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As global wind capacity continues to grow, the need for accurate operational analyses of a rapidly growing fleet of wind power plants has increased in proportion. The wind energy industry at present, however, is not ideally positioned to address this need. First, there is a lack of best practices and limited published standards for performing operational analyses. Second, operational data and methods are typically proprietary and not shared among the wind energy community. Consequently, there is considerable duplication of effort in developing methods as well as uncertainty in the calculated metrics. To address these problems, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has publicly released OpenOA, an open-source code base for performing operational analyses on wind plant data. The intent of OpenOA is to provide a framework in which best practices can be developed, refined, and disseminated. Ultimately, such collaboration is expected to lead to a working example (i.e. reference implementation) of methods from which a published standard may develop. This article provides an overview of OpenOA, highlighting its release as a public repository, modular software architecture, current functionality, and planned functionality in subsequent releases. It is our goal for OpenOA to evolve into an indispensable tool for performing operational analyses that is used and supported by a large community of wind energy experts.

This study investigated the effectiveness of a combined academic and personal counselling initiative on student performance and emotional well-being outcomes of 289 at-risk students at a Canadian University. Criterion for risk included academic struggles, mental health distress, or both. The program was developed to be tailored to individual needs, and students participated in weekly counselling sessions over the course of 1 academic year. Results showed significant overall increases in student grade point average (GPA), academic functioning, and mental health well-being, demonstrating the program’s effectiveness in addressing the differential needs of students. Implications of the results are discussed.

The pre-construction energy generation of a wind farm (P50) is difficult to estimate and evaluate. This paper presents a methodology to measure the accuracy of the p50 prediction, which we call the Historical Validation Survey (HVS), for several wind farms in the continental United States. Our results indicate that there is a bias between predicted and measured energy, even when controlling for factors like grid curtailment and resource variability. We also find that our results depend on the assumptions we make during analysis, which we quantify with a sensitivity analysis. This method allows the estimation of uncertainty we have in our findings. When we account for reasonable ranges of model assumptions, we find that, in the most optimistic case, there is still a bulk −5.5% bias when estimating pre-construction energy generation. When controlling for grid curtailment this number reduces to a range of −3.5 to −4.5%.

The complete nucleotide sequence of an HPV-1a variant has been determined. The variant has over 99% nucleotide identity with the prototype HPV-1a sequence, with the majority of mutations occurring in the long control region. Additionally, remaining errors in the prototype HPV-1a sequence are reported.

Twenty males with a strong right hand preference underwent 120 simple reaction time trials to a 500 hz auditory stimulus presented to right, left and both ears. Ten Transcendental Meditators served as their own controls in twenty minute meditation and relaxation conditions and were also compared to a ten Non-Meditator control group who relaxed only in two 20-minute conditions. The reaction time trials were administered after the conditions. When the ears were compared to each other a significant right-ear (left hemisphere) advantage (REA) occurred in all relaxation conditions of the Meditator and Non-Meditator control groups. However, no REA emerged after meditation conditions of the Meditator group. The Meditator group after meditation compared to their own baseline relaxation condition showed a significant suppression of reaction time latencies to stimulation delivered to the left hemisphere and a significant facilitation to stimulation delivered to the right hemisphere. The meaning of these findings suggest Transcendental Meditation is an attentional strategy that disrupts the usual biases of the brain which also has implications as a clinical method. A neuropsychological explanation of the results suggest a comprehensive theory of Transcendental Meditation.