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Since 2001 there have been pockets of renewed interest in TOU rates, notably including California, Idaho, a few other U.S. states, and the province of Ontario. This interest tends to be driven by regulators, not utilities, but utilities are stepping up to the challenge. Major utilities in many other states have adopted a \"been there, done that\" attitude and have no intention of expanding TOU rate offerings.

The utility industry's transition to market competition over the last five years has been anything but smooth. The vision of competitive retail choice has not yet fulfilled early expectations-to many, the retail electricity market has defied regulatory prescription and left many customers seeing a plateful of transition costs but rarely tasting savings.Nor have the anticipated metering information requirements materialized. Few customers or retail suppliers appear to want to be burdened with prices that vary hourly. On the contrary, according to market research, a regimen of fixed prices locked in for several years wins wider acceptance from most residential consumers. Looking back on the experiences of the past five years, the industry should be better prepared for the next five to make coherent and correct decisions about metering, data acquisition, and other revenue cycle services. Some lessons: 1. The electric utility is, after all, the obvious and best qualified provider of metering services for the residential sector at least, given the absolute necessity that the function be performed accurately and efficiently. 2. Energy service providers (ESPS) are simply not interested in residential customers under currently prevailing market conditions and default service arrangements. 3. Most residential customers appear perfectly happy to remain with their historical utility as energy provider.

Recreation is one of the most important factors in mans existence whether he be six or sixty

The lengthy Energy Policy Act is concise in how it deals with peak- and time-sensitive pricing, demand reduction techniques, and \"smart metering.\" Many utilities already have time-of-use rates, have offered them in accordance with the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 or even before, and still offer them. While most businesses typically invest in something as substantial as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) only if it is economically attractive in the near term, regulated utilities have a broader charter and will consider other motives. AMI systems typically produce operating benefits across the utility. AMI can help the utility get to the meter with no disruption to the customer. The original and clearest motive for automating meter reading is to reduce or eliminate the labor expense of manual meter reading while improving the accuracy and completeness of monthly billing. In some cases, where the rate differentials are minimal, advanced metering systems can be a good investment purely for the benefits they provide to utility operations.

FOR an outing of three or four days at a time, or even a week, one person can equip himself complete for $10 or $12.

The prehistoric Hohokam people of south-central Arizona are best known for their large and extensive irrigation works. However, just how the administration of the canal systems articulated with the organization of Hohokam society is an interesting and unresolved issue. In this study, substantial gains are made for reconstructing Hohokam social structure, the degree to which it was shaped by their irrigation economy, and the evolving interplay between hydraulic management and the pattern of Hohokam social relationships over time. A methodology is developed, based on the exchange of utilitarian ceramics over short distances (as little as 5 km), in order to trace social interaction between Hohokam populations who lived in the central Phoenix Basin between A.D. 1100 and 1400. Applications of the methodology show that hydraulic management had a pervasive influence on the organization of Hohokam social networks. In addition, there is new evidence to suggest an increase in Hohokam social complexity around A.D. 1275 that may have been directly linked to the inherent asymmetrical control of water in large irrigation economies. The ceramic methodology consists of two parts. First, it is demonstrated with geologic mapping, petrographic analyses, and electron microprobe assays that the production sources of Hohokam utilitarian wares are closely associated with the pottery's temper, thereby enabling the participants in the exchange transaction to be identified. Second, the social relationship between the interacting parties can be inferred on the basis of the pottery's exchange value, which, in turn, is determined by an analysis of ceramic production and use. This ability to assess who among the Hohokam interacted with whom and the nature of their social ties provides a novel and powerful approach to study Hohokam social structure, which complements other approaches currently used by archaeologists.

Increased glucose uptake and metabolism is a prominent phenotype of most cancers, but efforts to clinically target this metabolic alteration have been challenging. Here, we present evidence that lactoylglutathione (LGSH), a byproduct of methylglyoxal detoxification, is elevated in both human and murine non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC). Methylglyoxal is a reactive metabolite byproduct of glycolysis that reacts non-enzymatically with nucleophiles in cells, including basic amino acids, and reduces cellular fitness. Detoxification of methylglyoxal requires reduced glutathione (GSH), which accumulates to high levels in NSCLC relative to normal lung. Ablation of the methylglyoxal detoxification enzyme glyoxalase I (Glo1) potentiates methylglyoxal sensitivity and reduces tumor growth in mice, arguing that targeting pathways involved in detoxification of reactive metabolites is an approach to exploit the consequences of increased glucose metabolism in cancer. Glycolysis is elevated in many cancers. In this study, the authors show that lactoylglutathione, a by-product of methylglyoxal produced from increased glycolysis, is elevated in lung cancer in mouse models and humans, arguing reactive metabolite production can be a liability for cancers.

Background Protein effectors of pathogenicity are instrumental in modulating host immunity and disease resistance. The powdery mildew pathogen of grasses Blumeria graminis causes one of the most important diseases of cereal crops. B. graminis is an obligate biotrophic pathogen and as such has an absolute requirement to suppress or avoid host immunity if it is to survive and cause disease. Results Here we characterise a superfamily predicted to be the full complement of Candidates for Secreted Effector Proteins (CSEPs) in the fungal barley powdery mildew parasite B. graminis f.sp. hordei . The 491 genes encoding these proteins constitute over 7% of this pathogen’s annotated genes and most were grouped into 72 families of up to 59 members. They were predominantly expressed in the intracellular feeding structures called haustoria, and proteins specifically associated with the haustoria were identified by large-scale mass spectrometry-based proteomics. There are two major types of effector families: one comprises shorter proteins (100–150 amino acids), with a high relative expression level in the haustoria and evidence of extensive diversifying selection between paralogs; the second type consists of longer proteins (300–400 amino acids), with lower levels of differential expression and evidence of purifying selection between paralogs. An analysis of the predicted protein structures underscores their overall similarity to known fungal effectors, but also highlights unexpected structural affinities to ribonucleases throughout the entire effector super-family. Candidate effector genes belonging to the same family are loosely clustered in the genome and are associated with repetitive DNA derived from retro-transposons. Conclusions We employed the full complement of genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic analyses as well as structural prediction methods to identify and characterize the members of the CSEPs superfamily in B. graminis f.sp. hordei . Based on relative intron position and the distribution of CSEPs with a ribonuclease-like domain in the phylogenetic tree we hypothesize that the associated genes originated from an ancestral gene, encoding a secreted ribonuclease, duplicated successively by repetitive DNA-driven processes and diversified during the evolution of the grass and cereal powdery mildew lineage.