be served by SUB over the next several years. The purpose is aimed at finding the resource portfolio with the best combination of cost and risk for customers. It provides balance between the least expensive power-supply portfolio and the most desirable way to meet all customers' energy needs. Both supply- and demand-side resources were evaluated, including a review of the potential benefits, costs, and risks, along with political and environmental considerations. The Plan expands the focus from specific electric rates to including information about monthly energy bills and customer comfort.
Naturally, the human decision behavior is normally based on selfishness, but it may be different according to their desire such as considering on the benefits. On the economics field called utility which has an effect on the decision of the ones to buy goods or services that means human will naturally decide to depend on the most valued among all things that exist. In the same way, political decision behavior such as an observer, participator, partner etc… are usually under the influences of political utilities that are in stimulation of estimation and acceptation on value from political activities, which can be described in four theories; deterministic, exchange, psychology and consciously rational. Each theory explains political values differently, but they are the same in focusing on political behavior. Thus, political decision of any political actor must be based on their supreme values hoping to serve, therefore, general assumptions could be concluded that political utilities influence political behavior.
An alphabet soup of government agencies like FERC, EPA, EIA, PHMSA, MSHA and the ISOs and RTOs collect and publish terabytes of data about the US energy system. It includes operating costs and fuel consumption, hourly power output and GHG emissions, and the age and length of natural gas pipelines, the price of electricity every 5 minutes at thousands of nodes in the grid, coal production numbers and much much more. In theory all this data is public and freely available, but in practice it takes a lot of wrangling to make it usable for analysis. The result: it's packaged up by one or two platform monopolies that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for easy access, excluding most non-corporate users. But for anyone interested in the ongoing transformation of our energy system and its climate impacts, this data is a treasure trove worth excavating. Catalyst Cooperative's Public Utility Data Liberation (PUDL) Project has been working for the last 2.5 years to liberate this data and make it freely accessible to activists, data journalists, and researchers working on US climate and energy policy. This talk takes a look at what the data is, where it comes from, why it's interesting, how we're processing it and making it available, and some of the challenges we're facing and opportunities we see ahead.
ABSTRACT The issue. Nineteenth century utilitarian philosophers considered happiness as the highest good ('utility' in their words) and claimed political priority for attempts to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In reaction, many of their contemporaries cried out that happiness is not good at all, because it turns people into 'contented cows' and undermines social bonds. Modern psychologists, however, tend to suggest positive effects: sharper awareness more activity, better social functioning and better health. Data. No empirical investigations have yet focussed on consequences of happiness. Nevertheless, indications can be found in various studies covering other matters. This paper gathers the available data. These data do not allow definite conclusions, but do suggest several small yet noteworthy effects. Enjoyment of life seems to broaden perception, to encourage active involvement and thereby to foster political participation. It facilitates social contacts: in particular contacts with spouse and children. Further happiness buffers stress, thereby preserving health and lengthening life somewhat. There is no evidence of harmful effects. It is concluded that society is more likely to flourish with happy citizens than with unhappy ones.
Uncorrected refractive error (URE) is the leading cause of vision impairment globally. URE, particularly uncorrected presbyopia (resulting in near vision impairment), has been a poorly recognised, poorly researched and a poorly prioritised area. This thesis explores the impact and cost-effectiveness of URE correction. In the health sector, cost-utility analysis is a form of cost-effectiveness evaluation that considers a person's Quality of Life (QoL) outcomes. These types of evaluations assist governmental resource allocation decisions. A utility value is an indirect measure of a person's QoL. Utilities have been derived for a variety of ocular and medical conditions but not previously reported for URE. Cross-sectional research involving 406 refractive error participants was conducted at a university based eye clinic in Sydney. Eye examinations and utility interviews and questionnaires were administered on all participants. Utilities were elicited using the Time-Trade-Off (TTO), Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and AQol-7D methods. URE was found to be associated with measurable reductions in QoL using utility analysis. Unaided visual acuity (VA) was found to be a strong predictor of utility with little influence of socio-demographic and lifestyle factors. This suggests results may be generalised to other populations based on the level of VA loss. Reductions were similar irrespective of whether near or distance vision was impaired but worse when both aspects of vision were affected. This thesis therefore argues for the inclusion of near vision impairment to current global definitions of vision impairment. Until now, cataract surgery was believed to be one of the most cost-effective interventions globally. Data estimates from this study suggest that intervention aimed at alleviating URE is 40 times more cost-effective than cataract surgery. Given that URE is the leading cause of vision impairment, the utility values reported here will assist and improve current vision and eye health care prioritisation. These measures ...
Vilfredo Pareto's contribution to modem economic theory is today universally recognized, but to my mind his particular contribution to utility theory is not sufficiently understood. In the following paragraphs I intend to give an assessment and evaluation of Paretian thought on this important topic. It seems that Pareto' s contribution to utility theory originated as a reaction to the attitude of Walras and the Austrian School of.Economists to this same theory. The latter thought that utility theory, as they understood it, was a sort of ultimate truth, a key to all the secrets of pure economics. Consequently they placed such an emphasis on it that they induced Pareto and the Paretians to do their best to demolish it. Such was their eagerness that some even held that this departure constituted Pareto's main contribution to economic theory. ; N/A
We propose that outcome utility and process utility can be distinguished and empirically measured. People gain procedural utility from participating in the political decision-making process itself, irrespective of the outcome. Nationals enjoy both outcome and process utility, while foreigners are excluded from political decision-making and therefore cannot enjoy the corresponding procedural utility. Utility is measured by individuals' reported subjective well-being or happiness. We find that participation rights provide more procedural utility in terms of a feeling of self-determination and influence than actual participation.
Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs) are charged with regulating a public utility's rates at levels that serve the public's interest while allowing the utility's investors to earn a rate commensurate with that expected by businesses facing similar risks. Although the process of adjusting rates for risk is a staple of modern finance, we know surprisingly little about how well accomplish their regulatory mandate when judged against the benchmarks of financial economics. This article analyzes a dozen years' worth of gas and electric rate-setting decisions from PUCs in the United States and Canada, demonstrating empirically that allowed returns on equity (ROE) diverge significantly and systematically from the predictions of accepted asset pricing methodologies in finance. Our analysis suggests that current regulatory practice more plausibly reflects an amalgam of other non-finance desiderata, including political goals, incentive provision, and regulatory capture. For example, elected PUCs award significantly lower ROEs than appointed ones. We nevertheless conjecture that the divergence of observed regulatory behavior from asset-pricing fundamentals may be due (in part) to a lack of financial valuation expertise among regulators. To test this conjecture, we study a unique field experiment that exposed commissioners and their staffs to immersion training in finance. We find evidence that treated PUCs began to issue ROE rulings that were (moderately) more aligned with standard asset pricing theory than those of untreated placebo groups. Our results suggest that it is possible to train non-expert legal and regulatory decision-makers to exhibit greater fidelity to principles of financial economics.
People not only obtain utility from actual outcomes but also from the conditions which lead to these outcomes. Procedural utility and outcome utility and outcome utility can be distinguished and empirically measured. People gain procedural utility from participating in the political decision-making process itself, irrespective of the outcome. Nationals enjoy both outcome and process utility, while foreigners are excluded from political decision-making and therefore cannot enjoy the corresponding procedural utility. Utility is measured by individuals' reported subjective well-being. We find that participation rights provide more procedural utility in terms of a feeling of self-determination and influence than actual participation.
Report of the Texas State Auditor's Office related to evaluating the Office of Public Utility Counsel's (Office) performance measures to determine the accuracy of the calculations and whether the measures accurately depict the impact of the office, including estimation of savings to residential and small commercial consumers directly attributable to office participation in proceedings.
The utility network cadastre in Serbia is the main register of utility lines and the rights to them. The Law on State Survey and Cadastre states the necessity for implementing a unified information system of both a real estate and utility network cadastre, but this has not been achieved in practice. The reasons for such a unified information system are to ensure easier maintenance of the rights of both the utilities and properties located above or below them, to ensure more efficient procedures for obtaining the consent for placement, repair, or removal of the utility line, to prevent procedures being executed based on outdated data, to build an information system as the law prescribes, and to facilitate the business processes in the Serbian geodetic authority, since it is responsible for both registers. Therefore, an already-developed LADM (Land Administration Domain Model)-based country profile for Serbia should be extended to include information from the utility network cadastre. An analysis of Serbian legislation showed the necessity of extending the class set of the utility network cadastre by further specialization of the LADM LA_LegalSpaceUtilityNetwork class. Furthermore, such a system will support the maintenance of utility network data. In practice, when there is a change made on utility lines by the right holders, it is necessary to implement the change in the register. In many situations, this is not done, and the actual state does not correspond to the one in the register. Usually, modern technologies, such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) and LIDAR, are used for data acquisition in order to provide an update of the utility network data. Since these technologies produce 3D data, we analyzed how to link that data to the traditional 2D spatial paradigm.
To optimize resource usage in communication, various algorithms have been proposed to enhance efficiency in data, energy, and throughput. Here we propose a data utility cognitive green video streaming strategy with novel streaming-chunk scheduling algorithm to balance data efficiency and energy efficiency. We focused on maximizing the ratio of data utility to electricity. Simulation study results showed that our proposed strategy could reduce 10~70% data waste while consuming almost the same amount of energy compared to the latest and the most efficient solution considering both data and energy. In addition, it increased the ratio of data utility to electricity. Since our strategy uses simple algorithm with a divide and conquer approach avoiding too many multiplication operators, it requires only 14 percent of calculation time compared to the currently available best strategy. ; This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning(NRF-2014R1A1A1003562), Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion(IITP) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIP) (No.B0190-15- 2017, Resilient/Fault-Tolerant Autonomic Networking Based on Physicality, Relationship and Service Semantic of IoT Devices) and the MSIP(Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning), Korea, under the ITRC(Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2015-R0992- 15-1023) supervised by the IITP(Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion). ; OAIID:RECH_ACHV_DSTSH_NO:A201620393 ; RECH_ACHV_FG:RR00200003 ; ADJUST_YN: ; EMP_ID:A001118 ; CITE_RATE: ; DEPT_NM:컴퓨터공학부 ; EMAIL:ckim@snu.ac.kr ; SCOPUS_YN: ; CONFIRM:Y
Sri Lanka's economy is in a critical juncture and it is now in a stage transition to middle income economy. Still there are so many infrastructure facilities that have to be developed not only in villages but also in cities. Due to the lack of infrastructure facilities there are so many physical civic issues still prevail in the society. Most importantly people don't have a proper mechanism to report these physical civic issues to the relevant authorities to get those issues fixed as the mechanism which is prevailing is outdated. Therefore there should be a proper mechanism to report the civic issues in a city or a village and monitor the solution process after directing the issue to the relevant authority. It makes the lives of the citizens much comfortable and happier. This proposed system will be a novel solution for the outdated reporting methods. A survey was done to gather the requirements for the system. This proposed solution will encourage the citizens to perform their civic duty in a more responsible manner. When the system is implemented the members of the local government can't wait as unseen. They have to take actions for the reported issues as the entire country is in touch about the issues.
