Archive for January, 2008

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Race to the top; because consumers

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The phrase race to the top was coined in response to “race to the bottom”, a phrase current in anti-globalization circles.

It is a process by which competition leads to the progressive improvement of goods and services provided to consumers. One example of the “race to the top” is the success of the computer industry in creating ever-faster and more powerful computers. The phrase may be used also in a more general sense of evolutionary trends gravitating towards the greatest common divisor.

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Roy’s identity; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Roy’s identity (named for French economist Rene Roy) is a major result in microeconomics having applications in consumer choice and the theory of the firm. The lemma relates the ordinary demand function to the derivatives of the indirect utility function.


Derivation of Roy’s identity

Roy’s identity reformulates Shephard’s lemma in order to get a Marshallian demand function for an individual and a good (<math>i</math>) from some indirect utility function.

The first step is to consider the trivial identity obtained by substituting the expenditure function for wealth or income (<math>m</math>)in the indirect utility function (<math>\psi\ (m, p)</math>, at a utility of <math>u</math>):

<math>\psi\ ( e(p, u), p) = u </math>

This says that the indirect utility function evaluated in such a way that minimizes the cost for achieving a certain utility given a set of prices (a vector <math>p</math>) is equal to that utility when evaluated at those prices.

Taking the partial derivative of both sides of this equation with respect to the price of a single good <math>p_i</math> (with the utility level held constant) gives:

<math>\frac{ \partial \psi\ [e(u,p),p]}{\partial m} \frac{\partial e(u,p)}{\partial p_i} + \frac{\partial \psi\ [e(u,p),p]}{\partial p_i} = 0</math>.

Rearranging gives the desired result:

<math>\frac{\partial e(u,p)}{\partial p_i}=-\frac{\frac{\partial \psi\ [e(u,p),p]}{\partial p_i}}{\frac{\partial \psi\ [e(u,p),p]}{\partial m}}=x_i(m,p)</math>


Application

This gives a method of deriving the Marshallian demand function of a good for some consumer from the indirect utility function of that consumer. It is also fundamental in deriving the Slutsky equation.


References

  • Roy, René (1947). “La Distribution du Revenu Entre Les Divers Biens,” Econometrica, 15, 205-225.

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Ten Chances; price

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Ten Chances is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting on July 15, 1975, this game is played for a car and two additional prizes – one worth between $10 and $90, and another worth between $120 and $980.


Gameplay

The contestant is given ten chances in which to guess the prices of the three prizes, beginning with the least expensive. They are shown three digits, two of which are in the price of the first prize. The contestant writes their guess on the first of ten cards. If they are correct, the price is revealed, and they move on to the next prize. If they are not, they must write another price on the second card, and so on until they are correct.

For the second prize, the contestant is shown four digits, three of which are in the correct price. Play continues as with the first prize until they correctly guess the price. Finally, the contestant is shown five digits, all of which are in the price of the car. Again, they must write down the correct price with whatever chances they have left.

If the contestant has used all of their ten chances and has not correctly written the price of the car, they win any prizes that they have correctly priced to that point.

An unwritten rule since the early 1980s is that the prices of all prizes end in 0, except in the rare case that 0 is not one of the provided choices, in which case the last number is always 5. Many contestants do not take this rule into account, even after seeing the first two correct prices. In addition, contestants often attempt to use the same digit more than once in the same price. A contestant attempting to do so is usually corrected and allowed to rewrite an acceptable price.

Ten Chances originally had a 10-second time limit for each guess. While the rule has not actually been enforced since the early 1980s, the game is one in which contestants often take a long time to consult with the audience, and host Bob Barker often chided contestants that they would lose a turn if they did not start writing.


History

Ten Chances was originally played for four-digit cars, and five digits were given, with one unused digit.


See also

  • The Price Is Right
  • List of The Price Is Right pricing games
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Apple Loops Utility; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Apple Loops Utility is a small companion utility to Soundtrack Pro, Garageband, Logic Express, and Logic Pro, all made by Apple Computer. It allows users to create loops of audio that can be time-stretched. Audio files can also be tagged with their publishing (Author, Comments, etc) and musical information (Key, Tempo, etc). Multiple files can be tagged at the same time, a process known as batch tagging. Apple Loops Utility can read both AIFF and WAV file formats, but it will convert the latter to AIFF when saved with tagging information.

The most recent version available without purchasing the aforementioned software is 1.3.1, available from Apple’s Developer Web site. Version 1.4, which is the first Universal Binary version of the software, is available with Logic Pro or Express 7.2. 1.4 allows multiple files to have multiple tags added to them. Version 1.4 also allows content merging to occur with Logic Audio Express. Only version 1.4 will work natively with Intel Macs. Version 1.3.1 will appear to allow edits to be made and file information to be saved, but none of the essential tagging information will be retained on an Intel Mac.


External links and references

  • Apple Loops SDK, including Apple Loops Utility (DMG)
  • Apple Loops Utility Manual (PDF)

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Large gauge transformation; same bundle

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Let’s

say we have a topological space M and a topological group G and a principal G-bundle over M. A global section of this principal bundle is a gauge fixing and the process of replacing one section by another is a gauge transformation. If a gauge transformation isn’t homotopic to the identity, we call it a large gauge transformation.

In theoretical physics, M is often a manifold and G is a Lie group.

See also large diffeomorphism, global anomaly

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Singleton bound; p w </math>

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The Singleton bound (named after RC Singleton) is a relatively crude bound on the size of a code <math>C</math> of length <math>n</math>, size <math>r</math> and minimum Hamming distance <math>d</math>.

Let <math>A_q(n,d)</math> denote the maximum possible size of a q-ary code with length <math>n</math> (a q-ary code is a code over the field of <math>q</math> elements). Let the minimum Hamming distance between two codewords be <math>d</math>, i.e. <math>\textrm D_H(w,w’)\ge d</math> for any distinct words <math>w</math> and <math>w’</math> in the code.

Then:

<math>A_q(n,d) \leq q^{n-d+1}</math>


Proof

First observe that the maximum size <math>r</math> of a q-ary code of length <math>n</math> is <math>q^n</math> since each component of a given codeword may take one of <math>q</math> different values independently of all other components.

Let <math>C</math> be a q-ary code. Then clearly all codewords <math>c \in C</math> are distinct. If we delete the first <math>d-1</math> components of each codeword, then each resulting codeword must still be distinct since all codewords have Hamming distance at least <math>d</math> from each other. Thus the size <math>r</math> of the code is unchanged.

The new code has length

<math>n-(d-1)=n-d+1</math>

and thus has maximum possible size

<math>q^{n-d+1}</math>

Hence the original code shares the same bound on its size:

<math>A_q(n,d) \leq q^{n-d+1}</math>


See also

  • Gilbert-Varshamov bound
  • Plotkin bound
  • Hamming bound
  • Johnson bound

Gozoku; identical

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Literally: Go tribe, where Go is a Japanese game identical to the Chinese “Wei Chi”. The moving forces behind Japanese politics in the 4th and 5th politics: a group of powerful and near-autonomous wealthy families, of which the most powerful was the house of the ruling emperor.

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Uncompress; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

uncompress is a shell command in Unix-like environments.

The uncompress utility will restore files to their original state after they have been compressed using the compress utility. If no files are specified, the standard input will be uncompressed to the standard output.

This utility supports the uncompressing of any files produced by compress. For files produced by compress on other systems, uncompress supports 9- to 16-bit compression.


Usage

The uncompress command options are specified like this:

uncompress switches files


Switches

uncompress has a number of command line options, or “switches”, that can modify the output. Some of these options are

  • -f: force. If given, uncompress will not prompt for overwriting files.
  • -v: verbose. List all files as they are being uncompressed


See also

  • compress
  • List of Unix programs

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Atkinson index; income

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The Atkinson index (also known as the Atkinson measure) is a measure of economic income inequality developed by Anthony Barnes Atkinson. The distinguishing feature of the Atkinson index is its ability to gauge movements in different segments of the income distribution.

The index can be turned into a normative measure by imposing a coefficient <math>\varepsilon</math> to weight incomes. Greater weight can be placed on changes in a given portion of the income distribution by choosing <math>\varepsilon</math>, the level of “inequality aversion”, appropriately. The Atkinson index becomes more sensitive to changes at the lower end of the income distribution as <math>\varepsilon</math> approaches 1. Conversely, as the level of inequality aversion falls (that is, as <math>\varepsilon</math> approaches 0) the Atkinson becomes more sensitive to changes in the upper end of the income distribution.

The Atkinson index is defined as:

<math>A=

\begin{cases}
1-\frac{1}{\mu}\left(\frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^{N}y_{i}^{1-\varepsilon}\right)^{1/(1-\varepsilon)}
& \mbox{for}\ \varepsilon \in \left[0,1\right) \\
1-\frac{1}{\mu}\left(\prod_{i=1}^{N}y_{i}\right)^{1/N}
& \mbox{for}\ \varepsilon=1,
\end{cases}
</math>

where <math>y_{i}</math> is individual income (i = 1, 2, …, N) and <math>\mu</math> is the mean income.

An entropy measure from Atkinson can be computed from the Theil index, T, (example without using <math>\varepsilon</math>)

<math>A = 1 - e^{-T}.\,</math>


References

  • Paul D. Allison, Measures of Inequality, American Sociological Review, 43 (December 1978), pp. 865-880, presents a technical discussion of the Atkinson measure’s properties.
  • Income Inequality, 1947-1998, from the United States Census Office.


See also

  • Theil index
  • Gini index

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Serre duality; bundle

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

In algebraic geometry, a branch of mathematics, Serre duality is a duality present on non-singular projective algebraic varieties V of dimension n (and in greater generality) for vector bundles and the more general coherent sheaves. It shows that a cohomology group Hi is the dual space of another one, Hn−i. If the variety is defined over the complex numbers, this is therefore quite distinct from Poincaré duality, which relates Hi to H2n−i because as a manifold V has dimension 2n.

The case of algebraic curves was already implicit in the Riemann-Roch theorem. For a curve C the coherent groups Hi vanish for i > 1; but H1 does enter implicitly. In fact, the basic relation of the theorem involves L(D) and L(K−D), where D is a divisor and K is a divisor of the canonical class. After Serre we recognise l(K−D) as the dimension of H1(D), where now D means the line bundle determined by the divisor D. That is, Serre duality in this case relates groups H0(D) and H1(KD*), and we are reading off dimensions (notation: K is the canonical line bundle, D* is the dual line bundle, and juxtaposition is the tensor product of line bundles).

In this formulation the theorem can be rearranged to read as a calculation of the Euler characteristic of a sheaf

h0(D) − h1(D),

in terms of the genus of the curve, which is

h1(C,OC),

and the degree of D. It is this expression that can be generalised to higher dimensions.

Serre duality of curves is therefore something very classical; but it has an interesting light to cast. For example, in Riemann surface theory, the deformation theory of complex structures is studied classically by means of quadratic differentials (namely sections of L(K2)). The deformation theory of Kunihiko Kodaira and D. C. Spencer identifies deformations via H1(T), where T is the tangent bundle sheaf K*. The duality shows why these approaches coincide.

The origin of the theory lies in Serre’s earlier work on several complex variables. In the generalisation of Alexander Grothendieck, Serre duality becomes a part of coherent duality in a much broader setting. While the role of K above in general Serre duality is played by the determinant line bundle of the cotangent bundle, when V is a manifold, in full generality K cannot merely be a single sheaf in the absence of some hypothesis of non-singularity on V. The formulation in full generality uses a derived category and Ext functors, to allow for the fact that K is now represented by a chain complex of sheaves. Nevertheless, the statement of the theorem is recognisably Serre’s.

Itäharju; Non-decreasing in

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Itäharju (Finnish; Österås in Swedish) is a district in the Itäharju-Varissuo ward of the city of Turku, in Finland. It is located to the east of the city centre, and consists mostly of industrial area and low-density residential area.

The current (as of 2004) population of Itäharju is 2,940, and it is decreasing at an annual rate of 0.78%. 16.19% of the district’s population are under 15 years old, while 15.54% are over 65. The district’s linguistic makeup is 93.20% Finnish, 5.07% Swedish, and 1.73% other.


See also

  • Districts of Turku
  • Districts of Turku by population

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Patronage concentration; an amount

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Patronage concentration is a term used in marketing. It is the share of an individual consumer’s expenditures in an industry that is spent at one company. It is the amount that a person spends at one company divided by the amount that person spends at all companies in the industry.

amount spent at one company
___________________________________
amount spent at all companies in the industry

The amount a person spends at one company is sometimes called the “relationship revenue”.

For example, I may spend $1000 per year at fast food restaurants. If I spend $100 at Wendy’s Restaurants, then Wendy’s has (100/1000=10%) ten percent of my patronage. As long as the amount spent at one firm is less than the total amount spent at all firms in the industry, the customer will be patronizing more than one firm, and patronage concentration will be less than 100%.

The goal of many firms is to increase the patronage concentration ratio of its customers to 100% (that is make it an exclusive relationship). Some firms set different patronage concentration targets for various classes of customers. This reflects the fact that some types of customers are more profitable than others.

This is very similar to market share. Whereas market share describes the percentage of all customers that patronize a company relative to the industry total, the patronage concentration ratio describes the percentage of one customer’s patronage going to a company, relative to that persons spend in the industry. That is, market share is the aggregate or macro version of the patronage concentration ratio. Or alternatively, patronage concentration is the micro equivalent of market share.


See also

  • loyalty business model
  • personalized marketing
  • relationship marketing

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Network Utility; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Network Utility is an application included with Mac OS X that provides a variety of computer network information. It is located at /Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app.


Services

  • Network interfaces
  • Netstat
  • AppleTalk
  • ping
  • Lookup
  • Traceroute
  • Whois
  • Finger
  • Port scan


Port scan

Network Utility uses the tools supplied in the unix directories for most of its functions, however for the port scan it uses a unix executable in its resources folder, stroke, found at /Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app/Contents/Resources/stroke.


Gallery

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Indirect injection; indirect

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

In an internal combustion engine, the term indirect injection refers to a fuel injection where fuel is not directly injected into the combustion chamber. Gasoline engines are usually equipped with indirect injection systems, wherein a fuel injector delivers the fuel at some point before the intake valve.

An indirect injection diesel engine delivers fuel into a chamber off the combustion chamber, called a prechamber, where combustion begins and then spreads into the main combustion chamber. The prechamber is carefully designed to ensure adequate mixing of the atomized fuel with the compression-heated air. This has the effect of slowing the rate of combustion, which tends to reduce audible noise. In addition, it softens the shock of combustion and produces lower stresses on the engine components. The addition of a prechamber, however, increases heat loss to the cooling system and thereby lowers engine efficiency.

In an indirect injection system the fuel/air mixing occurs with the air moving fast, and the fuel therefore need only move relatively slowly. This simplifies injector design and allows the use of less tightly toleranced designs which are simpler to manufacture and more reliable. Furthermore achieving the correct gas flow patterns in the swirl chamber is a relatively straightforward task. Direct injection, by contrast, uses slow-moving air and fast-moving fuel; both the design and manufacture of the injectors is more difficult, the optimisation of the in-cylinder gas flow is much more difficult than designing a swirl chamber, and there is much more integration between the design of the injector and that of the engine it is to be used in. It is for this reason that car diesel engines were almost all indirect injection until the ready availability of powerful CFD simulation systems made the adoption of direct injection practical.

Aside from the above advantages, early diesels often employed indirect injection in order to use simple, flat-top pistons, and made the positioning of the early, bulky diesel injectors easier.

Contents


Classification of indirect combustion chambers(prechambers)


Swirl chamber

It consists of a sperical chamber located in the cylinder head and separated from the engine cylinder by a tangential throat.About 50% of air enters this swirl chamber during compression stroke of the engine producing a swirl.The products after combustion returns through the same throat to the main cylinder at much higher velocity.So more heat loss to walls of the passage takes place.However this loss can be reduced by providing insulation.Such type of chambers finds application in those engines where fuel control and engine stability is more important than fuel economy.


Precombustion chamber

This chamber is located at the cylinder head and is connected to the engine cylinder by small holes.It occupies 40% of the total cylinder volume.During compressiion stroke air from the main cylinder enters the precombustion chamber.During this moment fuel is injected to the precombustion chamber and combustion takes place.Thus high pressure is released and the fuel droplets are forced through the small holes to the main cylinder resulting in very good mixing of the fuel and air.Thus the bulk of the combustion actually takes place in the main cylinder.This type of combustion chamber has multi-fuel capability because of the temperature of the prechamber


Air cell chamber

The air cell is a small cylindrical chamber with a hole in one end. It is mounted more or less coaxially with the injector, said axis being parallel to the piston crown, with the injector firing across a small cavity which is open to the cylinder into the hole in the end of the air cell. The air cell is mounted so as to minimise thermal contact with the mass of the head. A pintle injector with a narrow spray pattern is used. At TDC the majority of the charge mass is contained in the cavity and air cell.

When the injector fires the jet of fuel enters the air cell and ignites. This results in a jet of flame shooting back out of the air cell directly into the jet of fuel still issuing from the injector. The heat and turbulence give excellent fuel vaporisation and mixing properties. Also since the majority of the combustion takes place outside the air cell in the cavity, which communicates directly with the cylinder, there is less heat loss involved in transferring the burning charge into the cylinder.

Air cell injection can be considered as a sort of half way stage between fully indirect and fully direct injection, gaining some of the efficiency advantages of direct injection while retaining the simplicity and ease of development of indirect injection.


Advantages of indirect injection combustion chambers

  1. The injection pressure required is low
  2. Also the question of injection direction becomes less importance
  3. Indirect injection is much simpler to design and manufacture; much less engine and injector development is required and the injectors themselves are less tightly toleranced and more reliable.


Disadvantages

  1. Heat plugs are required for pre heating the chambers
  2. Specific fuel consumption is high because of heat loss to large exposed areas and pressure loss due to air motion through the throats
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Serre duality; bundle

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

In algebraic geometry, a branch of mathematics, Serre duality is a duality present on non-singular projective algebraic varieties V of dimension n (and in greater generality) for vector bundles and the more general coherent sheaves. It shows that a cohomology group Hi is the dual space of another one, Hn−i. If the variety is defined over the complex numbers, this is therefore quite distinct from Poincaré duality, which relates Hi to H2n−i because as a manifold V has dimension 2n.

The case of algebraic curves was already implicit in the Riemann-Roch theorem. For a curve C the coherent groups Hi vanish for i > 1; but H1 does enter implicitly. In fact, the basic relation of the theorem involves L(D) and L(K−D), where D is a divisor and K is a divisor of the canonical class. After Serre we recognise l(K−D) as the dimension of H1(D), where now D means the line bundle determined by the divisor D. That is, Serre duality in this case relates groups H0(D) and H1(KD*), and we are reading off dimensions (notation: K is the canonical line bundle, D* is the dual line bundle, and juxtaposition is the tensor product of line bundles).

In this formulation the theorem can be rearranged to read as a calculation of the Euler characteristic of a sheaf

h0(D) − h1(D),

in terms of the genus of the curve, which is

h1(C,OC),

and the degree of D. It is this expression that can be generalised to higher dimensions.

Serre duality of curves is therefore something very classical; but it has an interesting light to cast. For example, in Riemann surface theory, the deformation theory of complex structures is studied classically by means of quadratic differentials (namely sections of L(K2)). The deformation theory of Kunihiko Kodaira and D. C. Spencer identifies deformations via H1(T), where T is the tangent bundle sheaf K*. The duality shows why these approaches coincide.

The origin of the theory lies in Serre’s earlier work on several complex variables. In the generalisation of Alexander Grothendieck, Serre duality becomes a part of coherent duality in a much broader setting. While the role of K above in general Serre duality is played by the determinant line bundle of the cotangent bundle, when V is a manifold, in full generality K cannot merely be a single sheaf in the absence of some hypothesis of non-singularity on V. The formulation in full generality uses a derived category and Ext functors, to allow for the fact that K is now represented by a chain complex of sheaves. Nevertheless, the statement of the theorem is recognisably Serre’s.

Decision analyst; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008
For the company, see Decision Analyst (company)

Decision analysts are people who use formal methods, particularly Expected Utility Theory, to assist others in decision making.

Clay County Electric Cooperative; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Clay County Electric Cooperative is a non-profit rural electric utility cooperative headquartered in Corning, Arkansas. The cooperative serves customers in Clay County, Arkansas and Randolph County, Arkansas.

In addition to electric service, the cooperative also offers long distance telephone service.


External

links

  • Clay County Electric Cooperative

Tax wedge; consumers

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The tax wedge is the deviation from equilibrium price/quantity as a result of a taxation, which results in consumers paying more, and suppliers receiving less.

Following from the Law of Supply and Demand, as the price to consumers increases, and the price suppliers receive decreases, the quantity each wishes to trade will decrease. After a tax is introduced, a new equilibrium is reached where consumers pay more (P* → Pc), suppliers receive less (P* → Ps), and the quantity exchanged falls (Q* → Qt). The difference between <math>Pc</math> and <math>Ps</math> will be equivalent to the value of the tax.

While both consumers and suppliers pay some portion of the tax, the distribution depends on the structure of the demand and supply curves, respectively. As long-run supply curves tend to flatten over time, consumers tend to pay an increasingly larger portion of the tax.

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Xconfig; utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

xconfig is short for the 'xconfig' target for the Linux Makefile. It is a graphical Linux compilation utility, which uses Qt. The xconfig utility is invoked by running 'make xconfig' as root in the base Linux source directory.

Qt has only been used in Linux 2.6. Linux 2.4 uses a Tcl/Tk configuration interface. A [[GTK+]] interface is also available for Linux 2.6.

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Closeout Man; than prices.

Thursday, January 31st, 2008


Closeout Man was a staple on Big Lots commercials during the 1990s. A chubby superhero with the ability to fly, Closeout Man would purchase surplus goods for low prices, thus allowing great savings on the part of the consumers.

Closeout Man vanished around 2000, being replaced by Jerry Van Dyke. However, his many fans like to believe he is still out there, fighting for truth, justice, and discount prices.

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AirPort Admin Utility; indirect utility

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The AirPort Admin Utility is a utility that is built in to Mac OS X and available for download for Windows XP. The utility serves to allow the user to configure an AirPort Wi-Fi Base Stations to create a wireless network. The AirPort Admin Utility has been superseded by the simple and aptly named AirPort Utility. Older AirPort Graphite and AirPort Snow base stations must use the Admin Utility, whereas the first generation AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express can use either one, but the second generation AirPort Extreme works only with AirPort Utility.

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Welfarism; utility function

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Welfarism is a form of consequentialism. Like all forms of consequentialism, welfarism is based on the premise that actions, policies, and/or rules should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences. Welfarism is the view that the morally significant consequences are impacts on human welfare. There are many different understandings of human welfare, but the term “welfarism” is usually associated with the economic conception of welfare. Economists usually think of individual welfare in terms of utility functions. Social welfare can be conceived as an aggregation of individual utilities or utility functions. Welfarism can be contrasted to other consequentialist theories, such as classical utilitarianism, which takes utility among agents as directly accessible and measurable.

Welfarist views have been especially influential in the law and economics movement. Steven Shavell and Louis Kaplow have argued in an influential book, Fairness versus Welfare that welfare should be the exclusive criteria by which legal analysts evaluate legal policy choices.


Bibliography

Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Fairness versus Welfare (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2002) ISBN 0-674-00622-4..


See also

  • Consequentialism
  • Social welfare
  • Social welfare function
  • Welfare economics
  • Utilitarianism
  • Utility
  • Juvenile delinquency


External links

  • Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, Principles of Fairness versus Human Welfare: On the Evaluation of Legal Policy (Social Science Research Network, Working Paper, 2002)

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United Utilities; Expectation utilities

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

United Utilities (UU) () is a British utility company with its headquarters in Warrington which operates mainly in the North West England, with 9,000 employees. It serves over 20 million people around the UK and worldwide. Its shares are listed on the London Stock Exchange and it is a member of the FTSE 100 group of companies.

Its water business is regulated under the Water Industry Act 1991

Contents


History

United Utilities was created in 1985 by the merger of North West Water and Norweb. It sold it’s telecoms business, Your Communications in 2006 and Vertex in 2007.


Activities

United Utilities operates water, wastewater, electricity and gas networks. In north west England it is investing £3.5 billion between 2005-2010 to improve utility infrastructure and the environment.

Its customers include:
• Northern Gas Networks – for whom it operates and maintains the gas network in the north of England, serving 2.5 million customers.
• Southern Water – UU delivers water and wastewater schemes on behalf of Southern Water, serving their four million customers.
• Welsh Water – UU operates and maintains assets serving 1.2 million homes in Wales.
• Scottish Water – helps deliver a £1.1 billion capital investment programme.

Worldwide:
• Australia – provides water and wastewater services to 500,000 people in South Australia.
• Central Europe – operates water and wastewater networks for two million people in Bulgaria, Estonia and Poland.
• Philippines – partners Manila Water. Since 1997 the number of people with access to clean drinking water has jumped from 26% to 92%.


Financial information

In the year ended 31 March 2006 United Utilities made a profit before tax of £439.3 million on turnover of £2.387 billion.


External links

  • Official site
  • Yahoo profile

IBD; being identical to

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

IBD may refer to:

  • Inflammatory bowel disease
  • Investment Banking Division
  • Investor’s Business Daily
  • independent bicycle dealers
  • Identical By Descent (genetics)

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Robert Kegan; desires and beliefs;

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Robert Kegan is a developmental psychologist and the author of numerous books, including his most well-known work The Evolving Self (1982).

In The Evolving Self, Kegan presents a model of psychological development consisting of six “equilibrium stages”: the incorporative stage, the impulsive stage, the imperial stage, the interpersonal stage, the institutional stage, and the inter-individual stage. The object of each stage is the subject of the preceding stage.

The subject of the incorporative stage are reflexes, and it has no object. The subjects of the impulsive stage are the individual’s impulses and perceptions, and its objects are the reflexes. The subject of the imperial stage are the individual’s needs, interests, and desires, and its objects are the individual’s impulses and perceptions. The subject of the interpersonal stage are interpersonal relationships and mutuality, and its objects are the individual’s needs, interests, and desires. The subject of the institutional stage are the individual’s authorship, identity, and ideology, and its objects are
interpersonal relationships and mutuality. The subject of the inter-individual stage is “the interpenetrability of self-systems”, and its objects are the individual’s authorship, identity, and ideology.

Stage 0: Incorporative stage

  • Subject: reflexes
  • Object: nothing

Stage 1: Impulsive stage

  • Subject: impulses, perceptions
  • Object: reflexes

Stage 2: Imperial stage

  • Subject: needs, interests, desires
  • Object: impulsive, perceptions

Stage 3: Interpersonal stage

  • Subject: interpersonal relationships, mutuality
  • Object: needs, interests, desires

Stage 4: Institutional stage

  • Subject: authorship, identity, ideology
  • Object: interpersonal relationships, mutuality

Stage 5: Inter-individual stage

  • Subject: “the interpenetrability of self-systems”
  • Object: authorship, identity, ideology


Notable works

  • (with T. Wagner and L. Lahey) Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools , 2005
  • (with L. Lahey) How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation, 2000
  • In Over Our Heads: the Mental Demands of Modern Life, 1994
  • The Evolving Self, 1982


Ref

Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self. Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN 0674272315


External links

  • Dr. Kegan’s bio at Harvard
  • Slides on Kegan’s Development Model
  • Summary of The Evolving Self

Utility player (baseball); the utility

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

In baseball, a utility player is a player who can play several different positions.

In general, each major league baseball team has at least one player who can be described as a utility player. The most famous utility player is probably Pete Rose (though he was not described as such), because during his career, he played left field, right field, center field, third base, second base and finally, first base late in his career. Most professional teams have two types of utility players. There are “utility infielders”, who usually play all of the infield positions (plus occasionally catcher). Utility outfielders, or fourth outfielders, tend to play all three outfield positions as various times. Occasionally, there will be players who perform a combination of the two duties. Utility players tend to be players who come off of the bench, though this isn’t absolute. Often, players who don’t have high prospects to be a major league star will learn additional positions so they can look more attractive to major league clubs as bench talent.

José “The Utilityman” Oquendo is regarded as the most versatile utility player in the modern game, having played every position, including Pitcher.


See also

  • Ramon Santiago
  • Willie Bloomquist
  • Miguel Cairo
  • Chone Figgins
  • Rex Hudler
  • Aubrey Huff
  • Rob Mackowiak
  • Mark McLemore
  • Eli Marrero
  • Josh Phelps
  • Pete Rose
  • Honus Wagner 
Mark Derosa

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Single-valued function; utility function

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

A single-valued function is an emphatic term for a mathematical function in the usual sense. That is, each element of the function’s domain maps to a single, well-defined element of its range. This contrasts with a general binary relation, which can be viewed as being a multi-valued function.

Any function is a single-valued if it is continuously differentiable.

PithHelmet; utility

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

PithHelmet is an ad-blocking utility for the Apple Safari web browser.


History

PithHelmet began in January 2003 as one user’s utility to filter content in Safari and has since become a popular utility for other users of Apple’s web browser.

As of July 2007 PithHelmet’s most recent version is 2.7-78, a beta designed to work with the Safari 3 beta. The most recent official release is 2.6.7 from June 2006.


External link

  • PithHelmet