Energy Union: Can Europe learn from Japan’s joint gas purchasing? CEPS Commentary, 11 December 2014

Japan’s two major electricity producing companies reached a preliminary agreement recently to establish a joint venture for the procurement of fossil fuel resources, primarily liquefied natural gas (LNG). The authors of this commentary ask whether this commercial initiative could serve as an example to Europe of how to increase the negotiating power of individual EU member states. They conclude that a private joint gas procurement company may indeed offer a solution for EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe, instead of yet another source of confrontation. Given the political volatility in the region, it could well be the key to balancing out the need for security of supply with an offer to guarantee security of demand, thereby creating the climate for stable commercial relations.

Investigation of concentration of economic power; monograph no. 1[-43]

Printed for the use of the Temporary National Economic Committee.

Arlette Laguiller:does the mainstay of the French political far-left enjoy linguistic parity with her male counterparts?

While language use has been argued to reflect gender asymmetry, increasing parity has been evidenced in official settings (Holmes, 2000; Dister and Moreau, 2006). Our hypothesis is that the French national press has developed a norm of equal linguistic treatment of men and women. In a corpus of articles from Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro, we examine the treatment of Arlette Laguiller, the female leader of the French extreme-left 'Worker's Struggle' Party (Lutte Ouvrière), during the run-up to the 2007 presidential elections. How Laguiller is referred to and described in comparison with her male counterparts evidences no asymmetry. Breaches to parity are only found in the right-wing Figaro newspaper. The ideological distance between the newspaper and the candidate suggests that power struggles are a primary source of asymmetrical treatments. The discursive functions of such treatments can be understood through an investigation based on a portable corpus linguistics methodology for the measure of discrimination. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Benefits of a marketing cooperative in transition agriculture: Mórakert purchasing and service co-operative

The paper analyses the potential benefits of marketing cooperatives in Hungary, employing a transaction cost economics framework. We found that the purchased quantity, the existence of contracts, flexibility and trust are the most important factors farmers consider when selling their products via a cooperative. The most striking result is that diversification has positive influences on the share of cooperatives in farmers’ sale. Furthermore, farmers with larger bargaining power have less willingness to sell their product to the cooperative. Surprisingly, asset specificity has rather negative effects on the share of cooperatives in members’ sales.

Peak -to -average power ratio reduced parallel interference cancellation Multicarrier-Code Division Multiple Access system with anti -interference property

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been proved to be a promising technology that enables the transmission of higher data rate. Multicarrier Code-Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is a transmission technique which combines the advantages of both OFDM and Code-Division Multiplexing Access (CDMA), so as to allow high transmission rates over severe time-dispersive multi-path channels without the need of a complex receiver implementation. Also MC-CDMA exploits frequency diversity via the different subcarriers, and therefore allows the high code rates systems to achieve good Bit Error Rate (BER) performances. Furthermore, the spreading in the frequency domain makes the time synchronization requirement much lower than traditional direct sequence CDMA schemes. There are still some problems when we use MC-CDMA. One is the high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the transmit signal. High PAPR leads to nonlinear distortion of the amplifier and results in inter-carrier self-interference plus out-of-band radiation. On the other hand, suppressing the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) is another crucial problem in the MC-CDMA system. Imperfect cross-correlation characteristics of the spreading codes and the multipath fading destroy the orthogonality among the users, and then cause MAI, which produces serious BER degradation in the system. Moreover, in uplink system the received signals at a base station are always asynchronous. This also destroys the orthogonality among the users, and hence, generates MAI which degrades the system performance. Besides those two problems, the interference should always be considered seriously for any communication system. In this dissertation, we design a novel MC-CDMA system, which has low PAPR and mitigated MAI. The new Semi-blind channel estimation and multi-user data detection based on Parallel Interference Cancellation (PIC) have been applied in the system. The Low Density Parity Codes (LDPC) has also been introduced into the system to improve the performance. Different interference models are analyzed in multi-carrier communication systems and then the effective interference suppression for MC-CDMA systems is employed in this dissertation. The experimental results indicate that our system not only significantly reduces the PAPR and MAI but also effectively suppresses the outside interference with low complexity. Finally, we present a practical cognitive application of the proposed system over the software defined radio platform.

Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduced Parallel Interference Cancellation Multicarrier-Code Division Multiple Access System with Anti-Interference Property

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been proved to be a promising technology that enables the transmission of higher data rate. Multicarrier Code-Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) is a transmission technique which combines the advantages of both OFDM and Code-Division Multiplexing Access (CDMA), so as to allow high transmission rates over severe time-dispersive multi-path channels without the need of a complex receiver implementation. Also MC-CDMA exploits frequency diversity via the different subcarriers, and therefore allows the high code rates systems to achieve good Bit Error Rate (BER) performances. Furthermore, the spreading in the frequency domain makes the time synchronization requirement much lower than traditional direct sequence CDMA schemes. There are still some problems when we use MC-CDMA. One is the high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the transmit signal. High PAPR leads to nonlinear distortion of the amplifier and results in inter-carrier self-interference plus out-of-band radiation. On the other hand, suppressing the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) is another crucial problem in the MC-CDMA system. Imperfect cross-correlation characteristics of the spreading codes and the multipath fading destroy the orthogonality among the users, and then cause MAI, which produces serious BER degradation in the system. Moreover, in uplink system the received signals at a base station are always asynchronous. This also destroys the orthogonality among the users, and hence, generates MAI which degrades the system performance. Besides those two problems, the interference should always be considered seriously for any communication system. In this dissertation, we design a novel MC-CDMA system, which has low PAPR and mitigated MAI. The new Semi-blind channel estimation and multi-user data detection based on Parallel Interference Cancellation (PIC) have been applied in the system. The Low Density Parity Codes (LDPC) has also been introduced into the system to improve the performance. Different interference models are analyzed in multi-carrier communication systems and then the effective interference suppression for MC-CDMA systems is employed in this dissertation. The experimental results indicate that our system not only significantly reduces the PAPR and MAI but also effectively suppresses the outside interference with low complexity. Finally, we present a practical cognitive application of the proposed system over the software defined radio platform.