Anticipating Alternative National and Regional Futures in Energy Efficiency

Thirty-five stakeholder representatives and six observers from thirty organizations, interested in anticipating the adoption of energy efficiency for the Pacific Northwest, identified and described one hundred and seventy-eight national and regional trends extending to the year 2015 impacting energy efficiency, and proposed more than ninety actions for addressing these trends at the regional level. The representatives were engaged in a collaborative action planning workshop that was facilitated with the CogniScope methodology founded in the systems sciences. Convergence was achieved on eight highly influential actions as the highest priority.     

Mood as a Result of Temperament Profile: Predictions from the Regulative Theory of Temperament

The paper examines the relationship between three dimensions of mood and temperament traits according to the Regulative Theory of Temperament (RTT). The theory emphasises the role of temperament in meeting environmental requirements and implies that temperamental traits influence mood. The results showed that subjective level of energy was linked most strongly to activity (undertaking behaviours providing intense stimuli). It is questioned whether energy should be considered as a result or a cause of high activity. The best predictor of tense arousal and hedonic tone proved to be emotional reactivity. The former mood dimension was positively related to emotional reactivity, whereas the latter was negatively linked to this trait. The results are consistent with previous investigations on neuroticism and extraversion and widen the knowledge on temperamental predictors of mood by showing associations between briskness and all three mood dimensions. Moreover, the results showed that advantageous mood profile was associated with advantageous temperamental structure which corroborates the relevance of RTT.     

Joint consideration of energy expenditure,air quality,and safety by cyclists

Public health benefits are an important motivator and justification for urban cycling promotion. The health impacts of cycling are typically evaluated using three main effect pathways: physical activity (exercise), air pollution exposure, and safety (crashes). Effects of safety on cycling behaviour have been investigated, but little is known about how energy expenditure and air quality concerns influence cycling decisions. Understanding cyclist perceptions and preferences is important for planning and designing sustainable and healthy transportation networks. As such, research providing insights into the heterogeneity of these concerns is needed to inform models of behavioural change with evolving vehicles, technology, and infrastructure. The objective of this paper is to investigate the joint consideration of energy expenditure, air quality, and safety concerns by cyclists, and their relationships with cycling frequency. A structural equation model is developed based on data from a survey of 625 intercepted real-world cyclists. Air quality and energy expenditure were considered in routing decisions by 51% and 73% of the cyclists, respectively. Model results show that traffic safety and air pollution risks are perceived differently by cyclists, which has implications for modeling urban cycling behaviour in the context of evolving motor vehicle fleets. Safety concerns were associated with less frequent cycling, but not air quality concerns. Consideration of energy expenditure varies significantly among individuals and trip types, which will emerge with different preferences related to hills, stops, speeds, and electric-assistance. Energy and air quality concerns were significantly associated, suggesting health-conscious cyclists who tended to be older, have higher educational attainment, be more physically active, and cycle more recreationally. Utilitarian and recreational cycling trips had different relationships with health-related considerations and with weekly physical activity.     

The trichotomous achievement goal model and intrinsic motivation: a sequential mediational analysis

This experiment was designed to extend the research by Elliot and Harackiewicz (1996) on the trichotomous achievement goal model in several important ways and to more thoroughly document the processes through which the goals in the trichotomous model influence intrinsic motivation. Results indicated that performance-avoidance goals undermined intrinsic motivation relative to performance-approach and mastery goals; the latter goals evidenced the same intrinsic motivation. These results were obtained using highly evaluative performance goal manipulations, with early adolescent participants, and for a motor task relevant to physical ability. Sequential mediational analyses revealed that competence valuation, state anxiety, and task absorption processes accounted for the observed effects. Perceived competence served neither mediating nor moderating roles.     

Élargissement et renouvellement des questions traitées par l’ergonomie dans le domaine du développement durable : retour sur 12 ans de travaux sur les activités domestiques et la maîtrise des consommations énergétiques

This paper aims to trace how the integration of a societal issue such as “sustainable development” influenced our work in ergonomics in terms of activity analysis and contributions to the design during the last 12 years. We redefined the issue of energy consumption management and of behavioral modification. If we first developed household activities analyses for the design of smart home services, the introduction of sustainable issues leaded us to build the concept of “sustainable situation”: a new form of interaction between the actors and their environment. Sustainable situations allow energy consumption reduction as well as human well-being and development. We thus added sustainability as a new design criteria to preexisting ones such as utility, usability and appropriability. This new design perspective leaded us to enlarge our analysis of the lived experience at home to the longitudinal analysis of processes (appropriation, reflexivity, development and commitment) for the design of resources for the human development and activities.     

SEAT-DSR: Spatial and energy aware trusted dynamic distance source routing algorithm for secure data communications in wireless sensor networks

This paper propose a novel secure routing mechanism called Spatial and Energy Aware Trusted Dynamic Distance Source Routing (SEAT-DSR) algorithm for enhancing the network life time of wireless sensor networks. Here, the spatial information, energy level, and the effectiveness of data quality are equalized by the Quality of Service (QoS) based energy aware routing algorithms. In addition to this approach, a standard clustering algorithm is also incorporates for grouping the wireless sensor nodes based on the trust score, spatial information, energy level and the distance between the nodes. In this SEAT-DSR is also capable of making decision over the evaluation metrics that are decided and expressed the QoS. Moreover, a new hierarchical trust mechanism is also introduced in this model which adopts multi-attributes of many wireless sensor nodes according to the data communication speed, data size, energy consumption, and the recommendation. This new hierarchical trust method relies over an improved the sliding window time by considering the presence of various attacks frequency to identify the attackers by discovering their anomalous behaviour. The proposed SEAT-DSR is evaluated by conducting many experiments in a simulation environment that creates by using Network Simulator-2 (NS2). The experimental results of the proposed algorithm are proved that the average packet transfer rate is increased drastically than the existing secure routing methodologies.     

The Process by Which Relative Autonomous Motivation Affects Intentional Behavior: Comparing Effects Across Dieting and Exercise Behaviors

A motivational model integrating self-deter-mination theory and the theory of planned behavior was tested in two samples for exercise and dieting behavior respectively. Relative autonomous motivation from self-determination theory was hypothesized to predict intentions to exercise or diet via the mediation of attitudes and perceived behavioral control (PBC) from the theory of planned behavior. It was also expected that attitudes and PBC would predict actual levels of exercise and dieting behavior via the mediation of intentions. Relations in the proposed model were expected to be invariant across the behaviors. Two samples of participants (N = 511) completed measures of the autonomous motives, attitudes, subjective norms, PBC, and intentions with respect to exercise and dieting behavior. Four weeks later, participants self-reported their behavior. Structural equation models supported the replicability of the proposed model in both behaviors. Findings supported the majority of the hypothesized effects in the proposed model across the two health behaviors. However, four effects were significantly different across the two behaviors: the effect of autonomous motives on intentions, subjective norms and PBC on intentions, and intentions on behavior. Findings extend knowledge of the processes by which psychological antecedents from the theories affect health behaviors integral to the maintenance of energy balance.

Merleau-Ponty and Carroll on the Power of Movies

Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence on his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative all along. After presenting and criticizing Carroll’s view, I interpret and expand upon Merleau-Ponty’s position, showing that his version of the analogy between cinematic perception and everyday perception is more convincing than Carroll’s.     

Data Trimming, Nuclear Emissions, and Climate Change

Ethics requires good science. Many scientists, government leaders, and industry representatives support tripling of global-nuclear-energy capacity on the grounds that nuclear fission is “carbon free” and “releases no greenhouse gases.” However, such claims are scientifically questionable (and thus likely to lead to ethically questionable energy choices) for at least 3 reasons. (i) They rely on trimming the data on nuclear greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGE), perhaps in part because flawed Kyoto Protocol conventions require no full nuclear-fuel-cycle assessment of carbon content. (ii) They underestimate nuclear-fuel-cycle releases by erroneously assuming that mostly high-grade uranium ore, with much lower emissions, is used. (iii) They inconsistently compare nuclear-related GHGE only to those from fossil fuels, rather than to those from the best GHG-avoiding energy technologies. Once scientists take account of (i)–(iii), it is possible to show that although the nuclear fuel cycle releases (per kWh) much fewer GHG than coal and oil, nevertheless it releases far more GHG than wind and solar-photovoltaic. Although there may be other, ethical, reasons to support nuclear tripling, reducing or avoiding GHG does not appear to be one of them.