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As all safety systems in the majority of existing nuclear power plants use the preferred power supply, any voltage surges in these systems could lead to common-cause failures. In the event of an unusual electrical system transient, it is essential that safety-related equipment be isolated or protected from the fault in order to ensure its ability to safely shut down the reactor and remove decay heat.
Based on the analysis of the voltage surges observed at Forsmark-1 in 2006 and Olkiluoto-1 in 2008, this technical opinion paper summarises the current state of knowledge of in-plant and external grid-related challenges to nuclear power plant safety-related electrical equipment. It will be of particular interest to nuclear safety regulators, nuclear power plant operators and grid system regulators and operators.
Southern Cross University (SCU) has established a pathways college to increase access to and widen participation in higher education for people in regional areas of Australia. While many Australian universities have preparatory colleges associated with them, SCU College has been designed to make it unique in the sector. SCU College will operate under close contractual collaboration with the two vocational education institutes of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in its footprint, North Coast TAFE and the Gold Coast Institute of TAFE. The core offerings of SCU College will be generic associate degrees in arts, business, allied health and science, offered on SCU campuses, at learning centres on the campuses of the three partners and by distance. Graduates from the College will be able to articulate into SCU degree courses. Survey data reveal that there are thousands of people in this region who are not qualified for direct entry into university, who do not wish to study at TAFE institutes and who are unable or unwilling to travel to study. The associate degrees are designed to provide generic skills for these people within a discipline context with enhanced study support from local College staff.
The author demonstrates the process involved in creating the SCU pathways College noting that its creation fills an educational gap that responds to removing barriers and enhancing access, as well as successful outcomes noting that in detailing the main steps, strategies and design necessities involved may be of value for duplicating similar institutions, in Australia and elsewhere.
High values of implicit guarantees for bank debt can be taken as signalling the market’s expectation that public authorities will rescue the institution in question in times of severe financial distress. By the same token, declines in the measure would suggest a drop in the perceived likelihood of such a bailout, perhaps reflecting the availability of more effective failure resolution tools (although they could also reflect other factors such an improvement in the asset quality of banks).
- In most OECD countries, newly arrived 15-year-old immigrant students show poorer reading performance than immigrant students who arrived in their new country when they were younger than five.
- Students who emigrated from less-developed countries where the home language differs from their new language of instruction are particularly vulnerable to the “late-arrival” penalty in reading performance.
- Immigrant students from countries with similar levels of development and the same language as the host country do not suffer any late-arrival penalty at all.
- Most students enjoy orderly classrooms for their language-of-instruction lessons.
- Socio-economically disadvantaged students are less likely to enjoy orderly classrooms than advantaged students.
- Orderly classrooms – regardless of the school’s overall socio-economic profile – are related to better performance.
This study investigates the usefulness of business tendency surveys collected at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute and aggregated in the form of the KOF Employment Indicator for short-term forecasting of employment in Switzerland. We use a real-time dataset in order to simulate the actual predictive process using only information that was available at the time when predictions were made. We evaluate the predictive content of the KOF Employment Indicator both for nowcasts that are published two months before the first official release, and for one-quarter ahead forecasts published five months before the first official release. We find that inclusion of the KOF Employment Indicator leads to a substantial improvement in prediction accuracy of both point and density forecasts compared to the performance of a benchmark autoregressive model.