A Whirlwind in Occupied Holland
Penicillin was transformed from a laboratory curiosity to the first massproduced antibacterial chemotherapeutic agent during the Second World War. Popular accounts of this process, particularly those that appeared immediately after the war, have tended to cast events as a continuous series of related breakthroughs. However, there were several independent attempts in Europe to produce penicillin during World War II, but none except the Anglo-American effort proved successful. Despite attention focusing on that successful venture, those other wartime efforts reveal something of the human capacity for resourcefulness in straightened circumstances and during a period of censorship.
Auntibiotics: the BBC, penicillin, and the second world war
Gilbert Shama considers the BBC’s dissemination of the news about penicillin during the second world war
A Short-Term and High-Resolution Distribution System Load Forecasting Approach Using Support Vector Regression With Hybrid Parameters Optimization
This paper proposes an approach for distribution system load forecasting, which aims to provide highly accurate short-term load forecasting with high resolution utilizing a support vector regression (SVR) based forecaster and a two-step hybrid parameters optimization method. Specifically, because the load profiles in distribution systems contain abrupt deviations, a data normalization is designed as the pretreatment for the collected historical load data. Then an SVR model is trained by the load data to forecast the future load. For better performance of SVR, a two-step hybrid optimization algorithm is proposed to determine the best parameters. In the first step of the hybrid optimization algorithm, a designed grid traverse algorithm (GTA) is used to narrow the parameters searching area from a global to local space. In the second step, based on the result of the GTA, particle swarm optimization is used to determine the best parameters in the local parameter space. After the best parameters are determined, the SVR model is used to forecast the short-term load deviation in the distribution system. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to some classic methods in later sections of this paper.