Network tariffs applicable to households in Australia: empirical evidence

Presents information and analysis of the network tariffs applicable to household electricity consumers in the southern and eastern states of Australia covered by the National Energy Market. Executive summary: This report presents information and analysis of the network tariffs applicable to household electricity consumers in the southern and eastern states of Australia covered by the National Energy Market (NEM). The paper is the first of four papers focused on network tariffs from the perspective of households. Key findings include: A range of network tariff structures are used throughout the NEM. Inclining block rate tariffs (with small price increments) and two-part tariffs are common. The most expensive network tariff in Australia is almost four times higher than the least expensive. The average network charge to households in Victoria is about a third of that elsewhere in the NEM The gap between least expensive and most expensive network tariff has doubled over the last seven years. Network service providers in Queensland have the highest charges and also the greater proportion of their charge is fixed. The Queensland distributors and Ausnet Services in Victoria have increased their fixed charges significantly recently. In the 2015/16 year (not covered in this report Citipower and Powercor have both increased their fixed charges significantly). Network service providers are typically increasing fixed charges more quickly than variable charges. The international comparison shows that network tariffs in Britain are generally much lower than anywhere in Australia. The average network charge in Denmark and New Zealand is roughly comparable to those in Victoria, the lowest network cost jurisdiction in the NEM. The proportion of revenue recovered from fixed charges charged to most consumers in the NEM is higher than that in Britain, Denmark and New Zealand. Some distributors in Victoria have relatively smaller fixed charges, while those in Queensland and Essential Energy in New South Wales have fixed charges that are much higher than those found elsewhere. In NZ, network tariffs with higher fixed charges apply to households with high levels of consumption (> 9 MWh per year)

Portmanteau goodness-of-fit test for asymmetric power GARCH models

The asymptotic distribution of a vector of autocorrelations of squared residuals is derived for a wide class of asymmetric GARCH models. Portmanteau adequacy tests are deduced. %gathered These results are obtained under moment assumptions on the iid process, but fat tails are allowed for the observed process, which is particularly relevant for series of financial returns. A Monte Carlo experiment and an illustration to financial series are also presented.ARCH models; Leverage effect; Portmanteau test; Goodness-of-fit test; Diagnostic checking

A critique of the Victorian retail electricity market

The Brotherhood of St Laurence commissioned Bruce Mountain from Carbon and Energy Markets (CME) to investigate the Victorian retail electricity market.  Electricity costs have been rising across Australia’s National Electricity Market since 2007. In most Australian states rising network costs – the poles and wires – have been the primary cause of these price increases.   However, the Victorian case is different. Network costs are lower than in other states, and haven’t risen as much. High retail charges appear to be the cause. The report and accompanying summary, released 7 July 2015, investigate the dynamics of the retail energy market and how that impacts on householders bills

"I like how it looks but it is not beautiful" -- Sensory appeal beyond beauty

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty

Exploring the SDSS Dataset with Linked Scatter Plots: I. EMP, CEMP, and CV Stars

We present the results of a search for extremely metal-poor (EMP), carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP), and cataclysmic variable (CV) stars using a new exploration tool based on linked scatter plots (LSPs). Our approach is especially designed to work with very large spectrum data sets such as the SDSS, LAMOST, RAVE, and Gaia data sets, and it can be applied to stellar, galaxy, and quasar spectra. As a demonstration, we conduct our search using the SDSS DR10 data set. We first created a 3326-dimensional phase space containing nearly 2 billion measures of the strengths of over 1600 spectral features in 569,738 SDSS stars. These measures capture essentially all the stellar atomic and molecular species visible at the resolution of SDSS spectra. We show how LSPs can be used to quickly isolate and examine interesting portions of this phase space. To illustrate, we use LSPs coupled with cuts in selected portions of phase space to extract EMP stars, CEMP stars, and CV stars. We present identifications for 59 previously unrecognized candidate EMP stars and 11 previously unrecognized candidate CEMP stars. We also call attention to 2 candidate He~II emission CV stars found by the LSP approach that have not yet been discussed in the literature.Comment: Accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Supplement (February 2017

Computing and estimating information matrices of weak arma models

Numerous time series admit "weak" autoregressive-moving average (ARMA) representations, in which the errors are uncorrelated but not necessarily independent nor martingale differences. The statistical inference of this general class of models requires the estimation of generalized Fisher information matrices. We give analytic expressions and propose consistent estimators of these matrices, at any point of the parameter space. Our results are illustrated by means of Monte Carlo experiments and by analyzing the dynamics of daily returns and squared daily returns of financial series.Asymptotic relative efficiency (ARE); Bahadur's slope; Information matrices; Lagrange Multiplier test; Nonlinear processes; Wald test; Weak ARMA models

The Carbon 1951

Yearbook for Carbon College 1951.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usu_eastern_yearbooks/1033/thumbnail.jp

The Carbon 1939

Yearbook for Carbon College 1939.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usu_eastern_yearbooks/1022/thumbnail.jp

Canto 1963

Yearbook for Carbon College 1963.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usu_eastern_yearbooks/1043/thumbnail.jp

Monographing "Sacred Laws"

Along with new interest in the subject of Greek “sacred laws”, a series of monographic studies of inscriptions included in this category have recently been published. After Lupu’s addition to the three corpora of Sokolowski, Alexander Herda reedited the decree of the Molpoi from Miletus with a lengthy commentary, which was reviewed in this periodical. That is an unusually complex and detailed text, and the works under review also treat inscriptions of a similar character. While giving a gener..