Nexus

Book 1 of the Nexus Trilogy - Continued in Book 2: Crux In the near future, the experimental nano-drug Nexus can link humans together, mind to mind. There are some who want to improve it. There are some who want to eradicate it. And there are others who just want to exploit it. When a young scientist is caught improving Nexus, he's thrust over his head into a world of danger and international espionage - for there is far more at stake than anyone realizes. From the halls of academe to the halls of power, from the headquarters of an elite US agency in Washington DC to a secret lab beneath a top university in Shanghai, from the underground parties of San Francisco to the illegal biotech markets of Bangkok, from an international neuroscience conference to a remote monastery in the mountains of Thailand - Nexus is a thrill ride through a future on the brink of explosion. Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlisted for the Prometheus Award Shortlisted for the Kitschies Award An NPR Best Book of 2013! "Good. Scary good." - Wired "Provocative... A double-edged vision of the post-human."- The Wall Street Journal "A lightning bolt of a novel, with a sense of awe missing from a lot of current fiction."- Ars Technica "Starred Review. Naam turns in a stellar performance in his debut SF novel... What matters here is the remarkable scope and narrative power of the story."- Booklist "A superbly plotted high-tension technothriller ... full of delicious, thoughtful moral ambiguity ... a hell of a read."- Cory Doctorow "A gripping piece of near future speculation... all the grit and pace of the Bourne films."- Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space "A sharp, chilling look at our likely future."- Charles Stross, author of Singularity Sky and Halting State "The most brilliant hard SF thriller I've read in years. Reminds me of Michael Crichton at his best."- Brenda Cooper, author of The Creative Fire "A rich cast of characters...the action scenes are crisp, the glimpses of future tech and culture are mesmerizing."- Publishers Weekly "Any old writer can take you on a roller coaster ride, but it takes a wizard like Ramez Naam to take you on the same ride while he builds the roller coaster a few feet in front of you."- John Barnes, author of Directive 51 "Michael Crichton-like."- SFX Magazine "An incredibly imaginative, action-packed intellectual romp!"- Dani Kollin, Prometheus Award-winning author of The Unincorporated Man "The only serious successor to Michael Crichton."- Scott Harrison, author of Archangel

The world of development thinkers and practitioners is abuzz with a new lexicon: the idea of "the nexus" between water, food, and energy which is intuitively compelling. It promises better integration of multiple sectoral elements, a better transition to greener economies, and sustainable development. However, there appears to be little agreement on its precise meaning, whether it only complements existing environmental governance approaches or how it can be enhanced in national contexts. One current approach to the nexus treats it as a risk and security matter while another treats it within economic rationality addressing externalities across sector. A third perspective acknowledges it as a fundamentally political process requiring negotiation amongst different actors with distinct perceptions, interests, and practices. This perspective highlights the fact that technical solutions for improving coherence within the nexus may have unintended and negative impacts in other policy areas, such as poverty alleviation and education. The Water–Food–Energy Nexus: Power, Politics and Justice lays out the managerial-technical definitions of the nexus and challenges these conceptions by bringing to the forefront the politics of the nexus, around two key dimensions – a dynamic understanding of water–food–energy systems, and a normative positioning around nexus debates, in particular around social justice. The authors argue that a shift in nexus governance is required towards approaches where limits to control are acknowledged, and more reflexive/plural strategies adopted. This book will be of interest to academic researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in the fields of international development studies, environmental politics, and science and technology studies, as well as international relations.

The existence of water, energy, and food (WEF) is critical for people to fulfil their basic needs, to achieve welfare, and to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The WEF security topic is becoming widely discussed in developing and developed countries. Major components of WEF security i.e. availability, accessibility, and quality should be achieved integratedly to avoid unexpected impacts. The interconnectedness among endogenous and exogenous variables such as environmental, socio-economic, and political factors makes this issue immensely complex. The nexus approach attempts to integrate management and governance across sectors and scales to improve WEF security. This study aims to grasp WEF security in a local context and evaluate the implications of planned local interventions by developing a conceptual and quantitative analysis with local stakeholders. Karawang Regency in Indonesia is chosen as the case study. Several strategies for WEF-related sectors are formulated using location quotient (LQ) and competitive position (CP) methods. In addition, qualitative and quantitative system dynamics models are established by involving related stakeholders through group model building. Finally, a nexus-based framework for WEF security is developed to assist local policymakers in doing the evaluation and planning of WEF resources in the region.

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a representation of an economy that shows the circular flow of all transfers and real transactions between sectors and institutions. The SAM, which is a square matrix, describes the flows of incomes from activities, taking the form of factor remunerations, that are consequently received by the households for consumption on goods and services. The accounts in the SAM are the production activities, commodities, institutions, and factors of production. According to data availability, the production activities can be further disaggregated to include more detailed information on sub-sectoral or regional production. Similarly, the factors of production could be differentiated by the level of skills or the location of employment. Households can be disaggregated by income quintiles or by rural and urban residence.

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The Extended Energy-Growth Nexus: Theory and Empirical Applications advances the established bivariate econometric relationship which inextricably links energy consumption to economic growth. The book extends this "nexus" to accommodate variables such as globalization, institutional variables, financial variables and the energy "mix." Rooted firmly in the modern literature, it covers empirical applications such as the evaluation of renewable energy incentives, the electricity generation mix, and sustainable development. Each application area incorporates modern econometric methodologies, including VAR, panel VAR, ARDL, panel ARDL, Asymmetric panel ARDL, and Panel Quantile Regression. Throughout chapters are accompanied by illustrative Stata and EViews code, demonstrating their uses in applied research. Primes researchers to understand advanced literature and current methodologies within the energy-growth nexus Provides a rich set of working tools for econometricians working on real-world energy and growth problems Accompanied by representative databases and illustrative Stata and EViews code, facilitating replication and use

The purpose of this paper is used to document the different steps followed to construct the 2010/11 Social Accounting Matrix for Ethiopia. The SAM is an extension of the Standard Nexus Structure. It consists of 63 activity sectors, 67 commodity sectors, three types of factors of production: labor (rural and urban disaggregated by level of education), land, and capital (disaggregated by crops, livestock, mining and other sectors). The household sector is divided spatially into urban and rural households. Rural households are further disaggregated into households that earn crop and/or livestock incomes (i.e., farm households) and those that do no earn incomes from either source (i.e., nonfarm households). Households are further disaggregated into per capita expenditure quintiles. This SAM allows analyzing issues at the detailed level and to better understand the potential impacts of policy changes for both better off and more vulnerable households.