Market Power and Technological Bias: The Case of Electricity Generation

It is difficult to elminated all market power in electricity markets and it is therefore frequently suggested that some market power should be tolerated: extra revenues contribute to fixed cost recovery,facilitate investment and increase security of supply. This suggestion implicitly assumes all generation technologiesbenefit equally from market power. We assess a mixture of conventional and intermittent generation, eg coal plants and wind power. If all output is sold in the spot market, then intermittent generation benefits less frommarket power than conventional generation. Forward contracts or option contracts reduce the levelof market power but bias against intermittent generators persists

A review of the monitoring of market power : the possible roles of TSOs in monitoring for market power issues in congested transmission systems

The paper surveys the literature and publicly available information on market power monitoring in electricity wholesale markets. After briefly reviewing definitions, strategies and methods of mitigating market power we examine the various methods of detecting market power that have been employed by academics and market monitors/regulators. These techniques include structural and behavioural indices and analysis as well as various simulation approaches. The applications of these tools range from spot market mitigation and congestion management through to long-term market design assessment and merger decisions. Various market-power monitoring units already track market behaviour and produce indices. Our survey shows that these units collect a large amount of data from various market participants and we identify the crucial role of the transmission system operators with their access to dispatch and system information. Easily accessible and comprehensive data supports effective market power monitoring and facilitates market design evaluation. The discretion required for effective market monitoring is facilitated by institutional independence.Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research

Legal Mechanisms for Governing the Transition of Key Domain Name Functions to the Global Multi-Stakeholder Community

This Chapter proposes an alternative approach to the IANA transition that migrates the existing core contractual requirements imposed by the US government to the existing IANA functions customers. It also advances modest internal accountability revisions that could be undertaken within ICANN’s existing structure. Specifically, it advocates that the Independent Review Tribunal charged with reviewing certain ICANN board of directors-related decisions be selected by a multi-stakeholder committee rather than being subject to approval by ICANN and expanding the grounds for review to cover all of the rubrics recommended by ICANN’s “Improving Institutional Confidence” process in 2008-2009, including fairness, fidelity to the power, cogency of decision making and addressing the public interest. This new tribunal could be drawn from a standing panel of internationally recognized relevant technical experts, as well as internationally recognized jurists. Members of ICANN’s various stakeholder groups and the public should be able to make comments on the proposed bench before final appointment

Adaptation to Climate Change: A Prospective Collaboration in Flood Control

Latin American Studie

Abrasion injuries on artificial turf : A systematic review

Objectives: To review the incidence of abrasion injuries sustained on artificial turf playing fields and the level of evidence existing on player perceptions of abrasion injuries on these surfaces. Design: Systematic review. Method: A systematic search was performed using SPORTDiscus, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus and Science Direct databases. Inclusion criteria included: abrasion type injuries measured; conducted on artificial/synthetic turf; type of sport reported; peer-reviewed original research; English language search terms, but no language restrictions. A quality assessment was conducted using the Newcastle-Ottawa quality scale. Results: The search yielded 76 potential articles, with 25 meeting all inclusion criteria. Twenty articles were injury-based and five were perception–based. The differences in injury definition and the lack of details of the playing surfaces produced varying results on the rate of injuries on artificial turf. Regardless of the condition of the surface, the level of play, or the sport, players perceived the fear of abrasion injuries as a major disadvantage of artificial turf surfaces. Conclusions: The review highlighted the current disparity that exists between players’ perceptions of abrasion injuries and the level of evidence of abrasion injury risk on artificial turf playing surfaces. There is a need for the inclusion of greater detail of playing surfaces’ specifications and condition, and an injury definition sufficiently sensitive to better measure abrasion injury incidence and severity. Without this more detailed information, it is likely that the strongly perceived risk of abrasion injuries will continue as a barrier to the adoption of artificial playing surfaces

A Review of the Monitoring of Market Power The Possible Roles of TSOs in Monitoring for Market Power Issues in Congested Transmission Systems

The paper surveys the literature and publicly available information on market power monitoring in electricity wholesale markets. After briefly reviewing definitions, strategies and methods of mitigating market power we examine the various methods of detecting market power that have been employed by academics and market monitors/regulators. These techniques include structural and behavioural indices and analysis as well as various simulation approaches. The applications of these tools range from spot market mitigation and congestion management through to long-term market design assessment and merger decisions. Various market-power monitoring units already track market behaviour and produce indices. Our survey shows that these units collect a large amount of data from various market participants and we identify the crucial role of the transmission system operators with their access to dispatch and system information. Easily accessible and comprehensive data supports effective market power monitoring and facilitates market design evaluation. The discretion required for effective market monitoring is facilitated by institutional independence

The Stealth Biplane: a Proposal in Response to a Low Reynolds Number Station Keeping Mission

The Stealth Biplane is conceived and constructed to serve as a remotely piloted vehicle designed to navigate a low-level figure-eight course at a target Reynolds number of 100,000. This flight vehicle will combine the latest in lightweight radio controlled hardware in conjunction with current low Reynolds number aerodynamic research to demonstrate feasible operation in a variety of applications. These potential low Reynolds number applications include high altitude atmospheric sampling, search and rescue, and even law enforcement. Design specs and fabrication technique are discussed

White matter segmentation of Brain MRI during infancy

The objective of this study is the development of an automatic segmentation framework to measure the volume changes in white matter tissue from premature infant MRI data. Due to the early stage of the developing brain which results in a high water content in brain tissue, several major computational challenges arise including artefacts, intensity variations and partial volume effect.The first component of the framework is the development of a novel brain extraction method [1][2]. Due to the overlapping of intensity values across different brain tissues, a primary challenge is the removal of non-brain tissue such as skull, fluid, fat and body parts.The second component involves the intensity inhomogeneities called bias field and has a significant effect on the segmentation. The intensity variations described as a low-frequency multiplicative artefact is a result of the inhomogeneity in the magnetic field during the MRI acquisition.The last component is a novel probabilistic model which segments and measures the white matter volume. The key element is the classification of the partial volume voxels which is achieved by an expectation-maximization algorithm combined with a probabilistic segmentation scheme. Examples of each step of this framework are presented in Fig.