Bøker av John Collins

The world is moving away from demand-driven electricity markets supplied by centralized generation and distribution of fossil-fuel-produced electricity. Increasing reliance on weather-dependent renewable sources will require a shift toward a supply-driven paradigm, while beneficial electrification, including widespread adoption of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and batteries will offer considerable but widely distributed demand flexibility that can be used to compensate for supply variability. The open-source Power Trading Agent Competition (Power TAC) platform simulates a decentralized future, modeling the high complexity of future retail electricity markets. This book describes a variety of approaches to profitable trading in realistic wholesale and retail electricity markets. It presents actionable insights from extensive exploration of policies and business models for retail electricity markets gained from a decade of Power TAC tournaments, and from research inspired by the Power TAC experience. Featuring contributions from tournament designers, competitors, and scientists combining best practices from computer science and economics and management science, this book is of benefit to academics, researchers, practitioners and policy makers in sustainable energy and wholesale and retail electricity markets.

Where did the regulatory underpinnings for the global drug wars come from? This book is the first fully-focused history of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the bedrock of the modern multilateral drug control system and the focal point of global drug regulations and prohibitions. Although far from the propagator of the drug wars, the UN enabled the creation of a uniform global legal framework to effectively legalise, or regulate, their pursuit. This book thereby answers the question of where the international legal framework for drug control came from, what state interests informed its development and how complex diplomatic negotiations resulted in the current regulatory system, binding states into an element of global policy uniformity.

Bill's StoryBill Curry leaves New Albany, Indiana, after killing his abusive stepfather. In search of a new life, he meets two mountain men, Jim Kelly and Red Sampson, who take him under their wings and show him the ways of becoming a free trapper in the high lonesome. And to him, living with the Lakota Sioux and a new wife, Raven, the daughter of chief, Red Hawk. Ron's storyRon Baker, an orphan, was left with his uncle and aunt to raise. He dreams of stories he had heard of a breed of men who trapped the Rocky Mountains. He, at age sixteen, decides he would leave the blue ridges of Virginia and travel to the jump-off point at Independence, Missouri. As fate would have it, Bill and Ron are brought together to start a life of adventure and lasting friendship with the Lakota. The story will hold your interest from the first page to the last.

An illuminating exploration of the Bible and many of our most contentious contemporary issues

Classical economics suggests that market economies are self-correcting in times of recession or depression, and tend toward full employment and output. But English economist John Maynard Keynes disagrees. In his ground-breaking 1936 study The General Theory, Keynes argues that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment.

200 years after it was written, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations is still debated by governments internationally. Smith argued that 'mercantilism'-the theory that the national economy exists solely to strengthen the government, thus the government should regulate the economy-was wrong.

Noam Chomsky is one of the influential thinkers of the twentieth-century. His work in linguistics, philosophy and political theory has spanned six decades, and has been met with critical acclaim and controversy in equal measure. This book is not only an introduction to Chomsky's theoretical writings, but also a critical engagement with his work.

SIMPL (Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux) is discussed at many different levels. At its most fundamental, SIMPL is a set of library functions which allow the passing of encapsulated messages between cooperating processes. On another level, SIMPL is an active open source project which began over a decade ago. Over the years this project has accumulated an extensive body of sample code and extensions. SIMPL is also a great way to design software applications where complexity is encapsulated in separate, easily testable, readily extendable modules. The current state of software development is compared to the hardware world before the advent of integrated circuit chips. The term softwareIC is coined to describe the software equivalent of the integrated circuit. The SIMPL toolkit, along with tokenized messaging and the SIMPL testing framework is shown to be a great way to build these softwareICs. Several are illustrated throughout the book.

Highlife Giants is an intimate portrait of the pioneering artistes of West Africa's vibrant music scene from the 1920s onwards. It is packed full of inside information from stars including E.T Mensah, Kofo Ghanaba, King Bruce, Bobby Benson, Victor Uwaifo, and Ignace De Souza.

Based on extensive interviews with members of the "intifada generation," those who were between 10 and 18 years old when the intifada began in 1987, this book provides a detailed look at the intifada memories of ordinary Palestinians.