As the variations or short-term disturbances in frequency increase, electronic devices start to malfunction, experience reduced performance and, in extreme cases, suffer permanent damage.

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The grid needs short-, medium-, and longer-term storage to run smoothly, and car batteries could most easily meet the short-term need, a process called frequency regulation.

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The dominance of short-termism is evidenced by the magnitude of institutional stock "renting" for terms of 12 months or less, the volume of high-speed, high-frequency algorithmic short-term trading, the short average tenures of chief executive officers and the dominance of executive compensation tied solely to short-term results.

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Notably, the most spirited discussion I attended was about whether high-frequency trading hurts long-term investors.

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The New York Independent System Operator has defined short-term energy storage devices like flywheels and batteries as frequency regulators, allowing them to participate in regulated markets.

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Joyce, of The Bradford Group, and other advertisers interviewed for this article declined to specify the exact conversion rate, but Schock, of Google, puts it this way: The higher up a company is ranked in the search query and the higher the frequency of consumers Googl-ing a certain term, the better the chances of landing a sale.

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The burden would fall mostly on high frequency traders while having minimal impact on long-term investors such as pension funds.

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The idea of long-term tax planning is essentially impossible, since individuals, circumstances and tax laws change with frequency.

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