Subnational climate entrepreneurship: innovative climate action in California and São Paulo

The distinct role of subnational governments such as states and provinces in addressing climate change has been increasingly acknowledged. But while most studies investigate the causes and consequences of particular governments’ actions and networking activities, this article argues that subnational governments can develop climate action as a collective entrepreneurial activity. Addressing many elements explored in this special issue, it focuses on the second question and identifies climate entrepreneurship in two subnational governments—the states of California (USA) and São Paulo (Brazil). Examining internal action, as well as interaction with local authorities, national governments and the international regime, entrepreneurial activities are identified in the invention, diffusion and evaluation of subnational climate policy in each case. The article draws from the recent scholarship on policy innovation, entrepreneurship and climate governance. It contributes to the literature by exploring entrepreneurial subnational government activity in addressing climate change and expanding the understanding of the effects of policy innovation at the subnational level

Using the time weighted method to estimate betas of emerging markets

As the economic and financial characteristics of countries change, so would be their betas and correlations of their investment returns with that of the U.S. Such changes are expected to be particularly significant for emerging market nations as they strive for rapid industrialization and modernization. OLS estimator for the beta coefficient would not be the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (BLUE) if beta is non-stationary or changes from period to period. This paper proposes a special type of time weighted least square method (TWLS), which assigns greater weights on the regression errors in more recent periods, for estimating the current beta. This TWLS approach can tackle the problem of intertemporal heteroscedasticity and thus yields a beta that is more efficient. The breakthrough lies on the viability of the method without a-priori knowledge or estimation of the values of the weights. This yields a significant practical advantage since the weights are unobservable in the real world. Since the Time Weighted Method estimator is the coefficient estimator of beta value for the latest period in the sample, statisticians who base their forecasts on the beta estimates derived from the Time Weighted Least Square can expect to outperform those relying on beta values obtained from conventional estimation. We use a sample of daily returns of thirty-one emerging markets stock over the period of January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2002. We find that most of the tstatistics for the variances are significant at the 95% level, indicating that the Var(s)‘s are not zero for nearly every emerging-markets. This implies that the betas for these markets do shift over time. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2004

A solution for fault-tolerance in replicated database systems

A distributed database system is subject to site failure and link failure. This paper presents a reactive system approach to achieving the fault-tolerance in such a system. The reactive system concepts are an attractive paradigm for system design, development and maintenance because it separates policies from mechanisms. In the paper we give a solution using different reactive modules to implement the fault-tolerant policies and the failure detection mechanisms. The solution shows that they can be separated without impact on each other thus the system can adapt to constant changes in user requirements.<br /

Induction and Regulation of Chloroplast Replication in Mature Tobacco Leaf Tissue

Chloroplast replication was induced in mature tobacco leaf tissue (Nicotiana tabacum L.) by culturing leaf discs on a sterile medium composed of salts and sucrose. Chloroplast replicaton is greatly enhanced by the addition of kinetin to this medium. Kinetin also enhances cell enlargement, but cell division does not occur. Chloroplast replication is nonsynchronous and proceeds most rapidly when the cell enlargement rate decreases. Chloroplast replication is light-dependent, but cell enlargement occurs in both light and dark. Chloroplast replication resumes when discs cultured in the dark are returned to the light. It appears that chloroplast replication is related to cell expansion. The possibility of inducing synchronous replication of chloroplasts in tobacco cells is discussed