Maximum power point tracking techniques for photovoltaic systems: a comprehensive review and comparative analysis

Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) is an important concern in Photovoltaic (PV) systems. As PV systems have a high cost of energy it is essential that they are operated to extract the maximum possible power at all times. However, under non-uniform environmental conditions, which frequently arise in the outdoor environment, many MPPT techniques will fail to track the global peak power. This review paper discusses conventional MPPT techniques designed to operate under uniform environmental conditions and highlights why these techniques fail under non-uniform conditions. Following this, techniques designed specifically to operate under non-uniform environmental conditions are analysed and compared. Simulation results which compare the performance of the common Perturb and Observe (P&O) method, the Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) and the Simulated Annealing (SA) MPPT approaches under non-uniform environmental conditions are also presented. The research presented in this review indicates that there is no single technique which can achieve reliable global MPPT with low cost and complexity and be easily adapted to different PV systems.

Estimating the equity risk premium for economies in the Asian region

The Equity Risk Premium (ERP) is widely used in economic and financial analysis, yet it is difficult to find empirical estimates of the ERP that are generally accepted. The paucity of data in Asian economies exacerbates the problems of estimation. This study estimates the ERP for the larger market-orientated Asian economies and compares the estimates with those of the United States. Surprisingly, of the seven economies examined, the ERP of four cannot be statistically differentiated from that of the United States.

Economic evaluation of adult rehabilitation: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials in a variety of settings

Objectives:
To report if there is a difference in costs from a societal perspective between adults receiving rehabilitation in an inpatient rehabilitation setting versus an alternative setting. If there are cost differences, to report whether opting for the least expensive program setting adversely affects patient outcomes.

Data Sources:
Electronic databases from the earliest possible date until May 2011. All languages were included.

Study Selection
Multiple reviewers identified randomized controlled trials with a full economic evaluation that compared adult inpatient rehabilitation with an alternative. There were 29 included trials with 6746 participants.

Data Extraction
Multiple observers extracted data independently. Trial appraisal included a risk of bias assessment and a checklist to report the strength of the economic evaluation.

Data Synthesis:
Results were synthesized using standardized mean differences (SMDs) and meta-analyses for the primary outcome of cost. The Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation was applied to assess for risk of bias across studies for meta-analyses. There was high-quality evidence that cost was significantly reduced for rehabilitation in the home versus inpatient rehabilitation in a meta-analysis of 732 patients poststroke (pooled SMD [δ]=−.28; 95% confidence interval [CI], −.47 to −.09), without compromise to patient outcomes. Results of individual trials in other patient groups (orthopedic, rheumatoid arthritis, and geriatric) receiving rehabilitation in the home or community were generally consistent with the meta-analysis. There was moderate quality evidence that cost was significantly reduced for inpatient rehabilitation (stroke unit) versus general acute care in a meta-analysis of 463 patients poststroke (δ=.31; 95% CI, .15–.48), with improvement to patient outcomes. These results were not replicated in 2 individual trials with a geriatric and a mixed cohort, where costs did not differ between general acute care and inpatient rehabilitation. Three of the 4 individual trials, inclusive of a stroke or orthopedic population, reported less cost for an intensive inpatient rehabilitation program compared with usual inpatient rehabilitation. Sensitivity analysis included a health service perspective and varied inflation rates with no change to the significant findings of the meta-analyses.

Conclusions:
Based on this systematic review and meta-analyses, a single rehabilitation service may not provide health economic benefits for all patient groups and situations. For some patients, inpatient rehabilitation may be the most cost-effective method of providing rehabilitation; yet, for other patients, rehabilitation in the home or community may be the most cost-effective model of care. To achieve cost-effective outcomes, the ideal combination of rehabilitation services and patient inclusion criteria, as well as further data for nonstroke populations, warrants further research.

The moral rights of authors and performers: an international and comparative analysis

This book is a comprehensive guide to the development and utilization of authorial moral rights across the key jurisdictions of the English-speaking world and in France and Germany. In recent years, the copyright statutes of the common law countries have been expanded by the introduction of provisions dealing with purely authorial rights - moral rights.
The Moral Rights of Authors and Performers discusses the historical development of the rights in Europe, with particular reference to France and Germany, and shows the growth of moral rights theory and legislative coverage up to the late 1930s. During the 1920s the moral rights of authors became the subject of international protection, particularly through the operation of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The book explores the adoption of moral rights into this and other international instruments, explaining the functions that moral rights were intended to perform.
The author gives detailed accounts of the operation of moral rights in France and Germany today, addressing both statutory interpretation and doctrinal issues. The provision of case studies gives an impression of the rich jurisprudence associated with the rights in these countries.
The book also contains a detailed discussion of the versions of moral rights that have become entrenched in Canada, the UK, the US and Australia, with each country considered independently. It deals separately with the introduction of the rights into each country and their operation and interpretation by courts and commentators. Material on common law analogues to the rights is provided, which indicates alternative actions that practitioners might take. Problems of cross-jurisdictional legal proceedings (especially arising from technological transfer of information) are also addressed, with moral rights protection elsewhere in the world summarized in tabular form.

Decades of research efforts to link economic and environmental performance: still data in search of a theory?

With the proliferation of social investment vehicles, stakeholders, particularly investors, are increasingly aware of the relationship between economic, social and environmental performance, and disclosure to external parties. This is particularly evident in The Securities and Exchange Commission's Environmental Disclosure Rules. The thesis of this paper is that, after three decades of academic and professional research efforts, there are still no firm proactive guidelines to firmly link the financial performance with environmental and social performance. The purpose of this paper is to revisit empirical research efforts spanning three decades in order to delineate potential links that may assist in systematic, comparable reporting

Productivity and efficiency analysis of Australia banking sector under deregulation

This paper conducts productivity and efficiency analysis of banks operating in Australia since the deregulation of the Australian financial system in early 1980s. Applying data envelopment analysis (DEA), with a moving window, the Malmquist indices are determined in order to investigate the levels of and the changes in the efficiency of Australian banks over the period from 1983 to 200 I. The DEA window analysis is adopted in order to relieve the small sample problem that in previous studies has proved problematic in the study of the Australian banking sector. The pal1icular window used in this case has been carefully designed to ensure the robustness of the efficiencies scores to changes in the window width. A second-stage regression is conducted by using the unconditional bootstrap approach suggested by Xue and Harker (1999) to overcome the dependency and heteroskedasticity of DE A efficiency scores. The empirical results demonstrate the effect of deregulation on the performance of individual banks, banks of different organizational types and the entire Australian banking sector.

The welfare economics of measuring sustainability: a new approach based on social choice theory and systems analysis

This paper presents a new measure of sustainability within a welfare economics framework. Gross domestic product (GDP) can be used as an indicator of sustainability if the GDP estimates are undertaken within a cost-benefit analysis framework based on social choice perspectives. Sustainability is dependent on a healthy and functioning socio-economic and environmental (SEE) system. Economic development can damage the SEE system through resource degradation, over-harvesting and pollution. This paper addresses the tensions between economic development and sustainability by undertaking a number of SEE-based adjustments to GDP based on social choice perspectives in order to measure sustainability. These adjustments include the environmental and social costs caused by economic development such as water pollution, the depletion of non-renewable resources, and deforestation. Thailand is used as a case study for a 25 year period (1975-1999). The results show a divergence in terms of GDP per capita and the SEE-adjusted GDP per capita figure. The paper concludes that, with increasing environmental and social costs of economic development, pursuing such extreme high growth objectives without due environmental and social considerations can threaten present social welfare and future sustainability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Ecotourism in Costa Rica: an economic framework of analysis

Costa Rica is a small Central American nation that has gained an international reputation as a leader in environmental conservation. This has formed the base for its highly successful and lucrative small-scale ecotourism industry. However, there are threats from high rates of deforestation and expanding large scale tourism that is trading on strong environmental credentials. This paper sets out an ecologically sustainable economic framework to firstly examine the Costa Rican experience, and then analyse lessons for general policy development of any ecotourism industry. The analysis is conducted from a political economy perspective on the trade-offs between small-scale and large-scale tourism.

Ethical, economic and efficient sector : is it a gamble? The case of New Zealand Health

The New Zealand public sector has gone through major reform as a result of fiscal deficit in 1984 (KettI, 1997; Schwartz, 1997), resulting in shift of emphasis from quality service provision to establishing financial supremacy (Kettl, 1997). This raises concern as to how public sector employees are attaining balance between their service objectives with financial ones and how is the ethics negotiated in this process. Following this concern, this paper focuses on determining the organisational variables consisting of organisational policies in the District Health Boards (DHBs) and hospitals of New Zealand on ethical behaviours of managers and the ethical climate of these departments. The aim of this study is to increase our understanding of the ethical climate of the public health. Our findings suggest that little emphasis has been provided to the aspect of ethics in New Zealand health sector. There is no reward for employees who exhibit exemplary ethical behaviour, no hot line to consult/report about ethics, any detailed guidelines and policies, and not enough ethics-related training provided to staff.

Stability theory and numerical analysis of non-autonomous dynamical systems

The development and use of cocycles for analysis of non-autonomous behaviour is a technique that has been known for several years. Initially developed as an extension to semi-group theory for studying rion-autonornous behaviour, it was extensively used in analysing random dynamical systems [2, 9, 10, 12]. Many of the results regarding asymptotic behaviour developed for random dynamical systems, including the concept of cocycle attractors were successfully transferred and reinterpreted for deterministic non-autonomous systems primarily by P. Kloeden and B. Schmalfuss [20, 21, 28, 29]. The theory concerning cocycle attractors was later developed in various contexts specific to particular classes of dynamical systems [6, 7, 13], although a comprehensive understanding of cocycle attractors (redefined as pullback attractors within this thesis) and their role in the stability of non-autonomous dynamical systems was still at this stage incomplete. It was this purpose that motivated Chapters 1-3 to define and formalise the concept of stability within non-autonomous dynamical systems. The approach taken incorporates the elements of classical asymptotic theory, and refines the notion of pullback attraction with further development towards a study of pull-back stability arid pullback asymptotic stability. In a comprehensive manner, it clearly establishes both pullback and forward (classical) stability theory as fundamentally unique and essential components of non-autonomous stability. Many of the introductory theorems and examples highlight the key properties arid differences between pullback and forward stability. The theory also cohesively retains all the properties of classical asymptotic stability theory in an autonomous environment. These chapters are intended as a fundamental framework from which further research in the various fields of non-autonomous dynamical systems may be extended. A preliminary version of a Lyapunov-like theory that characterises pullback attraction is created as a tool for examining non-autonomous behaviour in Chapter 5. The nature of its usefulness however is at this stage restricted to the converse theorem of asymptotic stability. Chapter 7 introduces the theory of Loci Dynamics. A transformation is made to an alternative dynamical system where forward asymptotic (classical asymptotic) behaviour characterises pullback attraction to a particular point in the original dynamical system. This has the advantage in that certain conventional techniques for a forward analysis may be applied. The remainder of the thesis, Chapters 4, 6 and Section 7.3, investigates the effects of perturbations and discretisations on non-autonomous dynamical systems known to possess structures that exhibit some form of stability or attraction. Chapter 4 investigates autonomous systems with semi-group attractors, that have been non-autonomously perturbed, whilst Chapter 6 observes the effects of discretisation on non-autonomous dynamical systems that exhibit properties of forward asymptotic stability. Chapter 7 explores the same problem of discretisation, but for pullback asymptotically stable systems. The theory of Loci Dynamics is used to analyse the nature of the discretisation, but establishment of results directly analogous to those discovered in Chapter 6 is shown to be unachievable. Instead a case by case analysis is provided for specific classes of dynamical systems, for which the results generate a numerical approximation of the pullback attraction in the original continuous dynamical system. The nature of the results regarding discretisation provide a non-autonomous extension to the work initiated by A. Stuart and J. Humphries [34, 35] for the numerical approximation of semi-group attractors within autonomous systems. . Of particular importance is the effect on the system's asymptotic behaviour over non-finite intervals of discretisation.

Asymmetric recognition of good and bad news at Malaysian capital market : a pre and crisis analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyze the asymmetric recognition of good and bad news on reported earnings of Malaysian-listed firms. The study uses both descriptive and regression analyses to ascertain whether there is a contemporaneous relationship between news (good and bad) and reported earnings. The analysis is based on a sample of 150 firms listed on the Bursa Malaysia Index over a period of 10 years, from 1990 to 2000. Two regression models were adopted based on Basu (1997) and Giner and Rees (2001). The first model aims to capture asymmetric recognition of good and bad news into reported earnings while the latter model is developed to capture both asymmetric recognition of information shock and permanent earnings effect on contemporaneous earnings. The evidence from this study reported the steady increase in earnings per share till 1997. However, a drastic decline was observed for the period 1997 to 1999 because of Asian financial crisis. The findings from the regression model one suggested that the asymmetric recognition of good news was more prominent during the good time compare to bad time and vice versa. The findings from model two also suggested that autoregressive effect of permanent effect was very prominent both for crisis and non crisis periods.

Socio-economic and demographic variations in school lunch participation of French children aged 3-17 years

Objective: To assess school canteen attendance in a French nationally representative sample of children and to analyse its association with the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the children and their families.
Design: Data from the second French national cross-sectional food consumption survey (INCA2), performed in 2006–2007, were used. Information on usual weekly school canteen attendance was collected through a self-reported questionnaire, and demographic and socio-economic variables through a face-to-face questionnaire. The associations between school canteen attendance and the socio-economic and demographic variables were investigated by multivariate logistic regression analyses.
Setting: The INCA2 sample was representative of the children aged 3–17 years in France.
Subject: Analysis was performed on 1413 schoolchildren who completed the school canteen attendance questions.
Results: Some 65?6% of schoolchildren aged 3–17 years had school lunch at least once weekly. This rate of attendance was positively correlated with age. Whatever the school level, school canteen attendance was positively associated with the educational level of the caregiver/parent. In pre- and elementary-school children, enrolment at the school canteen was also higher when the caregiver/parent worked, or in single-parent families. In secondary-school children, school lunch participation decreased with children living in more densely populated areas and increased with the level of the household’s living standards.
Conclusions: School canteen attendance was positively associated with children’s socio-economic background. This could reduce the effectiveness of the forthcoming school meal composition regulations designed to improve the diet of children from deprived backgrounds, who are more likely to have unhealthy food habits.

Racism as a determinant of health: a protocol for conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: 

Suicide by occupation: systematic review and meta-analysis

Background Previous research has shown that those employed in certain occupations, such as doctors and farmers, have an elevated risk of suicide, yet little research has sought to synthesise these findings across working-age populations. Aims To summarise published research in this area through systematic review and meta-analysis. Method Random effects meta-analyses were used to calculate a pooled risk of suicide across occupational skill-level groups. Results Thirty-four studies were included in the meta-analysis. Elementary professions (e.g. labourers and cleaners) were at elevated risk compared with the working-age population (rate ratio (RR) = 1.84, 95% CI 1.46-2.33), followed by machine operators and deck crew (RR = 1.78, 95% CI 1.22-2.60) and agricultural workers (RR = 1.64, 95% CI 1.19-2.28). Results suggested a stepwise gradient in risk, with the lowest skilled occupations being at greater risk of suicide than the highest skill-level group. Conclusions This is the first comprehensive meta-analytical review of suicide and occupation. There is a need for future studies to investigate explanations for the observed skill-level differences, particularly in people employed in lower skill-level groups.