Federalism in the Greenhouse: Defining a Role for States in a Federal Cap-and-Trade Program

Reviews arguments for federal- and state-led action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Argues for a hybrid approach with options to enable states to implement innovations and more aggressive reductions to complement a federal cap-and-trade program

The Power of Linear Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural networks are a powerful means to cope with time series. We show how a type of linearly activated recurrent neural networks, which we call predictive neural networks, can approximate any time-dependent function f(t) given by a number of function values. The approximation can effectively be learned by simply solving a linear equation system; no backpropagation or similar methods are needed. Furthermore, the network size can be reduced by taking only most relevant components. Thus, in contrast to others, our approach not only learns network weights but also the network architecture. The networks have interesting properties: They end up in ellipse trajectories in the long run and allow the prediction of further values and compact representations of functions. We demonstrate this by several experiments, among them multiple superimposed oscillators (MSO), robotic soccer, and predicting stock prices. Predictive neural networks outperform the previous state-of-the-art for the MSO task with a minimal number of units.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures and tables, revised implementatio

CLOFFAR - update 3 - supplement to Checklist of the Freshwater Fishes of Argentina

In May 2016 we have published the second update to CLOFFAR and in these few months a total of 22 changes have summed up. The total number of fishes known from the freshwaters of Argentina has increased to 538, caused by one new Hoplias and 13 first records. Four new combinations and four synonymizations do not have influence on the total count. The paper of most importance in quantity without doubt is the one of Casciotta et al. on their findings in the Iguazú National Park, unfortunately also including two first records of exotic introduced species, Clarias gariepinus and Geophagus brasiliensis. Clarias gariepinus was included in this update against our standard to only recognize records which have been published based on voucher material. In this case the determination could undoubtfully be done based on a photo and this invasive species has been reported before from the lower Iguazú river in Brazil in 2012 already. The confirmation of Crenicichla iguassuensis has undergone some see-saw development in the past and the respective remarks can be found when following the link. Also another publication needs to be commented on: The synonymyzations of four rivulids by Calviño has been published as an isolated statement beyond any systematical context. Nevertheless, it has been formally published and in some of these cases the probability of being synonyms had been stated previously by other authors. Future will show the resilience and acceptance of those synonymizations. The paper of Ortí et al. dates from 2008 and was simply not known to us before and thus, the new combination of Myloplus tiete from Myleus is only included now, eigth years later.Fil: Koerber, Stefan. Gesellschaft für Ichthyolgie; AlemaniaFil: Litz, Thomas O.. Gesellschaft für Ichthyolgie; AlemaniaFil: Mirande, Juan Marcos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico - Tucumán. Unidad Ejecutora Lillo; Argentin

Westinghouse programs in pulsed homopolar power supplies

This document details Westinghouse's ongoing study of homopolar machines since 1929 with the major effort occurring in the early 1970's to the present. The effort has enabled Westinghouse to develop expertise in the technology required for the design, fabrication and testing of such machines. This includes electrical design, electromagnetic analysis, current collection, mechanical design, advanced cooling, stress analysis, transient rotor performance, bearing analysis and seal technology. Westinghouse is using this capability to explore the use of homopolar machines as pulsed power supplies for future systems in both military and commercial applications

Can the U.S. Get There from Here?

Climate change impacts in the United States are increasingly evident and come with steep economic and social costs. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events has increased in recent years, bringing record-breaking heat, heavy precipitation, coastal flooding, severe droughts, and damaging wildfires.According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), weather-related damages in the United States were $60 billion in 2011, and are expected to be significantly greater in 2012.The mounting costs convey an unmistakable urgency to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). This report examines pathways for GHG reductions in the United States through actions taken at the federal and state levels without the need for new legislation from the U.S. Congress

On the Semantics of Snapshot Isolation

Snapshot isolation (SI) is a standard transactional consistency model used in databases, distributed systems and software transactional memory (STM). Its semantics is formally defined both declaratively as an acyclicity axiom, and operationally as a concurrent algorithm with memory bearing timestamps. We develop two simpler equivalent operational definitions of SI as lock-based reference implementations that do not use timestamps. Our first locking implementation is prescient in that requires a priori knowledge of the data accessed by a transaction and carries out transactional writes eagerly (in-place). Our second implementation is non-prescient and performs transactional writes lazily by recording them in a local log and propagating them to memory at commit time. Whilst our first implementation is simpler and may be better suited for developing a program logic for SI transactions, our second implementation is more practical due to its non-prescience. We show that both implementations are sound and complete against the declarative SI specification and thus yield equivalent operational definitions for SI. We further consider, for the first time formally, the use of SI in a context with racy non-transactional accesses, as can arise in STM implementations of SI. We introduce robust snapshot isolation (RSI), an adaptation of SI with similar semantics and guarantees in this mixed setting. We present a declarative specification of RSI as an acyclicity axiom and analogously develop two operational models as lock-based reference implementations (one eager, one lazy). We show that these operational models are both sound and complete against the declarative RSI model

HyperTransport 3 Core: A Next Generation Host Interface with Extremely High Bandwidth

As the amount of computing power keeps increasing, host interface bandwidth to memory and input-output devices (I/O) becomes a more and more limiting factor. High speed serial host interface protocols like PCI-Express and HyperTransport (HT) have been introduced to satisfy the applications’ ever increasing demands for more bandwidth. Recent applications in the field of General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based coprocessors are an example. In this Paper we present a novel implementation of an FPGA based HyperTransport 3 (HT3) host interface. To the best of our knowledge it represents the very first implementation of this type. The design offers an extremely high unidirectional bandwidth of up to 2.3 GByte/s. It can be employed in arbitrary FPGA applications and then offers direct access to an AMD Opteron processor via the HT interface. To allow the development of an optimal design, we perform a complexity and requirements analysis. The result is our proposed solution which has been implemented in synthesizable Hardware Description Language (HDL) code. Microbenchmarks are presented to show the feasibility and high performance of the design