Energy Capture, Technological Change, and Economic Growth: An Evolutionary Perspective

Cognitive fossils: using cultural artifacts to reconstruct psychological changes throughout history

Psychology is crucial for understanding human history. When aggregated, changes in the psychology of individuals - in the intensity of social trust, parental care, or intellectual curiosity - can lead to important changes in institutions, social norms, and cultures. However, studying the role of psychology in shaping human history has been hindered by the difficulty of documenting the psychological traits of people who are no longer alive. Recent developments in psychology suggest that cultural artifacts reflect in part the psychological traits of the individuals who produced or consumed them. Cultural artifacts can thus serve as 'cognitive fossils' - physical imprints of the psychological traits of long-dead people. We review the range of materials available to cognitive and behavioral scientists, and discuss the methods that can be used to recover and quantify changes in psychological traits throughout history.

The Effect of Income and Wealth on Behavioral Strategies, Personality Traits, and Preferences

Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences. In this article, we build on the theory of optimal resource allocation to propose an alternative framework. We hypothesize that the quantity of resources available, such as income, has downstream consequences on psychological traits, leading to the emergence of behavioral syndromes. We show that more resources lead to more long-term orientation, more tolerance of variance, and more investment in low marginal-benefit needs. At the behavioral level, this translates, among others, into more large-scale cooperation, more investment in health, and more exploration. These individual-level differences in behavior, in turn, account for cultural phenomena such as puritanism, authoritarianism, and innovation.

Dynamic interactive links among sustainable energy investment, air pollution, and sustainable development in regional China

This research investigates the dynamic interactive associations among sustainable investment in the energy sector, air pollution, and sustainable development. To this end, it employs a "one-step" system-generalized method of moments (GMM) and "one-step" differential-GMM estimators, covering the period between 1996 and 2017. In this context, it utilizes the simultaneous equations of the dynamic panel data model for panel data of 27 Chinese provinces and municipalities. We have developed a new model of sustainable development, which incorporates sustainable investment in the energy sector and air pollution to offer a robust theoretical foundation for considering the underlying relations. The system-GMM estimator is used for the full data set; however, differential-GMM is utilized for the subsets of data, in order to tackle the small sample bias problem. The empirical outcomes provide several vital insights in that they yield mixed findings for the aggregated sample and subsets of data. For example, a two-way causal relationship occurs for all the panels, except the central part (medium development regions), between sustainable investment in the energy sector and sustainable development. Contrary to this, causality runs from air pollution to sustainable investment in the energy sector in a full data set and the central part (medium dev.). Nevertheless, the opposite is true in the case of the eastern part (most developed regions) of China. Still, the same relationship runs in either direction in the case of the western part (least developed regions). On the other way around, the feedback hypothesis of causality is confirmed, across all the samples, between air pollution and sustainable development. Hence, sustainable development and air pollution are overwhelmingly interdependent, in the country as well as the province and municipality level of the Chinese economy.

Pitch Angle Optimization by Intelligent Adjusting the Gains of a PI Controller for Small Wind Turbines in Areas with Drastic Wind Speed Changes

The population growth demands a greater generation of energy, an alternative is the use of small wind turbines, however, obtaining maximum wind power becomes the main challenge when there are drastic changes in wind speed. The angle of the blades rotates around its longitudinal axis to control the effect of the wind on the rotation of the turbine, a proportional-integral controller (PI) for this angle achieves stability and precision in a stable state but is not functional with severe alterations in wind speed, a different response time is necessary in both cases. This article proposes a novel pitch angle controller based on auto-tuning of PI gains, for which it uses a teaching–learning based optimization (TLBO) algorithm. The wind speed and the value of the magnitude of the change are used by the algorithm to determine the appropriate PI gains at different wind speeds, so it can adapt to any sudden change in wind speed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results for a 14 KW permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) wind turbine located at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro (UAQ), Mexico.

Expert Control Systems for Maximum Power Point Tracking in a Wind Turbine with PMSG: State of the Art

Wind power is a renewable energy source that has been developed in recent years. Large turbines are increasingly seen. The advantage of generating electrical power in this way is that it can be connected to the grid, making it an economical and easily available source of energy. The fundamental problem of a wind turbine is the randomness in a wide range of wind speeds that determine the electrical energy generated, as well as abrupt changes in wind speed that make the system unstable and unsafe. A conventional control system based on a mathematical model is effective with moderate disturbances, but slow with very large oscillations such as those produced by turbulence. To solve this problem, expert control systems (ECS) are proposed, which are based on human experience and an adequate management of stored information of each of its variables, providing a way to determine solutions. This revision of recent years, mentions the expert systems developed to obtain the point of maximum power generation in a wind turbine with permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) and, therefore, offers a control solution that adapts to the specifications of any wind turbine.