Sophie is the closest character to having sensory issues in canon imo, I’m not saying that she does but out of the characters present she seems to be the closest to experiencing it. This is a slightly biased conclusion though since we see all of her inner thoughts and (generally) the other characters don’t get this privilege.
I agree.
However, outside of Sophie, the person in canon I believe would have the roughest time ever is Linh Frickin Song. My headcanon of Hydrokinetic powers in general is that it makes everything way too much, because imo water is just everywhere all of the time, and it's talking to you.
Thus, if on top of that she's got a sweater that is not comfortable, or there are loud noises near her, or she touches things that make her skin crawl, it's extra awful.
Maybe I just like making characters suffer, but that’s most definitely 100% my thought process on the whole thing.
I finished Zaldo! One of my headcanons about Zaldo is that they started out female and aren’t quite through transitioning, so they still have a slight curve to them. I have many others that I put into this drawing, see if you can find them all! As far as I can tell, the general consensus is that Zaldo is a Hydrokinetic, so I went with that too. I hope you guys like it!
Shitty art taglist: @loverofallthingssmart, @enbies-and-felonies
With anarchitecture dictated by the dynamics of seawater breaking waves and water levels flooding parts of the island and interior, Ar. Margot Krasojević continues on her mission of orchestrating dynamic and efficient way to harness tidal energy. Check out her upcoming Breaking Waves Turbines Resort in North-West Scotland… https://bit.ly/BW_MKA-IAnD
Alejandro Alvarez, the most popular boy in school. He has a cool and confident facade that he keeps up at all times, even in the company of his twin brother and their best friend, Makena.
He goes to the same school as the others due to his eye colors (You can tell someone is a Kinetic + what their abilities are based off of their eye colors). He’s a boy with many friends and is more perceptive than most give him credit for. (also he is a total smart ass and you gotta love him for it -Vic)
Many of Alaska's smallest communities are along rivers. The Alaska Center for Energy and Power is researching ways those communities can tap the river as an efficient, sustainable energy source.
Generating loads of electricity from moving water might soon shift away from the province of behemoth structures like Washington’s Grand Coulee and China’s Three Gorges dams.
Over the last few years, researchers and industry have been chalking up successes developing small-scale, distributed hydroelectric generators to potentially replace their massive forebears, whose footprint causes major disturbances in the environment and communities nearby. These emerging technologies, collectively called hydrokinetics, can turn moving water in rivers, manmade spillways and ocean tides into electricity that gets pumped into power grids.
In an April 2013 report on waterpower, the U.S. Department of Energy forecast that hydroelectric dams and hydrokinetic technologies could provide 15 percent of the country’s electricity needs by 2030.
Huge potential energy recovery
But in the report’s compilation of analyses on hydrokinetic sources, the bigger potential is revealed—1,170 terawatt-hours of electricity is theoretically recoverable in wave energy alone every year. That’s enough to power around 100 million homes. Tapping the energy in flowing rivers without building dams by planting turbines in the water, so-called run-of-the-river generation, could yield another 120 terawatt-hours a year. And converting some of the thermal energy held in ocean water could produce another 576 terawatt-hours a year.
(Power density of the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts coast. Red areas are greater than 1,000 watts per square meter. Courtesy Center for GIS at Georgia Tech.)
Hydrokinetic power companies are beginning to see successes in pilot projects. Verdant Energy, a company that demonstrated tide-driven turbines in New York City’s East River from 2006 to 2009, was issued the first-ever commercial tidal power license in 2012 to generate and sell up to a megawatt of electricity. The company may eventually install 30 turbines in the river as part of their Federal Energy Regulatory Commission pilot license.
Others will soon follow them. FERC has now issued 14 preliminary hydrokinetic permits and another seven are pending. Those projects will have the capacity to produce more than 3.4 gigawatts of power.
"Energy harvesting from water is trapped in an archaic damming paradigm with high up-front costs and ecological impacts,” Marculescu says. “But rivers run to the ocean, and there is an enormous amount of kinetic energy that could be sustainably harvested."
Making hydrokinetic smart
But for these small power generation units that may one day pepper shorelines and inland waterways to work optimally, they need to smarten up. During project design and turbine operation, managers need to have real-time information about the flow of water at the units. They also need to have an accurate computer model that forecasts changes in water flow rates coming toward the turbines due to upstream weather events.
That’s why Marculescu is leading a team of engineers and computer scientists to develop a toolkit to monitor and control distributed hydrokinetic units. Their tools will help place and operate the generators. “The state-of-the-art model we are working to build is weather-aware and accurate second by second,” she says. “It’s a lot of data we’ll feed into it, but then we could predict what will happen in days or weeks. And then you could decide which turbines to turn on or off and do it as a function of weather and other data that effects the flow rate.”
The system would also provide the brains to direct hydrokinetic-generated electricity onto the local power network, creating a smart component of a smart grid. She says their model will be designed to tell the hydrokinetic units when to feed into the grid, and tell the grid when there won’t be enough power coming out the units so it can find power elsewhere.
"There is a huge benefit to society in this work as we strive to create more sustainable ways to power our lives,” she says. “Small footprint hydroelectric projects could create enough low-carbon energy to power an economy the size of Virginia while minimizing impact to the environment and surrounding communities.”
Power in prediction
The team is going to be building hierarchical models at several scales to analyze river systems, folding in huge amounts of data into each—tidal and river gauge sensor information, temperature and precipitation readings, and hydrological and soil features, among others. There are so many numbers to feed in, Marculescu says, that they still need to work out their system’s architecture. When they scale it up from their current study area to one the size of, say, the Mississippi River drainage basin, will standard computing resources be enough to crunch all the numbers? Or will they need to split these geographic areas up and then network the separate models together?
The project has just begun, and is being funded by a three-year, $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant. Marculescu says the result of their work could also be used to predict coming catastrophic flooding events in great detail. “The dynamics of something like a flood happen so fast that it can take people by surprise,” she says. “But you could use our system to monitor changing conditions and make predictions to say to people, ‘You’ll have this much water in this much time.’”
Top Image: A Verdant Power tidal turbine being installed in New York City's East River in 2006. Courtesy Kris Unger/Verdant Power.
Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital assets and goods. In a capitalist economy, investors are free to buy, sell, produce, and distribute goods and services with at most limited government control, at prices determined primarily by a competition for profit in a free market.[1][2][3] Central elements of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, and a price system.[4]
Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in many different times, places, and cultures.[5] Following the demise of feudalism, capitalism became the dominant economic system in the Western world. Capitalism successfully overcame a challenge by communism and is now the dominant system worldwide.[6][7]
Economists, political economists, and historians have taken different perspectives in their analysis of capitalism and recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire capitalism, welfare capitalism and state capitalism, all characterizing varying levels of state power and public capital control. A pejorative characterization, crony capitalism, refers to a state of affairs in which insider corruption, nepotism and cartels dominate the system. This is considered to be the normal state of mature capitalism in Marxian economics but as an aberrant state by advocates of capitalism. All such characterizations are subjective and tend to mark out a point of view either more or less sympathetic to attempts by voters to regulate business.
Laissez-faire economists emphasize the degree to which government does not have control over markets and the importance of property rights.[8][9] Others emphasize the need for government regulation, to prevent monopolies and to soften the effects of the boom and bust cycle.[10] Most political economists emphasize private property as well, in addition to power relations, wage labor, class, and the uniqueness of capitalism as a historical formation.[11] The extent to which different markets are free, as well as the rules defining private property, is a matter of politics and policy. Many states have what are termed mixed economies, referring to the varying degree of planned and market-driven elements in an economic system.[11]
Proponents of capitalism use historical precedent to claim that it is the greatest wealth-producing system known to man, and that its benefits are mainly to the ordinary person.[12] Critics of capitalism associate it with economic instability[13] and an inability to provide for the well-being of all people.[14]
The term capitalism, in its modern sense, is often attributed to Karl Marx.[5][15] However, Marx was far more concerned with characterizing the sociological effects of capital economics. The “ism" was used only twice in the more political interpretations of Marx’s work, which were primarily authored by Friedrich Engels.
In the 20th century defenders of the capitalist system often replaced the term capitalism with phrases such as free enterprise and private enterprise and replaced capitalist with investor in reaction to the negative connotations sometimes associated with capitalism.[16] The author Ayn Rand attempted a positive moral defense of capitalism as such but in highly romantic or literary terms that did not stand logical or historical scrutiny.[17]
By contrast modern welfare economics has produced a number of detailed defenses of the mixed capitalist economy based on public ownership of infrastructure and defense of positive human rights such as housing or education. Amartya Sen in particular, in Development as Freedom[18] , his Nobel Prize winning work, outlined the reasoning by which many human societies have reached the common conclusion that mixed democratic capitalist economies with welfare systems were optimal to support human life.
In practice, all early 21st century developed economies devote 40-60% of their GDP to taxes and the public sector. Those that devote more, such asScandinavian countries, are also rated the most successful by their citizens, and by measures of economic well-being such as literacy, housing, lifespan, andgender equality. This suggests that capitalism is or has evolved towards some kind of compromise or truce with democracy, as Joseph Schumpeter first clearly predicted.[19]
