The Impact of Weather Forecasts on Day-Ahead Power Prices

1. Introduction Power industry deregulation and electricity market restructuring, which began in Chile in the 1980s and then spread to Norway, New Zealand and the UK, were introduced in the United States with the passage of the Energy Policy Act (EPA) of 1992 (Jameson, 1997). The EPA and subsequent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Orders led to the restructuring of vertically integrated electric utilities, the establishment of Independent System Operators (ISO) and Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO) and the development of competitive wholesale power markets. Deregulation also led to the creation of various electricity contract–based financial derivative products. In 1996, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) created the US’s first electricity futures, the Palo Verde and California/Oregon Border contracts, which were traded for physical delivery (Warwick, 2002). While these products were eventually delisted in 2002, other exchange-traded and OTC contracts, for both physical and financial settlement, have been introduced on numerous exchanges, including the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and markets operated by ISOs and RTOs. From the start, deregulation of the electricity industry has been a contentious and controversial subject, its economic, political and social ramifications hotly debated in the US and abroad. The debate continues, and as of September 2010, fifteen states and the District of Columbia have deregulated electricity markets, seven have suspended restructuring activities and twenty-eight have no deregulatory legislation or restructuring activities to speak of (FERC, 2010)

Monetary Policy Under Uncertainty in Micro-Founded Macroeconometric Models

We use a micro-founded macroeconometric modeling framework to investigate the design of monetary policy when the central bank faces uncertainty about the true structure of the economy. We apply Bayesian methods to estimate the parameters of the baseline specification using postwar U.S. data, and then determine the policy under commitment that maximizes household welfare. We find that the performance of the optimal policy is closely matched by a simple operational rule that focuses solely on stabilizing nominal wage inflation. Furthermore, this simple wage stabilization rule is remarkably robust to uncertainty about the model parameters and to various assumptions regarding the nature and incidence of the innovations. However, the characteristics of optimal policy are very sensitive to the specification of the wage contracting mechanism, thereby highlighting the importance of additional research regarding the structure of labor markets and wage determination.

INVISIBLE USER CONTROLS FOR SUPPORTING VISUALLY DISABLED USERS

A system and method are disclosed that augment a user interface with invisible elements that enable a visually disabled user to exercise functionality that is hard to discover without visual cues. The method exposes the functionality to a visually disabled user by adding an invisible UI element in a way that does not affect a sighted user’s interaction with the application. For mobile devices that have accessibility service activated, the mechanism works by adding invisible buttons to the recent viewed stack or carousel of screens to access the “Recently Viewed” panes, in one example. The buttons or other invisible elements are configured such that the accessibility system can still find them, thereby enabling the visually disabled user to activate their functionality

Six Impossible Things: Moving KBART into the Next Decade

KBART is one of the most successful NISO recommendations today. Formally supported by over 80 organizations across all stakeholder groups, it enables a standardized transfer of data between content providers and knowledge bases. Most recently KBART added an automated process to transfer holdings data to localize an institution’s knowledge base holdings. While KBART was originally built to focus on journal and book data, the world has moved on—the different flavors and nuances of open access, the increased use of audiovisual material, holdings at the chapter and article levels, and issues around translations, transliterations, and author names are just some of the challenges that are disrupting the flow. So what is next for KBART? How does it adapt to continue to solve the data flow problems that libraries, publishers, and knowledge base providers face today? The presenters in this session, all members of the NISO KBART Standing Committee and/or the KBART Automation Working Group, discuss the status and future of a “Phase III” revision of NISO KBART that aims not only to clarify the existing recommendations but also to expand them to address the new challenges, including the support of additional content types beyond serials and monographs and improvements to item-level discovery and access

KBART Phase III: Changes and Unresolved Questions

Slides for a presentation, KBART Phase III: Changes and Unresolved Questions , presented at the 36th Annual NASIG Conference on May 20, 2021. The conference was held online due to COVID-19. -------- Abstract: KBART is one of the most successful NISO recommendations today. Formally supported by over 80 organizations across all stakeholder groups, it enables a standardized transfer of data between content providers and knowledge bases. Recently KBART added an automated process to transfer institution-specific holdings data to knowledge bases.Now, the KBART Standing Committee is beginning work on Phase III of the KBART Recommended Practice, which has not been updated since 2014.While KBART was originally designed to deliver journal and book holdings information in support of OpenURL link resolvers, KBART files are now used in multiple systems and by various stakeholders throughout the e-resource supply chain. In addition, content providers have moved beyond journals and books to deliver multimedia and non-book/non-journal content from around the globe.In this session, members of the KBART Standing Committee will provide an overview of our plans around KBART Phase III, which is now underway. We will review our progress to date, highlighting our efforts to resolve thorny issues around KBART files for which there are no easy answers such as:=\u3e Challenges of supporting additional content types beyond serials and monographs=\u3e How best to handle gap coverage for serials=\u3e How to indicate open access content We’ll also raise questions about the role of KBART in discovery of and access to content at the article and chapter levels.During the session, we will engage the audience by requestiong feedback on a number of issues using an EasyRetro board, with the goal of keeping KBART relevant and valuable into the future. -------- The session included an introductory slide presentation followed by a discussion with audience feedback via an interactive board on the EasyRetro.io platform. The session had approximately 76 attendees. The link leads to a session description on the Sched website at https://sched.co/ifzm. A video recording of the presentation is available here: https://youtu.be/vYFiSdAlRCw. Additional files include PDFs of presentation slides (with and without speakers notes), a transcript of the session, the EasyRetro board in multiple formats, a screenshot of a post on Twitter related to the session, and a PDF printout of the entire NASIG 2021 conference program schedule

Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource, collected and edited by Noah Levin

Collected and edited by Noah Levin Table of Contents: UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our Digital Selves (Noah Levin) UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko

KBART Phase III: Unresolved questions

During the “NISO update” session at the NISO Plus 2021 conference, which took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, members of the KBART (Knowledge Base and Related Tools) Standing Committee presented their plans and work toward KBART Phase III, a revision of the KBART Recommended Practice. In an interactive breakout session, they sought input from attendees on how KBART is being used and what new content types it should support. Presenters from the KBART Standing Committee were Noah Levin (Independent Professional), Stephanie Doellinger (OCLC, Inc.), Robert Heaton (Utah State University), and Andrée Rathemacher (University of Rhode Island). Assisting them in preparing the presentation were Jason Friedman (Canadian Research Knowledge Network), Sheri Meares (EBSCO Information Services), Benjamin Johnson (ProQuest), Elif Eryilmaz-Sigwarth (Springer Nature), and Nettie Lagace (NISO)

Local Parasite Lineage Sharing In Temperate Grassland Birds Provides Clues About Potential Origins Of Galapagos Avian Plasmodium

Oceanic archipelagos are vulnerable to natural introduction of parasites via migratory birds. Our aim was to characterize the geographic origins of two Plasmodium parasite lineages detected in the Galapagos Islands and in North American breeding bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) that regularly stop in Galapagos during migration to their South American overwintering sites. We used samples from a grassland breeding bird assemblage in Nebraska, United States, and parasite DNA sequences from the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, to compare to global data in a DNA sequence registry. Homologous DNA sequences from parasites detected in bobolinks and more sedentary birds (e.g., brown-headed cowbirds Molothrus ater, and other co-occurring bird species resident on the North American breeding grounds) were compared to those recovered in previous studies from global sites. One parasite lineage that matched between Galapagos birds and the migratory bobolink, Plasmodium lineage B, was the most common lineage detected in the global MalAvi database, matching 49 sequences from unique host/site combinations, 41 of which were of South American origin. We did not detect lineage B in brown-headed cowbirds. The other Galapagos-bobolink match, Plasmodium lineage C, was identical to two other sequences from birds sampled in California. We detected a close variant of lineage C in brown-headed cowbirds. Taken together, this pattern suggests that bobolinks became infected with lineage B on the South American end of their migratory range, and with lineage C on the North American breeding grounds. Overall, we detected more parasite lineages in bobolinks than in cowbirds. Galapagos Plasmodium had similar host breadth compared to the non-Galapagos haemosporidian lineages detected in bobolinks, brown-headed cowbirds, and other grassland species. This study highlights the utility of global haemosporidian data in the context of migratory bird–parasite connectivity. It is possible that migratory bobolinks bring parasites to the Galapagos and that these parasites originate from different biogeographic regions representing both their breeding and overwintering sites

E-Data Quality: How Publishers and Libraries are Working Together to Improve Data Quality

High quality data is essential for discovery and access of e-resources, but in many cases low quality, inaccurate information leads to low usage and a poor return on library investment dollars. In this article, publishers, aggregators, librarians, and knowledge base providers talk about how they are working together to improve access to e-resources