The future of the US energy infrastructure is a major and urgent challenge for our society. This monograph was stimulated by a report of the National Academies' Committee on America's Energy Future, America's Energy Future: Technology and Transformation, Summary Edition, 2009. The report pointed out the critical but poorly understood and little explored role of societal considerations in determining the fate of national energy policies and programs. In our efforts to respond to those concerns, we have examined the thesis that the three major dimensions of the energy challenge—technology, economics, and societal—are overlapping, interactive, and inseparable; therefore, they can be understood only when considered simultaneously and discussed in terms of their interactions. Correspondingly, this monograph describes energy technologies in the context of their economic and societal contexts, energy economics in their technological and societal contexts, and the societal aspects of energy in their technological and economic contexts. The monograph then identifies social science–driven research opportunities pertaining to America’s energy challenge, with the hope that the proposed research will help not only overcome the societal barriers identified by the National Academies' report, but also harness societal forces in developing a rational energy future.

For multi-user PDF licensing, please contact customer service. Energy touches our lives in countless ways and its costs are felt when we fill up at the gas pump, pay our home heating bills, and keep businesses both large and small running. There are long-term costs as well: to the environment, as natural resources are depleted and pollution contributes to global climate change, and to national security and independence, as many of the world's current energy sources are increasingly concentrated in geopolitically unstable regions. The country's challenge is to develop an energy portfolio that addresses these concerns while still providing sufficient, affordable energy reserves for the nation. The United States has enormous resources to put behind solutions to this energy challenge; the dilemma is to identify which solutions are the right ones. Before deciding which energy technologies to develop, and on what timeline, we need to understand them better. America's Energy Future analyzes the potential of a wide range of technologies for generation, distribution, and conservation of energy. This book considers technologies to increase energy efficiency, coal-fired power generation, nuclear power, renewable energy, oil and natural gas, and alternative transportation fuels. It offers a detailed assessment of the associated impacts and projected costs of implementing each technology and categorizes them into three time frames for implementation.

Remote viewing is the mental ability to perceive and describe places, persons, or events at distant locations in the past, present, and future. This book describes the science and theory of the remote-viewing phenomenon. The reality of the remote-viewing phenomenon is not in dispute among a large body of respected researchers ¿ both inside and outside of academia ¿ who have published an extensive collection of high-quality investigations over the past few decades. But profound mysteries remain. This volume breaks new ground by resolving some of remote-viewing¿s greatest enigmas. In these pages, new research and new theories explain why remote viewing works, and why it is scientifically possible. These investigations utilize remote-viewing methods that are derivative of those used for decades in well-documented U.S. government funded psi research sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.). Filled with descriptions and analyses of highly original experiments, here is an investigation into the fascinating characteristics of time and physical reality using remote viewing as a tool of exploration, offering evidence that the past, present, and future truly exist simultaneously. The idea of differing future and past time lines is not just science fiction.

To address the lack of information about American’s perceived and actual knowledge related to energy, RTI researchers measured three concepts: perceived understanding of energy, demonstrated energy knowledge, and the ability to interpret an energy bill. Results suggest that public understanding of energy is multifaceted, and perceived understanding is not directly equivalent to actual understanding in many cases. Results of this survey provide insight into individual and household energy consumption behavior, which has implications for future policy and intervention.

Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures presents works written by eminent international experts from a variety of disciplines including architecture, engineering and related fields. Due to the ever-increasing focus on sustainable technologies, alternative energy sources, and global social and urban issues, interest in the energy systems for cities of the future has grown in a wealth of disciplines. Some of the special features of this book include new findings on the city of the future from the macro to the micro level. These range from urban sustainability to indoor urbanism, and from strategies for cities and global climate change to material properties. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers active in architecture, engineering, the social and computational sciences, building physics and related fields.

This book was written to support community involvement in the design process, to help prevent negative outcomes that can result from a top-down design approach. The combination of community involvement and design is, at least in literature, not very extensive. Although much has been written about stakeholder involvement, this is often not directly related to design processes, which – most importantly – deprives community members of the opportunity to design their desired future themselves. The Design Charrette: Ways to Envision Sustainable Futures provides a theoretical foundation establishing the benefits of organizing a design charrette for community-based planning, supported by many practical examples. The book includes sections on collaborative learning, practical guidance, theory and case studies in many different contexts: long and short charrettes, urban and rural subjects, and Dutch, Chinese, Australian, Indian and European examples. Part I: General Theory offers a detailed overview of the charrette process, a chapter on innovations in organizational and community learning and a chapter on shifting paradigms in the design charrette. Part II presents a number of case studies, including the INternational Conference on Renewable Energy Approaches for the Spatial Environment (INCREASE); charrettes accomplished in two days in the communities of Sea Lake and Bendigo in Australia; a chapter on lessons for the future, describing rural participatory design in Rajasthan, India; a description of learning by practice in a high-pressure student atelier; a chapter entitled Design Charrettes for Sustainable Building in China and more. The Design Charrette challenges the conventional wisdom that good design by itself will bring about the benefits the designer envisions. By demonstrating and analyzing the effectiveness of design charrettes in personal development and learning, and as a way to share desired future pathways, the book benefits everyone who may be leading, considering or participating in a design charrette.

Kagawa Toyohiko was one of the best-known evangelists and social reformers of the twentieth century. Founder of several religious, educational, social welfare, medical, financial, labor, and agricultural cooperatives, he was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1947 and 1948), and four times for the Nobel Peace Prize (1954, 1955, 1956, and 1960). Appealing to the masses who had little knowledge of Christianity, Kagawa believed that a positive interpretation of nature was a key missiological issue in Japan. He reasoned that a faith, which is rooted in the "downward movement" of Christ's incarnation, must support the scientific quest and meditate on the purpose or "upward movement" implicit in scientific findings. Through an anti-reductionist methodological pluralism that strives to "sees all things whole," this "scientific mystic" employed a wide range of Japanese and Western cultural resources to assert a complementary role for science and religion in modern society.

This Textbook will give the reader a detailed understanding of the use of 3D echo covering a wide range of topics; from the evolution of RT3D echo to the role of RT3D echo in drug trials, including chapters on the Principles of Transthoracic and Transesophageal Real-time 3D echocardiography. Other books in this area are more varied, less specific.