Controlling deforestation in Brazil's Amazon region has long been illusive despite repeated efforts of government authorities to slow the process. From 1997 to 2000, deforestation rates in Brazil's 9-state "Legal Amazon" region continually crept upward. Now, a licensing and enforcement program for clearing by large farmers and ranchers in the state of Mato Grosso appears to be having an effect....

We study three generic clearing arrangements in the presence of two-sided limited commitment: simple bilateral clearing, segregated collateral through a third party, and—most sophisticated—central counterparty (CCP) clearing. Clearing secures settlement obligations from over-the-counter forward contracts that smooth income risk-averse traders. requires to guarantee settlement; this is costly, a...

The Computational Grid is a promising technology for providing access to distributed high-end computational capabilities. However, deciding which jobs are allocated to which resources is one the key problems in Computational Grids. In recent times, researchers have increasingly suggested to employ market mechanisms for scheduling and allocating Grid resources. This paper outlines the design of ...

We measured nitrogen transformations and loss following forest clearing in a relatively fertile tropical forest site. Nitrogen mineralization, nitrification, and amounts of ammonium and nitrate increased substantially in surface soils during the 6 mo following burning, then returned to background levels. The nitrogen content of microbial biomass declined to half its original value 6 mo after cl...

In a real electricity market, complete information of rivals’ behavior is not available to market participants. Therefore, they make their bidding strategies based on the historical information of the market clearing price. In this paper, a new market simulator is introduced for a joint energy and spinning reserve market, in which market participants’ learning process is modeled using Q-learnin...

We show whether central clearing of a particular class of derivatives lowers counterparty risk. For plausible cases, adding a central clearing counterparty (CCP) for a class of derivatives such as credit default swaps reduces netting efficiency, leading to an increase in average exposure to counterparty default. Further, clearing different classes of derivatives in separate CCPs always increase...

Cellulose degradation by four cellulose-clearing brown-rot fungi in the Coniophoraceae-Coniophora prasinoides, C. puteana, Leucogyrophana arizonica, and L. olivascens-is compared with that of a non-cellulose-clearing brown-rot fungus, Poria placenta. The cellulose- and the non-cellulose-clearing brown-rot fungi apparently employ similar mechanisms to depolymerize cellulose; most likely a nonenz...