MONITORING WEATHER AT PORTLAND GENERAL ELECTRIC

At Portland General Electric (PGE), an electric power utility company in Portland, Oregon, monitoring the weather and smokestack emissions is not just a sidelight, it's a requirement of doing business. Because PGE operates a nuclear power plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requires that weather conditions, which might affect the dispersal of routine low levels of radiation released from the plant, be monitored daily. This includes measuring wind speeds and directions and other atmospheric conditions. Similarly, to meet air quality and stack emission requirements of the Oregon state environmental office, PGE must monitor the emissions from its coal plant and two combustion turbine plants.

While keeping accurate environmental records can be expensive, PGE's failure to do so could result in regulatory fines. In 1986, when a PC system was installed, PGE used a monitoring system that involved collecting magnetic tapes from weather and emissions data loggers, mounting the tape on PGE's mainframe, and executing a program to produce the needed reports. This system involved a lag of several days between the collection of data and the meteorologist's being able to check it for possible malfunctions in the data recording device. Thus, any malfunctions would not be discovered for several days. The data logger was backed up by strip charts, but significant additional labor was required to convert the data to a usable form.

To speed up the processing of weather data, in 1989 PGE installed a local area network (LAN) composed of PCs that accept the data from an improved data logger/cassette recorder system. These PCs are used to check the data for reasonableness using a series of BASIC programs written by meteorologist Terry Worrell. After being processed by PCs on the LAN, the data are transferred to PGE's mainframe, where more accuracy checks are run before the data are included in reports that are sent to the NRC. The data are also transferred to a PC-based data base management program that generates reports for the state environmental office

LESSON 8

Exercise 8.1

Give the synonyms to the following words.

To use, general, easy, complexity, totally, difficult, to require, common, different, way, to choose, particular, desired, to call, to make, to result in, data, opposite, necessary, to indicate, to operate, earlier, to perform, quickly, disadvantage, to learn, of coarse, a set, to allow, actually, great, easy, to continue, completely, to apply, to generate, to create, to connect, diagram.

Exercise 8.2

Translate the following word combinations paying attention to infinitives.

1. The group works hard to coordinate the research…

2. To coordinate the research means to exchange…

3. The research to be coordinated deals with…

4. Hardly the group was supposed to coordinate the research…

5. To coordinate the research, the group…

6. The group supposed the research to coordinate the efforts…

7. The work is to coordinate …

8. The work is to be coordinated…

9. The work to be coordinated, researches...

10. Researchers had to coordinate the work to be able…

11. To work in group one is to coordinate the work…

12. The work is hard to be coordinated…

13. The work is hardly to be coordinated…

14. We heard the work be coordinated…

15. The work to be coordinated the researchers should…

16. The work to be coordinated researches the influence of…

17. The research is reported to have been coordinated by…

18. They are known to be coordinating their researches…

19. Should research be coordinated, the group could…

20. To coordinate the research they were ordered to work out…

Exercise 8.3

Translate the following sentences paying attention to infinitives.

1. The original developers, US Robotics and 3Com, appear to have been taken by surprise by the huge success of the product and it was left to a startup, Handspring, to make the running in terms of innovation.

2. However, Palm seems to be sticking with its proprietary SD expansion technology rather than choosing one of the more widely used industry standard alternatives.

3. While questions remain over the traditional quirkiness of the Psion products, this is unlikely to have a negative impact on the Symbian platform itself, and developers who focus on that are likely to do extremely well.

4. Microsoft obviously expects developers to move over to it rapidly, as it becomes a key output format in the next release of Visual Studio.

5. Internet service providers have invested over US $1 billion in internet-based telephony systems only to find more and more customers sending voice over instant messaging.

6. The system could respond that, for instance, the user is 85 percent likely to be back in the office within 20 minutes.

7. Teens hardly use e-mail, and when they do, often it’s merely to exchange documents, or to communicate with the adult world.

8. John Hennessy is the first computer scientist to head such a large and diverse U.S. university (Stanford).

9. For someone about to enter the job market, this was not a bad position to be in.

10. To implement the complex 3-D transformations, which required using floating-point arithmetic the design resorted to microcode, a series of stored instructions that are not program addressable.

11. There were two issues to deal with, a technical one and a business one.

12. The publisher expected lifetime sales of the book to be about 15 000; it hit that number the first year.

13. Faults that escape testing will annoy these people, but you are likely to get back properly documented fault reports.

14. To compete successfully in so large a market calls for heavy investment.

15. When first released, the Tuning Wizard was the only commercial tool to advise the administrator on how to make change to a database’s design so as to speed up a query and calculate potential performance improvements.

16. He says it’s time for basic research to play an even greater role in universities, and that corporations need to commit to funding such research.

17. The technology will be capable of theoretical peak transmission speed of 2.4 Mb/s, though average download rates are expected to be around 600 kb/s.

18. The process of developing a software solution based on plans and schedules containing estimates, assumptions and other uncertainties – not to mention the people factor – is a risky business.

Text A

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 885