Auctioning of EU ETS Phase II allowances: how and why?

The European Directive on the EU ETS allows governments to auction up to 10% of the allowances issued in phase II 2008-2012, without constraints being specified thereafter. This article reviews and extends the long-standing debate about auctioning, in which economists have generally supported and industries opposed a greater use of auctioning. The article clarifies the key issues by reviewing six `traditional' considerations, examines several credible options for auction design, and then proposes some new issues relevant to auctioning. It is concluded that greater auctioning in aggregate need not increase adverse competitiveness impacts, and could in some respects alleviate them, particularly by supporting border-tax adjustments. Auctioning within the 10% limit might also be used to dampen price volatility during 2008-2012 and, in subsequent periods, it offers the prospect of supporting a long-term price signal to aid investor confidence. The former is only possible, however, if Member States are willing to coordinate their decision-making (though not revenue-raising) powers in defining and implementing the intended pricing mechanisms

Facts, trends and challenges in modern software development

The IT industry is not new to change and evolution, however, we are now in an era of two fundamental waves of IT changes. First, the post-PC era, where mobile devices and tablet-like devices are giving end-users the ability to consume information when they want it and where they want it. Second, the post-server era where companies no longer need to neither buy nor provision servers in their own data centres but instead rent the compute resources as needed. This twin change has direct consequences to how end-users consume software, how that software is produced, and how it is delivered.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Programmable Web: Agile, Social, and Grassroots Computing

Web services, the semantic Web, and Web 2.0 are three somewhat separate movements trying to make the Web a programmable substrate. While each has achieved some level of success on their own right, it is becoming apparent that the grassroots approach of the Web 2.0 is gaining greater success than the other two. In this paper we analyze each movement, briefly describing its main traits, and outlining its primary assumptions. We then frame the common problem of achieving a programmable Web within the context of distributed computing and software engineering and then attempt to show why Web 2.0 is closest to give a pragmatic solution to the problem and will therefore likely continue to have the most success while the other two only have cursory contributions

IBM Altocumulus: A Cross-Cloud Middleware and Platform

Cloud computing has become the new face of computing and promises to offer virtually unlimited, cheap, readily available, utility type computing resources. Many vendors have entered this market with different offerings ranging from infrastructure-as-a-service such as Amazon, to fully functional platform services such as Google App Engine. However, as a result of this heterogeneity, deploying applications to a cloud and managing them needs to be done using vendor specific methods. This lock in is seen as a major hurdle in adopting cloud technologies to the enterprise. IBM Altocumulus, the cloud middleware platform from IBM Almaden Services Research, aims to solve this very issue of managing applications across multiple clouds. It provides a uniform, service oriented interface to deploy and manage applications in various clouds and also provides facilities to migrate instances across clouds using repeatable best practice patterns. In this demonstration we will present the latest version of the IBM Altocumulus platform and also reveal some of the latest additions on scaling and the ability to perform map-reduce type computations

Herschel SPIRE-FTS Observations of Excited CO and [CI] in the Antennae (NGC 4038/39): Warm and Cold Molecular Gas

We present Herschel SPIRE-FTS observations of the Antennae (NGC 4038/39), a well studied, nearby ($22$ Mpc) ongoing merger between two gas rich spiral galaxies. We detect 5 CO transitions ($J=4-3$ to $J=8-7$), both [CI] transitions and the [NII]$205\mu m$ transition across the entire system, which we supplement with ground based observations of the CO $J=1-0$, $J=2-1$ and $J=3-2$ transitions, and Herschel PACS observations of [CII] and [OI]$63\mu m$. Using the CO and [CI] transitions, we perform both a LTE analysis of [CI], and a non-LTE radiative transfer analysis of CO and [CI] using the radiative transfer code RADEX along with a Bayesian likelihood analysis. We find that there are two components to the molecular gas: a cold ($T_{kin}\sim 10-30$ K) and a warm ($T_{kin} \gtrsim 100$ K) component. By comparing the warm gas mass to previously observed values, we determine a CO abundance in the warm gas of $x_{CO} \sim 5\times 10^{-5}$. If the CO abundance is the same in the warm and cold gas phases, this abundance corresponds to a CO $J=1-0$ luminosity-to-mass conversion factor of $\alpha_{CO} \sim 7 \ M_{\odot}{pc^{-2} \ (K \ km \ s^{-1})^{-1}}$in the cold component, similar to the value for normal spiral galaxies. We estimate the cooling from H$_2$, [CII], CO and [OI]$63\mu m$to be$\sim 0.01 L_{\odot}/M_{\odot}$. We compare PDR models to the ratio of the flux of various CO transitions, along with the ratio of the CO flux to the far-infrared flux in NGC 4038, NGC 4039 and the overlap region. We find that the densities recovered from our non-LTE analysis are consistent with a background far-ultraviolet field of strength$G_0\sim 1000$. Finally, we find that a combination of turbulent heating, due to the ongoing merger, and supernova and stellar winds are sufficient to heat the molecular gas.Comment: 50 pages, 15 figures, 8 tables, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Disentangling lattice and electronic instabilities in the excitonic insulator candidate Ta2_2NiSe5_5 by nonequilibrium spectroscopy

Ta$_2$NiSe$_5$ is an excitonic insulator candidate showing the semiconductor/semimetal-to-insulator (SI) transition below $T_{\text{c}}$ = 326 K. However, since a structural transition accompanies the SI transition, deciphering the role of electronic and lattice degrees of freedom in driving the SI transition has remained controversial. Here, we investigate the photoexcited nonequilibrium state in Ta$_2$NiSe$_5$ using pump-probe Raman and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopies. The combined nonequilibrium spectroscopic measurements of the lattice and electronic states reveal the presence of a photoexcited metastable state where the insulating gap is suppressed, but the low-temperature structural distortion is preserved. We conclude that electron correlations play a vital role in the SI transition of Ta$_2$NiSe$_5$.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Herschel/SPIRE Sub-millimeter Spectra of Local Active Galaxies

We present the sub-millimeter spectra from 450 GHz to 1550 GHz of eleven nearby active galaxies observed with the SPIRE Fourier Transform Spectrometer (SPIRE/FTS) onboard Herschel. We detect CO transitions from J_up = 4 to 12, as well as the two [CI] fine structure lines at 492 and 809 GHz and the [NII] 461 GHz line. We used radiative transfer models to analyze the observed CO spectral line energy distributions (SLEDs). The FTS CO data were complemented with ground-based observations of the low-J CO lines. We found that the warm molecular gas traced by the mid-J CO transitions has similar physical conditions (n_H2 ~ 10^3.2 - 10^3.9 cm^-3 and T_kin ~ 300 - 800 K) in most of our galaxies. Furthermore, we found that this warm gas is likely producing the mid-IR rotational H2 emission. We could not determine the specific heating mechanism of the warm gas, however it is possibly related to the star-formation activity in these galaxies. Our modeling of the [CI] emission suggests that it is produced in cold (T_kin 10^3 cm^-3) molecular gas. Transitions of other molecules are often detected in our SPIRE/FTS spectra. The HF J=1-0 transition at 1232 GHz is detected in absorption in UGC05101 and in emission in NGC7130. In the latter, near-infrared pumping, chemical pumping, or collisional excitation with electrons are plausible excitation mechanisms likely related to the AGN of this galaxy. In some galaxies few H2O emission lines are present. Additionally, three OH+ lines at 909, 971, and 1033 GHz are identified in NGC7130.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 20 pages, 9 figure

Broad emission lines in optical spectra of hot dust-obscured galaxies can contribute significantly to JWST/NIRCam photometry

Selecting the first galaxies at z>7-10 from JWST surveys is complicated by z<6 contaminants with degenerate photometry. For example, strong optical nebular emission lines at z7-10 Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs). Dust-obscured 3<z<6 galaxies in particular are potentially important contaminants, and their faint rest-optical spectra have been historically difficult to observe. A lack of optical emission line and continuum measures for 3<z<6 dusty galaxies now makes it difficult to test their expected JWST/NIRCam photometry for degenerate solutions with NIRCam dropouts. Towards this end, we quantify the contribution by strong emission lines to NIRCam photometry in a physically motivated manner by stacking 21 Keck II/NIRES spectra of hot, dust-obscured, massive ($\log\mathrm{M_*/M_\odot}\gtrsim10-11$) and infrared (IR) luminous galaxies at z~1-4. We derive an average spectrum and measure strong narrow (broad) [OIII]5007 and H$\alpha$ features with equivalent widths of $130\pm20$ A ($150\pm50$ A) and $220\pm30$ A ($540\pm80$ A) respectively. These features can increase broadband NIRCam fluxes by factors of 1.2-1.7 (0.2-0.6 mag). Due to significant dust-attenuation ($A_V\sim6$), we find H$\alpha$+[NII] to be significantly brighter than [OIII]+H$\beta$, and therefore find that emission-line dominated contaminants of high-z galaxy searches can only reproduce moderately blue perceived UV continua of $S_\lambda\propto\lambda^\beta$ with $\beta>-1.5$ and z>4. While there are some redshifts (z~3.75) where our stack is more degenerate with the photometry of z>10 LBGs between $\lambda_{rest}\sim0.3-0.8\,\mu$m, redder filter coverage beyond $\lambda_{obs}>3.5\,\mu$m and far-IR/sub-mm follow-up may be useful for breaking the degeneracy and making a crucial separation between two fairly unconstrained populations, dust-obscured galaxies at z~3-6 and LBGs at z>10.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, submitted to ApJ