This paper proposes a methodology for determining the optimal bidding strategy of a retailer who supplies electricity to end-users in the short-term electricity market. The aim is to minimize the ...cost of purchasing energy in the sequence of trading opportunities that provide the day-ahead and intraday markets. A genetic algorithm has been designed to optimize the parameters that define the best purchasing strategy. The proposed methodology has been tested using real data from the Spanish day-ahead and intraday markets over a period of two years with a significant cost reduction with respect to trading solely in the day-ahead market.
Strategic Bidding in Secondary Reserve Markets Campos, Fco Alberto; Munoz San Roque, Antonio; Sanchez-Ubeda, Eugenio F. ...
IEEE transactions on power systems,
2016-July, 2016-7-00, 20160701, Letnik:
31, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Electricity markets are based on several sequential energy and reserve trading mechanisms to constantly maintain the balance between generation and demand. During the last years, reserve markets are ...getting much importance all around the world with the increasing social awareness of the renewable energy benefits. Additional reserve quantities and larger remunerations are being implemented by the regulators since this renewable energy is highly dependent on weather conditions uncertainties. Utilities are therefore demanding more and more powerful models to better optimize their reserve bidding curves to be sent to the system operators. This paper describes a new methodology to obtain an optimized real bidding curve for the secondary (spinning) reserve market. The approach is based on the maximization of a company profit, assuming a set of residual demand curves scenarios for its competitors' representation, and considering the day-ahead market opportunity cost to build the reserve cost curve. The case study validates the main features of the proposed methodology by its application to the Spanish secondary reserve market. This methodology is being daily used by one of the most important electricity companies in Spain.
Introduction
For many patients with primary immune deficiency (PID), stem‐cell transplantation (SCT) may be life‐saving.
Objective
To review our experience of 11 years transplanting children with PID ...in Mexico.
Methods
Chart review of patients who underwent SCT from 2008 to 2018, to describe their diagnoses, time to transplant, conditioning regime, survival rate and outcomes. All patients received post‐transplant cyclophosphamide as graft‐versus‐host‐disease (GVHD) prophylaxis.
Results
19 patients with combined, phagocytic or syndromic PID from 5 states. Twelve of them were male (58%) and 14 survive (79%). Mean age at HSCT was 41.9 months; mean time from diagnosis was 31.2 months. Seven grafts were umbilical cord and 12 haploidentical. The conditioning regime was myeloablative, with five primary graft failures. Two patients had partial and 10 full chimerism. Five patients died within 2 months after transplant. Immune reconstitution was complete in 11 of 19 patients. We found a prevalence of 21% GVHD.
Discussion
We describe 19 patients from Mexico with 8 PID diagnoses who underwent allogenic HSCT over a period of 11 years. Survival rate and other outcomes compare well with industrialized countries. We recommend the use of post‐transplant cyclophosphamide to prevent GVHD in scenarios of resource scarcity and a lack of HLA‐identical donors.
Chagas disease represents a significant public health problem in Mexico. In the state of Hidalgo, studies on the presence of triatomines are scarce and restricted to a few locations. To determine the ...risk of transmission in the state of Hidalgo and stratify the vector potential, the distribution of Triatominae was surveyed from 2015 to 2016 in collaboration with primary health care services and local communities. A total of 570 specimens was collected in 278 houses in 25 municipalities. The species of Triatominae detected were T. dimidiata with 391 samples, T. mexicana with 159 samples, T. gerstaeckeri with 17 samples, and T. barberi with three samples. The samples were collected in domestic and peridomestic areas. The general index of natural infection was 9.8%. Indices of colonization and crowding were determined for species and municipality and results were variable.
According to local citizens, the spraying of insecticide is carried out in households where triatomines are reported; however, houses that are abandoned or not inhabited are excluded from the ...spraying. ...there is a possibility that these non-sprayed sites function as a refuge for triatomines. There is also a possibility that these triatomines developed resistance to the pesticides used, because resistance of R. prolixus has been reported to different pesticides, mainly pyrethroids (Vassena et al. 2000, Flores-Ferrer et al. 2018). ...it is important to note that the areas where triatomines were collected are semi-urban, and most of the sampled houses are built mainly with adobe, wood, metal sheets, and palm, and this last material is considered a natural habitat of R. prolixus (Dujardin et al. 1998). ...the municipalities sampled in this study are within the area where human populations are reported to be exposed to triatomines infected with T. cruzi (Ramsey et al. 2015). ...the households and yards colonized with R. prolixus located less than 20 m from dwellings in an area in which some residents have been diagnosed with Chagas disease suggests active vector-mediated T. cruzi transmission. The determination of the geographical distribution of triatomines is fundamental to better understanding the ecoepidemiology of Chagas disease, considering environmental changes such as: deforestation, agriculture, shifts in land use, and climatic changes that can alter the displacement of vectors and reservoirs in new areas, directly influencing transmission dynamics of T. cruzi.
We report the presence of Triatoma longipennis for the first time in two localities in Hidalgo, Mexico.
This study was conducted at Tecozautla municipality, Hidalgo. Collection was performed in April ...2022.
We collected eight triatomines from Guadalupe: two fourth-instar nymphs, three fifth-instar nymphs, one female, and two males. In San Miguel Caltepantla, a female was collected inside a dwelling. One sample tested positive for Trypanosoma cruzi.
These findings suggest the need to investigate the dynamics of this species with respect to the inhabitants of the study area.
The operational slowness in the execution of direct methods for estimating forage mass, an important variable for defining the animal stocking rate, gave rise to the need for methods with faster ...responses and greater territorial coverage. In this context, the aim of this study was to evaluate a method to estimate the mass of Urochloa brizantha cv. BRS Piatã in shaded and full sun systems, through proximal sensing applied to the Simple Algorithm for Evapotranspiration Retrieving (SAFER) model, applied with the Monteith Radiation Use Efficiency (RUE) model. The study was carried out in the experimental area of Fazenda Canchim, a research center of Embrapa Pecuária Sudeste, São Carlos, SP, Brazil (21°57′S, 47°50′W, 860 m), with collections of forage mass and reflectance in the silvopastoral systems animal production and full sun. Reflectance data, as well as meteorological data obtained by a weather station installed in the study area, were used as input for the SAFER model and, later, for the radiation use efficiency model to calculate the fresh mass of forage. The forage collected in the field was sent to the laboratory, separated, weighed and dried, generating the variables of pasture total dry mass), total leaf dry mass, leaf and stalk dry mass and leaf area index. With the variables of pasture, in situ, and fresh mass, obtained from SAFER, the training regression model, in which 80% were used for training and 20% for testing the models. The SAFER was able to promisingly express the behavior of forage variables, with a significant correlation with all of them. The variables that obtained the best estimation performance model were the dry mass of leaves and stems and the dry mass of leaves in silvopastoral and full sun systems, respectively. It was concluded that the association of the SAFER model with the proximal sensor allowed us to obtain a fast, precise and accurate forage estimation method.
Autosomal recessive (AR) DOCK8 deficiency is a well-known actinopathy, a combined primary immune deficiency with impaired actin polymerization that results in altered cell mobility and immune ...synapse. DOCK8-deficient patients present early in life with eczema, viral cutaneous infections, chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis, bacterial pneumonia, and abscesses, together with eosinophilia, thrombocytosis, lymphopenia, and variable dysgammaglobulinemia that usually includes Hyper-IgE. In fact, before its genetic etiology was known, patients were described as having a form of Hyper-IgE syndrome, a name now deprecated in favor of genetic defects. We describe a school-age male patient with a clinical picture suggestive of DOCK8 deficiency, except for high serum IgE or a family history: early onset, failure to thrive, eczema, warts, condyloma, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, recurrent otitis media, bronchiectasis, candidiasis, leukocytosis, eosinophilia, high IgA, low IgG, and low CD4+ T cells. We were able to confirm the diagnosis through protein expression and whole-exome sequencing. We review the clinical, laboratory, and genetic features of 200 DOCK8-deficient patients; at least 4 other patients have had no elevated IgE, and about 40% do not have Hyper-IgE (above 1,000 IU/mL). Despite this, the constellation of signs, symptoms, and findings allow the suspicion of DOCK8 deficiency and other actinopathies.
The paradigm of Content-Centric Networks (CCN) has been used in several networking application contexts in order to enhance the performance of data forwarding and retrieval. By disassociating device ...addressing from the packet routing process, CCN offers new message routing possibilities in network scenarios that are limited in this respect. An example of such scenarios concerns Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs), in which requesting and retrieving data and services may be even more unpredictable than simply sending any message from a source to a destination. With this in mind, we propose a DIscovery and REtrieval protocol based on Social Cooperation (DIRESC), designed specifically to perform data request and retrieval by applying the concept of CCN in the DTN scenario, an environment also known as Content-Centric Delay-Tolerant Networks (CCDTN). Our forwarding mechanism proposes the distributed sending of data based on the profile of each node, which is defined by its social interactions with other nodes. To evaluate our protocol, we used the Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator to compare DIRESC to other related CCDTN protocols, including our conceptual implementation of content-centric forwarding dubbed CCN broadcast. Results show that social cooperation has positive performance impact (i.e., improved delivery rate, delay, overhead, packet retransmission, and energy consumption) when compared to other social-oblivious CCDTN protocols.
Changes in dietary patterns and body weight have become a focus of research in undergraduate students. This study compared breakfast consumption, intake of foods high in saturated fat, and BMI ...between medical and non-medical students. A comparative cross-sectional study was conducted in 4,561 Peruvian university students, of whom 1,464 (32.1%) were from the medical field and 3,097 (67.9%) from the non-medical field. We compared the frequency of breakfast consumption (categorized as regular: 6 to 7 days/week; occasional: 3 to 5 days/week; and rarely or never: 0 to 2 days/week) and the frequency of consumption of foods high in saturated fat. We created simple and multiple linear and Poisson regression models with robust variance to evaluate the association of the mentioned variables with academic fields. Non-medical students (Adjusted Prevalence Ratio PR = 0.92, 95% CI 0.86-0.99; p = 0.008) were less likely to eat breakfast regularly compared to medical students. Likewise, consumption of foods high in saturated fats was higher in non-medical students (B = 1.47, 95% CI 0.91-2.04; p < 0.001) compared to medical students. Similarly, the mean BMI of these students was significantly higher than that of medical students (B = 0.33, 95% CI 0.12-0.53; p = 0.002). Although medical students reported relatively healthy eating habits and a lower BMI, there is a widespread need to promote improved diet and lifestyle among the entire university population to reduce the risks of communicable diseases and improve quality of life.
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