Post-Crisis Financial Reform in Korea: A Critical Appraisal

In the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1997-98 South Korea has undertaken a number of financial reforms under IMF auspices. One of such reforms was in financial supervision, which created the Financial Supervisory Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service. In spite of these reforms Korea has recently experienced a costly financial instability relating to credit-card companies and household debts. Korea’s success in bringing about rapid economic recovery from the crisis may have lessened, as suggested by the World Bank, the urgency for full financial reform. This paper, however, argues that the newly created supervisory agencies, although created as independent agencies, have not in fact functioned as such and thus failed to carry out proper supervision over credit-card companies. It is argued that those agencies have not been able to function independently due to institutional constraints imposed on them by other extant, formal as well as informal, institutions in Korea.Financial reform, financial supervision, institutions

Power Plant Economic Analysis: Maximizing Lifecycle Profitability by Simulating Preliminary Design Solutions of Steam-Cycle Conditions

Many existing financial models for power plants chose a design based on the maximum thermal efficiency excluding the operational (OPEX) and capital (CAPEX) cost variations of technical factors. These factors are often fixed because including them in financial assessments can be burdensome and it is assumed that maximum efficiency equals maximum profit. However, this assumption may not always be right. Through 19,440 power plant steam-cycle design solutions and their associated OPEX and CAPEX, this study found the eighth most thermally-efficient solution to be $1.284 M more profitable than the traditional thermally-optimized design solution. As such, this paper presents a model incorporating technical factors through parametric estimation by minimizing the burden on decision makers. While this may reduce precision, it allows for quick cost assessments across differing design solutions. The data for model development was collected from a Korean-constructed, operational 600 MW coal-fired power plant in the Philippines. Using the Thermoflex software, nearly all design configurations' heat rate outputs are simulated. Profitability is then optimized based on the resultant design configuration's impact on revenue and CAPEX and OPEX costs. The simulation inputs included variables found to be most impactful on the steam generated power efficiency per existing literature. Lastly, the model includes an assessment of cost impacts among recent environmental regulations by incorporating carbon tax costs and a sensitivity analysis. The economic analysis model discussed in this paper is non-existent in current literature and will aid the power-plant project investment industry through their project feasibility analyses.112sciescopu

CP1CP^{1} model with Hopf term and fractional spin statistics

We reconsider the $CP^{1}$ model with the Hopf term by using the Batalin-Fradkin-Tyutin (BFT) scheme, which is an improved version of the Dirac quantization method. We also perform a semi-classical quantization of the topological charge Q sector by exploiting the collective coordinates to explicitly show the fractional spin statistics.Comment: 15 page

Influence of Carbon Content and Isothermal Heat Treatment Temperature on the Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Ultra-High Strength Bainitic Steels

The effect of carbon content and isothermal heat treatment conditions on the microstructure evolution and mechanical properties of ultra-high strength bainitic steels was investigated. A reduction in carbon content from 0.8 wt% to 0.6 wt% in super-bainite steel with typical chemistry effectively improved not only the Charpy impact toughness but also the strength level. This suggests that reducing the carbon content is a very promising way to obtain better mechanical balance between strength and impact toughness. The higher Charpy impact toughness at a lower carbon content of 0.6 wt% is thought to result from a reduction in austenite fraction, and refinement of the austenite grain. The coarse austenite grains have a detrimental effect on impact toughness, by prematurely transforming to deformation-induced martensite during crack propagation. Mechanical properties were also affected by the isothermal treatment temperature. The lower isothermal temperature enhanced the formation of bainitic ferrite with a refined microstructure, which has a beneficial influence on strength, but reduces impact toughness. The lower impact toughness at lower isothermal temperature is attributed to the sluggish redistribution of carbon from the bainitic ferrite into the surrounding austenite. Higher solute carbon in the bainitic ferrite contributes to an increase of strength, but at the same time, encourages a propensity to cleavage fracture.11Ysciescopuskc

Self-assembled RNA interference microsponges for efficient siRNA delivery

The encapsulation and delivery of short interfering RNA (siRNA) has been realized using lipid nanoparticles1, 2, cationic complexes3, 4, inorganic nanoparticles5, 6, 7, 8, RNA nanoparticles9, 10 and dendrimers11. Still, the instability of RNA and the relatively ineffectual encapsulation process of siRNA remain critical issues towards the clinical translation of RNA as a therapeutic1, 12, 13. Here we report the synthesis of a delivery vehicle that combines carrier and cargo: RNA interference (RNAi) polymers that self-assemble into nanoscale pleated sheets of hairpin RNA, which in turn form sponge-like microspheres. The RNAi-microsponges consist entirely of cleavable RNA strands, and are processed by the cell’s RNA machinery to convert the stable hairpin RNA to siRNA only after cellular uptake, thus inherently providing protection for siRNA during delivery and transport to the cytoplasm. More than half a million copies of siRNA can be delivered to a cell with the uptake of a single RNAi-microsponge. The approach could lead to novel therapeutic routes for siRNA delivery.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH) NIBIB Grant R01-EB008082)United States. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ((ARRA) grant)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Division of Materials Research Polymers Program grant #0705234)David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT (Nanotechnology grant

Mass inflation in f(R) gravity: A conjecture on the resolution of the mass inflation singularity

We study gravitational collapse of a charged black hole in f(R) gravity using double-null formalism. We require cosmological stability to f(R) models; we used the Starobinsky model and the R + (1/2)cR^2 model. Charged black holes in f(R) gravity can have a new type of singularity due to higher curvature corrections, the so-called f(R)-induced singularity, although it is highly model-dependent. As the advanced time increases, the internal structure will approach the Cauchy horizon, which may not be an inner apparent horizon. There is mass inflation as one approaches the Cauchy horizon and hence the Cauchy horizon may be a curvature singularity with nonzero area. However, the Ricci scalar is finite for an out-going null observer. This can be integrated as follows: Cosmologically stable higher curvature corrections of the Ricci scalar made it bounded even in the presence of mass inflation. Finally, we conjecture that if there is a general action including general higher curvature corrections with cosmological stability, then the corrections can make all curvature components finite even in the presence of mass inflation. This might help us to resolve the problem of inner horizon instability of regular black hole models.Comment: 31 pages, 15 figure

Power Management of Nanogrid Cluster with P2P Electricity Trading Based on Future Trends of Load Demand and PV Power Production

This paper presents the power management of the nanogrid clusters assisted by a novel peer-to-peer(P2P) electricity trading. In our work, unbalance of power consumption among clusters is mitigated by the proposed P2P trading method. For power management of individual clusters, multi-objective optimization simultaneously minimizing total power consumption, portion of grid power consumption, and total delay incurred by scheduling is attempted. A renewable power source photovoltaic(PV) system is adopted for each cluster as a secondary source. The temporal surplus of self-supply PV power of a cluster can be sold through P2P trading to another cluster (s) experiencing temporal power shortage. The cluster in temporal shortage of electric power buys the PV power to reduce peak load and total delay. In P2P trading, a cooperative game model is used for buyers and sellers to maximize their welfare. To increase P2P trading efficiency, future trends of load demand and PV power production are considered for power management of each cluster to resolve instantaneous unbalance between load demand and PV power production. To this end, a gated recurrent unit network is used to forecast future load demand and future PV power production. Simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed P2P trading for nanogrid clusters.Comment: This article is submitted for publication in Sustainable Cities and Societ