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In order to continually reduce vehicle pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, fuel standards and regulations are in a state of constant change and tightening. These changes and future trends have an impact on the take-up of renewable fuels for both gasoline and diesel fuels. This chapter discusses current and future fuel standards and illustrates how the hurdles experienced by ethanol and bio-diesel blends have been overcome. Nevertheless, ethanol and bio-diesel still remain and are likely to remain a minor part of the world fuel market.

Ideally new renewable fuels should be drop-in fuels with minimum compatibility issues with conventional fuels. This is illustrated by bio-refinery operations to produce green diesel which is compatible with conventional diesel.

There may be a role for a new renewable additive to improve gasoline octane as octane requirements rise. The market for such an additive could justify large-scale manufacture.

Using an online survey with about 650 persons living in urban areas in Vietnam and working in different job positions, this chapter aimed to explore how they perceived various measures in containing COVID-19 and how they complied with and evaluated different government policies in controlling the pandemic. In particular, we disaggregated data of the urban workers into gender (male vs. female), job positions (wage-earners vs. other), social insurance participation (mandatory, voluntary, and non-participating), and self-rated health (good vs. bad). We found that the respondents highly appreciated the government with the provided information of COVID-19 and the implemented policies to contain the pandemic. People showed quite good compliance with the national social distancing policies since they went out of their homes mostly for essential work, while very rarely for other reasons or non essential work. We could see various differences in perceptions and compliance levels of the respondents in terms of age, gender, residential area, and health status. Based on those findings along with the existing studies, we recommended that appropriate measures stabilising social and economic activities within the country should be continuously implemented so as to maintain or alternate jobs for people working in severely affected economic sectors. Also, providing accessible and affordable healthcare measures to all people, especially for poor and informal workers who are particularly risky to infectious diseases, should also be given great consideration. Sufficient goods and services for people to meet their basic needs during social distancing should be continuously maintained.

Among the social determinants of health, social capital is gaining increasing attention in health economics and health policy. Although the boundaries of the concept of social capital are still under debate, the essence of social capital is that of favoring and supporting cooperation within communities, allowing them to supply a range of services which are beneficial to individual health. This chapter, after a brief overview of the debate about the conceptualization of social capital, discusses in some detail the mechanisms which relate social capital to health and offers a review of the recent empirical literature, focusing, although not exclusively, on developing countries. In the second part, this chapter contributes to the empirical literature by estimating the association between individual social capital and health in a cross-country setting including 93 countries, the largest ever used in this literature. Results confirm the beneficial role that social capital has in individual health and unveil a pattern so far rather overlooked, that the influence of social capital seems to be stronger in developed than developing countries. The third part of the chapter focuses on policy interventions and recommendations. It provides a broad taxonomy of policies, motivated by theoretical models of investment in social capital. Next, it discusses a number of academic papers describing and evaluating interventions aimed at creating social capital, and concludes by describing a few interventions realized by two organizations whose purpose is to help communities accumulate social capital.

A specific set of guidelines for academic library accreditation is difficult to determine, due to differences in levels of academic institutions. The purpose of studying the perceptions of accreditation liaisons and librarians of Level-One, Associate degree-granting institutions, was to examine their compliance with regional accreditation standards and utilize the results to help librarians better understand the process of preparing for accreditation. A suggestion for further research would include the interaction of multiple authors of varying skills such as survey writing, statistical analyses, and experiences in accreditation. Librarian inclusion on accreditation committees, training, and collaboration with overall institutional effectiveness could also be studied and encouraged. This paper was the Master's project of the author in May 2008, in the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

The energetic effects of knee locking and addition of linear elastic members to different joints of a seven-link fully actuated planner bipedal robot were studied. The focus was on the reduction of energy consumption during walking. An impactless walking gait was studied and the energetic cost of walking was determined without joint stiffness and knee locking as a baseline for comparison. The gait trajectory was then optimized by adding spring to different joints, energetic cost of walk was then calculated at different walking speeds. Support knee was then mechanically locked and gait was optimized to find the walking cost. The energetic cost of walking determined for the above two cases was then compared to the baseline cost. It was observed that addition of torsional springs at both hips can reduce the walking cost up to 38%, support hip up to 40% with spring stiffness as an optimization parameter for both cases while mechanically locking the support knee can reduce the cost of walking up to 92% at slow walking speeds with gait and knee locking angle optimized.

We propose a mechanical design for the knee joints of a planar bipedal robot. Each knee joint is composed of cross four-bar with springs. The dynamic model of a planar bipedal robot with cross four-bar knees and a parametric optimization problem are presented to produce a set of optimal reference trajectories. We use these trajectories to compare the performance of the bipedal robot with respect to different physical characteristics of the knee joints.