By December 2004, the decade-old truce between water users and environmental groups, forged at the beginning of the CALFED process, was all but over. This truce—epitomized by the CALFED motto that “everyone would get better together”—had always been a fragile one, with continuing differences over priorities for the Delta within the CALFED investment portfolio. Disagreements had escalated over t...

From an ethical perspective, good governance involves the translation of collective moral intentions into effective and accountable institutional actions. With respect to the use of human subjects in Canadian health research, I contend that there have been many good intentions but very little in the way of appropriate governance arrangements. Hence, the question, "who minds the store?" is espec...

For a given minimum cost of the electricity dispatch, multiple equivalent dispatch solutions may exist. We explore the sensitivity of networks to these dispatch solutions and their impact on the vulnerability of the network to cascading failure blackouts. It is shown that, depending on the heterogeneity of the network structure, the blackout statistics can be sensitive to the dispatch solution ...

Article history: Received 24 March 2014 Received in revised form 18 August 2014 Accepted 2 September 2014 Available online 29 September 2014 Editor: J. Brodholt

Reliability evaluation based on degradation is very useful in systems with scarce failures. In this paper a new degradation model based on Weibull distribution is proposed. The model is applied to the degradation of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) under different accelerated tests. The results of these tests are in agreement with the proposed model and reliability function is evaluated.