Financial Management of Weather Risk with Energy Derivatives

In this paper we describe the major issues in the weather risk management. We focus on the management of financial risks connected with weather. We first provide a general discussion of the impact of weather on the economy. Then we follow with the overview of the development of the weather risk management. The core of the paper in then devoted to the role of weather derivatives as financial tools for weather risk management.Financial risk; Weather risk; Derivatives; Energy

The notion of social class in Czech political discourse

The article studies the discourse on social class that emerged around the Czech parliamentary election of 2010. The authors look at Czech discourse from the perspective of the wider discussion about the role that the notion of class plays in post-communist societies. While some researchers argue that social class is absent as a category within post-communist political discourse, other researchers report the existence of derogatory discourse on the lower classes and even consistent symbolic boundaries between classes. This analysis contributes to the discussion by offering recent evidence of both the rejection and the use of class-based classification in the discourse. The authors argue that the rejection of the notion of class goes hand in hand with the symbolic division of society into class-like groups. They illustrate how these divisions are tied to the idea of a legitimate political subjectivity and conclude by noting similarities to contemporary ‘Western’ discourse on social class

Simple yet stable bearing-only navigation

This article describes a simple monocular navigation system for a mobile robot based on the map-and-replay technique. The presented method is robust and easy to implement and does not require sensor calibration or structured environment, and its computational complexity is independent of the environment size. The method can navigate a robot while sensing only one landmark at a time, making it more robust than other monocular approaches. The aforementioned properties of the method allow even low-cost robots to effectively act in large outdoor and indoor environments with natural landmarks only. The basic idea is to utilize a monocular vision to correct only the robot's heading, leaving distance measurements to the odometry. The heading correction itself can suppress the odometric error and prevent the overall position error from diverging. The influence of a map-based heading estimation and odometric errors on the overall position uncertainty is examined. A claim is stated that for closed polygonal trajectories, the position error of this type of navigation does not diverge. The claim is defended mathematically and experimentally. The method has been experimentally tested in a set of indoor and outdoor experiments, during which the average position errors have been lower than 0.3 m for paths more than 1 km long

Brownfields Information Brocker

This paper discusses a possible solution for developing a virtual place for advertisement, investment and the harvesting, collecting and sharing of information concerning brownfields - now abundantly availabe land that was previously used for industrial, commercial or other uses. The novelty of the proposed solution is an automated brownfield related information integration (brownfields data integrator or brownfields broker) from various sources and its further distribution for other purposes (reuse of collected information) in a machine readable format and that meets European requirements regarding the integration of spatial information (INSPIRE directive and its related activities). This virtual place will provide services for brownfields related automated data harvesting, data update by local governments and citizens, as well as mechanisms for the reuse of this data through Application Protocol Interfaces and other „machine to machine “interfaces. The brownfield broker should also help to improve the ratio between developments made on brownfields and greenfields, which are currently imbalanced and statistically unknown in the European Union (EU). The beneficiaries from the brownfields data integrator will be very broad: owners, entrepreneurs (potential investors), municipalities (will be able to upload and then re-use relevant reliable, classified, updated information about brownfields and to advertise it through the application), planners, realtors (will be able to publicise the data using their web portals), financial institutions (for providing distance financial services), volunteers, scientists and the general public (for their personal interest, data creation, use, publishing and informing)

Automatic C Compiler Generation from Architecture Description Language ISAC

This paper deals with retargetable compiler generation. After an introduction to application-specific instruction set processor design and a review of code generation in compiler backends, ISAC architecture description language is introduced. Automatic approach to instruction semantics extraction from ISAC models which result is usable for backend generation is presented. This approach was successfully tested on three models of MIPS, ARM and TI MSP430 architectures. Further backend generation process that uses extracted instruction is semantics presented. This process was currently tested on the MIPS architecture and some preliminary results are shown

Instructor Selector Generation from Architecture Description

We describe an automated way to generate data for a practical LLVM instruction selector based on machine-generated description of the target architecture at register transfer level. The generated instruction selector can handle arbitrarily complex machine instructions with no internal control flow, and can automatically find and take advantage of arithmetic properties of an instructions, specialized pseudo-registers and special cases of immediate operands

Financial Management of Weather Risk with Energy Derivatives

In this paper we describe the major issues in the weather risk management. We focus on the management of financial risks connected with weather. We first provide a general discussion of the impact of weather on the economy. Then we follow with the overview of the development of the weather risk management. The core of the paper in then devoted to the role of weather derivatives as financial tools for weather risk management