Price Floors for Emissions Trading

Price floors in greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes can have advantages for technological innovation, price volatility, and management of cost uncertainty, but implementation has potential pitfalls. We argue that the best mechanism for implementing a price floor is to have firms pay an extra fee or tax. This has budgetary advantages and is more compatible with international permit trading than alternative approaches that dominate the academic and policy debate. The fee approach can also be used to implement more general hybrid approaches to emissions pricing.Price Floor, Price Ceiling, Carbon Tax, Emissions Trading, Carbon Pricing, Price and Quantity Controls, Waxman-Markey Bill

Human dimensions of global environmental change: A review of frameworks and research gaps.

This review of current knowledge in, and development of, priorities for research into the human dimensions of global environmental change has been conducted to assist the Foundation for Research Science and Technology to formulate their research needs agenda. An overview of the emergence of the human dimension of the global environmental change research field is used as a prelude to a review of the international literature on frameworks for conducting human dimensions research. The terminology used in the human dimension field is diverse. An attempt is therefore made to consolidate the myriad of definitions for key concepts, in order to form a basis for human dimensions research in New Zealand and build a platform for the remainder of this report. Three disciplinary areas of academic inquiry were explored in the context of human dimensions of global environmental change research: economics, law and biological sciences. These disciplinary perspectives are reviewed through the international literature and in a New Zealand context. A conceptual framework for research into the human dimensions of global environmental change is provided based on the knowledge-base developed from the both international and New Zealand research. Core concepts, such as found in multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research are reviewed in historical context to form the basis for a specific research framework for New Zealand. Some general needs for research are derived from the New Zealand framework. The remainder of this report details the methods used for drawing out expert opinion on the priorities for research on the human dimensions of global environmental change in the context of information, knowledge and method. Thirty-eight interviews and two hui were conducted and 254 research needs defined by questions were obtained. A modified Delphi technique was applied to the questions and prioritised lists of responses are provided. The final list Provides European/Pakeha and Māori perspectives. Divergence and convergence between the European/Pakeha and Māori responses is provided, as well as justification for the prioritisation stance that is taken. This research had four outputs: A conceptual framework for considering the human dimensions of global environmental changes and research contributions; A description of the gaps in knowledge that impede effective response to global change and provisional research needs: one for New Zealand generally, and one on Māori in particular; A network of end-users and research providers that are cognisant of, and contributors to, the human dimensions research assessment; A set of priority research needs pertaining to the human dimensions of global environmental change, in a form suitable for use by FRST

Mainely Gay, Vol.4, No.08 (August 1977)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1007/thumbnail.jp

Mainely Gay, Vol.4, No.06 (June 1977)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1005/thumbnail.jp

Patient-Centred Laboratory Validation Using Software Agents

Guidelines are self-contained documents which healthcare professionals reference to obtain knowledge about a specific condition or process. They interface with these documents and apply known facts about specific patients to gain useful supportive information to aid in developing a diagnosis or manage a condition. To automate this process a series of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and workflow processes are constructed using the contents of these documents in order to manage the validation flow of a patient sample. These processes decompose the guidelines into workflow plans, which are then called using condition triggers controlled by a centralised management engine. The software BDI agent offers an alternative dynamic which more closely matches the modus operandi of narrative based medical guidelines. An agent’s beliefs capture information attributes, plans capture the deliberative and action attributes, and desire captures the motivational attributes of the guideline in a self-contained autonomous software module. Agents acting on behalf of guidelines which overlap and interweave in similar domains can collaborate and coordinate in a loosely coupled fashion without the need for an all encompassing centralised plan

Mainely Gay, Vol.4, No.07 (July 1977)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1006/thumbnail.jp

Communication of Medical Information Using Agents

Agents are self-contained software entities which act faithfully and autonomously on behalf of a body of knowledge. They can operate in a standalone capacity, or as part of a social group collaborating and coordinating activities with other software agents. To access their knowledge, agents are interfaced with using message passing communication. The principle behind medical communications is to provide a means for exchanging information and knowledge from one computerised location to another, whilst preserving its true meaning and understanding between the listener and sender. Agent communication is similar to medical communications, but must provide an additional framework element to allow agents to interact at a social and operational level. Social aspects relate to agents collaborating on shared objectives, and operational aspects relate to coordination of tasks between the loosely coupled agents working as part of a group. Medical communications focus on data exchanges specific to the medical domain, while agent communication was designed for a much broader audience. Therefore, it is essential to verify if agent communications can support standard medical data exchanges. This paper investigates current forms of agent based communications and demonstrates they can support medical communication, yet retain their social and interaction information exchange functionality

An investigation into the design and implementation of an internet-scale network simulator

Simulation is a complex task with many research applications - chiey as a research tool, to test and evaluate hypothetical scenarios. Though many simulations execute similar operations and utilise similar data, there are few simulation frameworks or toolkits that allow researchers to rapidly develop their concepts. Those that are available to researchers are limited in scope, or use old technology that is no longer useful to modern researchers. As a result of this, many researchers build their own simulations without a framework, wasting time and resources on a system that could already cater for the majority of their simulation's requirements. In this work, a system is proposed for the creation of a scalable, dynamic-resolution network simulation framework that provides scalable scope for researchers, using modern technologies and languages. This framework should allow researchers to rapidly develop a broad range of semantically-rich simulations, without the necessity of superor grid-computers or clusters. Design and implementation are discussed and alternative network simulations are compared to the proposed framework. A series of simulations, focusing on malware, is run on an implementation of this framework, and the results are compared to expectations for the outcomes of those simulations. In conclusion, a critical review of the simulator is made, considering any extensions or shortcomings that need to be addressed

Mainely Gay, Vol.4, No.09 (September 1977)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1008/thumbnail.jp