Regulatory Highlights – The Year 2016 In Review and Implications for 2017

The Public Utility Commission of Texas (“PUCT” or “Commission”) started out last year much the same way that it is starting out this year—the key item on its agenda will be the sale of Oncor Electric Delivery, LLC out of the EFH bankruptcy—however this sale will be to NextEra Energy Resources, LLC instead of two entities spearheaded by the Hunt family. Many of the other key issues initiated in 2016 have carried over into 2017, including the implications of Reliability Must Run, the determination of a standard for reliability, and the use and deployment of both distributed generation and emergency response service, and possible transitions of Lubbock Power & Light (“LP&L”) and Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative (“Rayburn”) load into the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (“ERCOT”). A review and discussion of these issues demonstrates that the market design, which continues to evolve around many of the same key issues and in particular renewable development, is influenced by legislative changes, agency guidance and changes to rules.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Restructuring of Agribusiness in the CEE Countries Following the Transition

The foreign direct investment (FDI) is a form of the capital flow having several century traditions. In the privatization as well as modernization of economies following the economic and political transition of the countries in the Central and Eastern Europe at the 1990s the role of the foreign direct investment was significant. According to the research, besides to the general positive effects of the FDI (production culture, market demand orientated product and technology innovation, supplier nets of SMEs, diffused know-how, quality demands, etc.) also led to economic dependency as well as market structure deformations (see oil industry, sugar industry, retail chains). The point of view of sectors the foreign direct investment has flowed insignificantly into the agriculture (raw material production), while it has been significant into the food industry. The paper discusses the relations as well as causes of them.Agribusiness, International Relations/Trade,

Loop algorithm for classical Heisenberg models with spin-ice type degeneracy

In many frustrated Ising models, a single-spin flip dynamics is frozen out at low temperatures compared to the dominant interaction energy scale because of the discrete "multiple valley" structure of degenerate ground-state manifold. This makes it difficult to study low-temperature physics of these frustrated systems by using Monte Carlo simulation with the standard single-spin flip algorithm. A typical example is the so-called spin ice model, frustrated ferromagnets on the pyrochlore lattice. The difficulty can be avoided by a global-flip algorithm, the loop algorithm, that enables to sample over the entire discrete manifold and to investigate low-temperature properties. We extend the loop algorithm to Heisenberg spin systems with strong easy-axis anisotropy in which the ground-state manifold is continuous but still retains the spin-ice type degeneracy. We examine different ways of loop flips and compare their efficiency. The extended loop algorithm is applied to the following two models, a Heisenberg antiferromagnet with easy-axis anisotropy along the z axis, and a Heisenberg spin ice model with the local easy-axis anisotropy. For both models, we demonstrate high efficiency of our loop algorithm by revealing the low-temperature properties which were hard to access by the standard single-spin flip algorithm. For the former model, we examine the possibility of order-from-disorder and critically check its absence. For the latter model, we elucidate a gas-liquid-solid transition, namely, crossover or phase transition among paramagnet, spin-ice liquid, and ferromagnetically-ordered ice-rule state.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Nonintegrability of the two-body problem in constant curvature spaces

We consider the reduced two-body problem with the Newton and the oscillator potentials on the sphere ${\bf S}^{2}$ and the hyperbolic plane ${\bf H}^{2}$. For both types of interaction we prove the nonexistence of an additional meromorphic integral for the complexified dynamic systems.Comment: 20 pages, typos correcte

The Archaeology of Jemez Resistance and Revitalization in the Pueblo Revolt Era

Anthropolog