The oil market : recent developments and outlook

Artículo de revistaThe past three years have seen a radical change in the structure of the oil market, as a result of the deep-seated transformation the US oil industry has undergone and of OPEC’s strategic reaction. This has translated into a substantial reduction in the price of oil. Specifically, this article analyses three key factors behind oil market developments in the past two years: the resilience of US shale oil production, the new turn in OPEC’S strategy to cut output and the slowdown in demand. Further, the medium and long-term outlook for this market is discussed, with the conclusion drawn that a marked rise in prices owing to the foreseeable course of supply and demand is not expected. While some fall-off in supply is contemplated owing to the decline in investment, demand, too, will be contained by greater efficiency in the use of oil-derived fuels and social awareness about their negative externalitie

Distributed eventual leader election in the crash-recovery and general omission failure models.

102 p.Distributed applications are present in many aspects of everyday life. Banking, healthcare or transportation are examples of such applications. These applications are built on top of distributed systems. Roughly speaking, a distributed system is composed of a set of processes that collaborate among them to achieve a common goal. When building such systems, designers have to cope with several issues, such as different synchrony assumptions and failure occurrence. Distributed systems must ensure that the delivered service is trustworthy.Agreement problems compose a fundamental class of problems in distributed systems. All agreement problems follow the same pattern: all processes must agree on some common decision. Most of the agreement problems can be considered as a particular instance of the Consensus problem. Hence, they can be solved by reduction to consensus. However, a fundamental impossibility result, namely (FLP), states that in an asynchronous distributed system it is impossible to achieve consensus deterministically when at least one process may fail. A way to circumvent this obstacle is by using unreliable failure detectors. A failure detector allows to encapsulate synchrony assumptions of the system, providing (possibly incorrect) information about process failures. A particular failure detector, called Omega, has been shown to be the weakest failure detector for solving consensus with a majority of correct processes. Informally, Omega lies on providing an eventual leader election mechanism

The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocol Design and Implementation

Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have recently been extensively used by decentralized data management systems with non-trustworthy infrastructures, e.g., permissioned blockchains. BFT protocols cover a broad spectrum of design dimensions from infrastructure settings such as the communication topology, to more technical features such as commitment strategy and even fundamental social choice properties like order-fairness. The proliferation of different BFT protocols has rendered it difficult to navigate the BFT landscape, let alone determine the protocol that best meets application needs. This paper presents Bedrock, a unified platform for BFT protocols design, analysis, implementation, and experiments. Bedrock proposes a design space consisting of a set of design choices capturing the trade-offs between different design space dimensions and providing fundamentally new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of BFT protocols. Bedrock enables users to analyze and experiment with BFT protocols within the space of plausible choices, evolve current protocols to design new ones, and even uncover previously unknown protocols. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of Bedrock to uniformly evaluate BFT protocols in new ways that were not possible before due to the diverse assumptions made by these protocols. The results validate Bedrock's ability to analyze and derive BFT protocols

The Disproportionality Project: Addressing issues relating to the disproportionately high representation of Islington’s and Haringey’s BAME young people in the Criminal Justice System

This report presents the findings and recommendations from the second partnership project involving Islington Borough Council and criminologists at City, University of London. The first project, Enhancing the work of the Islington Integrated Gangs Team, was published in 2019. This second project involved evaluating a programme designed to tackle key issues and outcomes relating to the disproportionate representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) young people in the Criminal Justice System and beyond

Systematic review of energy theft practices and autonomous detection through artificial intelligence methods

Energy theft poses a significant challenge for all parties involved in energy distribution, and its detection is crucial for maintaining stable and financially sustainable energy grids. One potential solution for detecting energy theft is through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) methods. This systematic review article provides an overview of the various methods used by malicious users to steal energy, along with a discussion of the challenges associated with implementing a generalized AI solution for energy theft detection. In this work, we analyze the benefits and limitations of AI methods, including machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks, and relate them to the specific thefts also analyzing problems arising with data collection. The article proposes key aspects of generalized AI solutions for energy theft detection, such as the use of smart meters and the integration of AI algorithms with existing utility systems. Overall, we highlight the potential of AI methods to detect various types of energy theft and emphasize the need for further research to develop more effective and generalized detection systems, providing key aspects of possible generalized solutions

Decolonising the economy in micropolities : rents, government spending and infrastructure development in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

Assessments of both legitimate governmental activity and responsible economic policy tend to be dominated by conceptions developed at the scale of the large state. Nevertheless, large state perspectives on appropriate levels of public spending relative to economic size and appropriate forms of economic activity do not always match the reality of governance and economics in micropolities (including both very small sovereign states and highly autonomous subnational jurisdictions). This paper considers the case of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), a subnational island jurisdiction of Denmark, to explore how the needs of micropolities are not served by understandings of governance and economics scaled to the large state. Focus is placed on Kalaallit Nunaat’s accrual of rents, government spending, and infrastructure development. Although Kalaallit Nunaat is, like many other micropolities, economically dependent on rents, it has been subjected to large state economic understandings that are often tied up in neocolonial processes and lead to the privileging of metropolitan expertise and development trajectories. Micropolities like Kalaallit Nunaat are better served by policy approaches that take into account the realities of small scale governance and economics, even if these fly in the face of large state experiences and expectations.peer-reviewe

Beyond Rio+20: governance for a green economy

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Center Task Force Reports, a publication series that began publishing in 2009 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.As an intellectual contribution to the preparations for the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, a.k.a. Rio +20), the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future convened a task force of experts to discuss the role of institutions in the actualization of a green economy in the context of sustainable development. A stellar group of experts from academia, government and civil society convened at the Pardee Center and were asked to outline ideas about what the world has learned about institutions for sustainable development from the past, and what we can propose about the governance challenges and opportunities for the continuous development of a green economy in the future. The Task Force members were encouraged to think big and think bold. They were asked to be innovative in their ideas, and maybe even a little irreverent and provocative. They were charged specifically NOT to come to consensus about specific recommendations, but to present a variety and diversity of views. This report presents their thoughts and ideas

‘Think about what our industry stands for….’: exploring the impact of external factors on line manager perceptions of graduate employability

Increasing emphasis is being placed upon employer expectations in research on graduate employability, in response to the widely claimed gap between employer expectations and graduates’ understanding of these expectations. For graduates, being uncertain of their employer’s expectations may threaten the ease of their transition into the workplace and their job satisfaction, even leading to issues around graduate retention for employers. External influences on the graduate labour market such as differences in industry/sector level expectations and economic/political factors, can pose further complications. This paper presents a cross-industry analysis of employer expectations of graduates, drawing from four selected case study vignettes aimed at uncovering insights into these variances. Findings offer implications for policy makers and higher education providers around the design and delivery of a curriculum that appropriately prepares students for the graduate labour market, whilst also catering for industry-level expectations particularly in light of the UK’s forthcoming departure from the EU