The importance and the policy impacts of post-contractual opportunism and competition in the English and Welsh non-fossil fuel obligation

The non-fossil fuel obligation (NFFO), which consisted in a competitive auction for the deployment of renewable electricity, was the main policy for almost a decade in England and Wales. Once also used in Ireland and France, it has recently been abandoned in all countries. Many critics of the NFFO have focused on its inability to develop a national industry and promote a climate of stability among investors. This paper focuses on the incentives faced by developers bidding for a NFFO contract and shows that the low deployment rate under this scheme is likely to have been a predictable outcome of how the policy was structured and implemented rather than an unfortunate accident. The importance of the NFFO goes beyond the lack of an intense deployment of renewable electricity generation observed in the years in which the policy was on place. In fact, the NFFO has contributed to: promoting hostility against wind farms; creating false expectations of a price competitive renewable electricity sector; creating a playing field giving advantages to big players; preventing the creation of a wide renewable lobby coalition and the effective solution of planning constraints encountered by several renewable developers.     

Two-Way Protocol with Imperfect Devices

The security of a deterministic quantum scheme for communication, namely the LM05 [1], is studied in presence of a lossy channel under the assumption of imperfect generation and detection of single photons. It is shown that the scheme allows for a rate of distillable secure bits higher than that pertaining to BB84 [2]. We report on a first implementation of LM05 with weak pulses.     

Acute effect of 17 beta-estradiol and lithium on ovariectomized rat brain biogenic amines metabolism

The effect of 17 beta-estradiol (E2) on the response of dopamine (DA) and serotonin (5-HT) to acute lithium in the brains of ovariectomized rats was investigated. An E2 injection (100 ng/s.c.) to ovariectomized rats did not change striatal DA levels, whereas the levels of its metabolites dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (DOPAC) and homovanillic acid (HVA), increased 30 min later; concentrations of 5-HT and its metabolite, 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA), also remained unchanged. In the frontal cortex, DA, 5-HT, HVA and 5-HIAA levels remained unchanged after the E2 injection, whereas DOPAC levels and DOPAC/DA and HVA/DA ratios increased 30 min later. Injection of LiCl (10 mEq) decreased striatal DA levels, increased DOPAC levels and slightly decreased HVA levels; by contrast, frontal cortex DA and HVA levels increased but DOPAC levels were unchanged. A biphasic response of striatal 5-HT levels occurred, increasing shortly after injection of LiCl, followed by a decrease; 5-HIAA levels, however, increased. In the frontal cortex, injection of rats with LiCl led to a gradual increase in 5-HT levels, whereas 5-HIAA concentrations decreased. In the presence of E2, LiCl effected a greater decrease in striatal DA than injection of LiCl alone, advanced the DOPAC peak by 30 min and increased HVA levels; E2 had less effect on the 5-HT response to LiCl, except the decreases in 5-HT and 5-HIAA at 60 min were greater. Furthermore, in the striatum, the increased DA turnover caused by LiCl, estimated by the DOPAC/DA and HVA/DA ratios, was advanced in rats treated with E2. In the presence of E2, LiCl slightly increased frontal cortex DA, DOPAC and HVA levels compared with treatment with LiCl alone, whereas DOPAC levels decreased in rats treated with LiCl + E2 compared with levels in E2-treated rats. Generally, higher levels of 5-HT and 5-HIAA were measured in the frontal cortices of rats treated with LiCl + Ex compared with rats injected with LiCl. These results indicate that E2 potentiates the acute effect of lithium on striatal and frontal cortex DA and 5-HT levels and metabolism, suggesting a role of the hormonal state on this drug response.     

Language disturbances following vascular lesions restricted to the left basal ganglia, thalamus, and white matter.

Examined the relationship between aphasia type and lesion site in 80 subcortical stroke patients. Ss were classified as affected by aphasia, dysarthria, and nonaphasia, nondysarthria. Sites of lesions were identified by means of computerized tomography (CT) scan. No correlation between site of lesions and category group was found. Lesions of the same subcortical structures yielded different neurolinguistic impairment, whereas comparable linguistic patterns were observed with lesions of different deep areas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Uncertainty in health risk analysis

This paper discuss several quantitative issues that arise in the analysis of health risks, beginning with principles such as de minimis and zero-risk. The paper also provides a probabilistic definition of risk in terms of hazard, context, consequence, magnitude, and uncertainty. The example relies on this definition to investigate, through sensitivity analysis, the effect that uncertainty has on the results obtained. The results, from a case study based on waterborne total arsenic, show that the choice of dose—response functions causes more uncertainty than any other component of risk analysis. Chemical carcinogenesis provides the basis for discussing inability to know as well as uncertainty. The conclusion is that risk analysis keeps uncertainty and inability to know separate; through this function, it provides a much needed method to present information to decision makers and the public.     

An implementation of storage management in capability environments

The exploitation of the salient features of capability-based addressing environments leads to a high number of small objects existing in memory at the same time. It is thus necessary to enhance the efficiency of the mechanisms for object relocation, and to avoid congestion of input/output devices due to swapping. In this paper, we present an approach to the management of a large virtual memory space aimed at solving these problems. We insert partial information concerning the physical allocation of each object into the virtual identifier of this object. Objects are grouped into large swapping units, called pages. The page size is independent of the average object size. This results in enhanced efficiency in managing the relocation information both with regard to memory requirements and access times. The allocation of objects into pages, and the movement of pages through the memory hierarchy, are controlled by user processes. This means that programs which have knowledge of their own use of virtual memory can increase their locality of reference, diminish the number of swap operations and reduce fragmentation.     

Transporting Deformations of Face Emotions in the Shape Spaces: A Comparison of Different Approaches

Studying the changes of shape is a common concern in many scientific fields. We address here two problems: (1) quantifying the deformation between two given shapes and (2) transporting this deformation to morph a third shape. These operations can be done with or without point correspondence, depending on the availability of a surface matching algorithm, and on the type of mathematical procedure adopted. In computer vision, the re-targeting of emotions mapped on faces is a common application. We contrast here four different methods used for transporting the deformation toward a target once it was estimated upon the matching of two shapes. These methods come from very different fields such as computational anatomy, computer vision and biology. We used the large diffeomorphic deformation metric mapping and thin plate spline, in order to estimate deformations in a deformational trajectory of a human face experiencing different emotions. Then we use naive transport (NT), linear shift (LS), direct transport (DT) and fanning scheme (FS) to transport the estimated deformations toward four alien faces constituted by 240 homologous points and identifying a triangulation structure of 416 triangles. We used both local and global criteria for evaluating the performance of the 4 methods, e.g., the maintenance of the original deformation. We found DT, LS and FS very effective in recovering the original deformation while NT fails under several aspects in transporting the shape change. As the best method may differ depending on the application, we recommend carefully testing different methods in order to choose the best one for any specific application.

     

Flow-based local optimization for image-to-geometry projection

The projection of a photographic data set on a 3D model is a robust and widely applicable way to acquire appearance information of an object. The first step of this procedure is the alignment of the images on the 3D model. While any reconstruction pipeline aims at avoiding misregistration by improving camera calibrations and geometry, in practice a perfect alignment cannot always be reached. Depending on the way multiple camera images are fused on the object surface, remaining misregistrations show up either as ghosting or as discontinuities at transitions from one camera view to another. In this paper we propose a method, based on the computation of Optical Flow between overlapping images, to correct the local misalignment by determining the necessary displacement. The goal is to correct the symptoms of misregistration, instead of searching for a globally consistent mapping, which might not exist. The method scales up well with the size of the data set (both photographic and geometric) and is quite independent of the characteristics of the 3D model (topology cleanliness, parametrization, density). The method is robust and can handle real world cases that have different characteristics: low level geometric details and images that lack enough features for global optimization or manual methods. It can be applied to different mapping strategies, such as texture or per-vertex attribute encoding.