Cap and Trade: How the Sulfur Dioxide Allowance Market Works, and How it Could Work Better

This Article provides an overview of the sulfur dioxide allowances market, and identifies ways in which could be improved. This information can be used to improve the performance of the sulfur dioxide allowances market, and incorporated into new emissions allowance markets to improve their operation. Part I of this Article provides background information on the creation and operation of the sulfur dioxide allowances market. Part II reports and analyzes data regarding the actual behavior of the market from 1995 to 2003. Part III engages in an economic analysis of the interaction between the allowances market and the power industry. Part IV then identifies and describes some barriers to efficient trading. Finally, Part V will explore potential solutions to the problems caused by the capital gains tax. Improving the efficiency of the sulfur dioxide allowances market will allow firms to spend less money to maintain current emissions levels. To the extent that environmental regulations are constrained by industry costs, this improved efficiency will allow for more stringent environmental regulation

The Difficulties of Encouraging Cooperation in a Zero-Sum Game

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure generally provide only the “rules of the road” on which litigation is conducted. However, in some areas the Rules step outside of this role and attempt to overtly encourage cooperation. One such rule is Rule 68, which allows a defendant to make an offer of judgment to the plaintiff, and provides that if the plaintiff refuses and subsequently wins less money than the defendant offered, the plaintiff must cover the defendant’s costs. Rule 68 was launched into prominence when the Supreme Court ruled, in Marek v. Chesney that a Rule 68 offer could negate the operation of attorney’s fee-shifting statutes. A storm of proposals, counter-proposals, analyses and critiques of the Rule soon followed. This article compares Rule 68 to Rule 4(d), which has been operating quietly for some time to encourage parties to cooperate to avoid the costs of service of process. The comparison serves to highlight some of the unappreciated features of Rule 68 as it currently stands, and some of the potential pitfalls to the commonly proposed expansion of the rule. The article concludes by offering a reform proposal designed to enhance the likelihood of reasonable settlements while avoiding the normative and practical problems inherent in expanding Rule 68

In search of virus carriers of the 1988 and 2002 phocine distemper virus outbreaks in European harbour seals

European harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) populations decreased substantially during the phocine distemper virus (PDV) outbreaks of 1988 and 2002. Different hypotheses have stated that various seals and terrestrial carnivore species might be the source of infection. To further analyse these hypotheses, grey (Halichoerus grypus) and ringed (Phoca hispida) seals, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and minks (Mustela lutreola) were sampled from the North Sea and East Greenland coasts between 1988 and 2004 and investigated by RT-PCR using a panmorbillivirus primer pair. However, all samples were negative for morbillivirus nucleic acid

Droplets on Inclined Plates: Local and Global Hysteresis of Pinned Capillary Surfaces

Local contact line pinning prevents droplets from rearranging to minimal global energy, and models for droplets without pinning cannot predict their shape. We show that experiments are much better described by a theory, developed herein, that does account for the constrained contact line motion, using as example droplets on tilted plates. We map out their shapes in suitable phase spaces. For 2D droplets, the critical point of maximum tilt depends on the hysteresis range and Bond number. In 3D, it also depends on the initial width, highlighting the importance of the deposition history.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication on GPGPU clusters: A new storage format and a scalable implementation

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (spMVM) is the dominant operation in many sparse solvers. We investigate performance properties of spMVM with matrices of various sparsity patterns on the nVidia "Fermi" class of GPGPUs. A new "padded jagged diagonals storage" (pJDS) format is proposed which may substantially reduce the memory overhead intrinsic to the widespread ELLPACK-R scheme. In our test scenarios the pJDS format cuts the overall spMVM memory footprint on the GPGPU by up to 70%, and achieves 95% to 130% of the ELLPACK-R performance. Using a suitable performance model we identify performance bottlenecks on the node level that invalidate some types of matrix structures for efficient multi-GPGPU parallelization. For appropriate sparsity patterns we extend previous work on distributed-memory parallel spMVM to demonstrate a scalable hybrid MPI-GPGPU code, achieving efficient overlap of communication and computation.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Added reference to other recent sparse matrix format

Cotranscription of the electron transport protein genes nifJ and nifF in Enterobacter agglomerans 333

A nucleotide sequence showing extensive homology to the nifF gene, which codes for a flavodoxin involved in nitrogen fixation in Klebsiella pneumoniae, was localized on the plasmid pEA3 of Enterobacter agglomerans and determined. The analysis of transcriptional fusions, as well as transcript protection assays, indicated a novel nif gene organization, that is, the cotranscription of nifJ and nifF