Many public goods like dams, fire departments, and lighthouses do not provide direct utility but act more as insurance devices against floods, fire, and shipwreck. They either diminish the probability or the size of the loss. We extend the public good model with this insurance aspect and generalize Samuelson’s efficient allocation rule when self-insurance and self-protection expenditures are pu...

Damage from two earthquakes that occurred in 2007 was surveyed. The 2007 Sumatra earthquake struck Indonesia. The results were typical of damage observed in developing countries from this magnitude event. Due to questinable detailing and inadequate construction practices, there was significant structural damage, including thousands of collapsed structures. The damage exceeded what is expected f...

Surveys have shown that noise from wind turbines is perceived as annoying by a proportion of residents living in their vicinity, apparently at much lower noise levels than those inducing annoyance due to other environmental sources. The aim of the present study was to derive the exposure-response relationship between wind turbine noise exposure in L(den) and the expected percentage annoyed resi...

Wind power has expanded significantly over the past years, although reliability of wind turbine systems, especially of offshore wind turbines, has been many times unsatisfactory in the past. Wind turbine failures are equivalent to crucial financial losses. Therefore, creating and applying strategies that improve the reliability of their components is important for a successful implementation of...

On Earth, large earthquakes commonly cause saturated soils to liquefy and streamflow to increase. We suggest that meteoritic impacts on Mars may have repeatedly caused similar liquefaction to enable violent eruption of groundwater. The amount of erupted water may be comparable to that required to produce catastrophic floods and to form outflow channels.  2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In this work, the numerical data related to wind turbine micrositing problem is presented. The data is acquired using the differential evolution algorithm (DEA) at different wind speeds. The data obtained through DEA include total dissipated power, cost per installation of unit turbine, and the efficiency of algorithm after installation of any particular number turbines; and are depicted versus...

We have numerically investigated statistical properties of the so-called interoccurrence time or the waiting time, i.e., the time interval between successive earthquakes, based on the two-dimensional (2D) spring-block (Burridge-Knopoff) model, selecting the velocity-weakening property as the constitutive friction law. The statistical properties of frequency distribution and the cumulative distr...

INTRODUCTION Some people living in the environs of industrial wind turbines (IWTs) report experiencing adverse health and socioeconomic effects. This review considers the hypothesis that annoyance from audible IWTs is the cause of these adverse health effects. METHODS We searched PubMed and Google Scholar for articles published since 2000 that included the terms "wind turbine health," "wind t...

Noroviruses are an important cause of acute gastroenteritis in humans. We incorporated new insights gained over the past decade in an updated estimate of the disease burden of (foodborne) norovirus illness in The Netherlands in 2009. The disease outcomes - non-consulting cases, visiting a general practitioner, hospitalization and mortality - and the foodborne proportion were derived from cohort...