REPRESENTATION SCHEMES FOR MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING MODELS

Because of the difficulties often experienced in formulating and understanding large scale models, much current research is directed towards developing systems to support the construction and understanding of management science models. This paper discusses seven different methods for representing mathematical programming models during the formulation phase of the modeling process. The approaches discussed are block-schematic, algebraic, three different kinds of graphical schemes, a database-oriented approach and Structured Modeling. We emphasize representations that have graphical elements suitable for incorporation in the interface to a modeling system. The different methods are compared using a common example and the transformations that allow one to go from one representation to another are discussed.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Marshall and Walras : Incompatible Bedfellows ?

The standard view about the relation between the Marshallian and the Walrasian approaches is that they are complementary to each other. My aim in this paper is to show that, on the contrary, they constitute alternative sub-research programs within the wider neoclassical paradigm. I make my point by contrasting the two approaches against the following benchmarks : the purpose of economic theory according to Marshall and Walras, their views as the role of mathematics, their ways of looking at the working of the economy as whole, the conception of equilibrium underpinning their theories and finally their trade organization assumptions

REPRESENTATION SCHEMES FOR MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING MODELS

Because of the difficulties often experienced in formulating and understanding large scale models, much current research is directed towards developing systems to support the construction and understanding of management science models. This paper discusses six different methods for representing mathematical programming models during the formulation phase of the modeling process. The approaches discussed in the paper include algebra, three different kinds of graphical schemes, a database-oriented approach and Structured Modeling. We emphasize representations that have graphical elements suitable for incorporation in the interface to a modeling system. The different methods are compared using a common example and conclusions are drawn as to their suitability for various modeling tasks and situations.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Market operation and distributive justice: An evaluation of the ACCRA confession

In the so-called ACCRA declaration of 2004 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) condemns neo liberal globalisation on grounds of lack of justice. This paper outlines ten alternative criteria for distributive justice. We show that Biblical ethics support various of these criteria, including distribution in accordance to needs, the capability approach of Sen, reward of productivity and procedural justice in transactions. Next, we present an overview of empirical research to the impact of international market operation on distributive justice. We evaluate the conclusion of the WARC that market operation is opposite to Christian faith.Distributive justice; libertarianism; moral desert; egalitarianism; Christian ethics; market operation; poverty; income inequality

Biodiversity Impacts of Investment and Free Trade Agreements

The following Article identifies the myriad ways in which international investment and free trade agreements interact with biodiversity. It categorizes these interactions into three main groups and provides a literature review of the various real-world and policy impacts. The first part analyses arbitration procedures in these agreements that investors and trade partners can invoke to protect their economic expectations from otherwise proper State action, including regulation that is intended to promote biodiversity. The next part evaluates biodiversity provisions that are included directly in the free trade and investment agreements themselves, or in side agreements thereto. Some of these provisions reference multilateral environmental treaties and attempt to provide stronger enforcement mechanisms for those obligations, while others create freestanding obligations between the contracting states and provide for dispute resolution procedures. The final part considers biodiversity as a form of intellectual property and a few of the various trade and investment agreements that regulate it as such. As the Article is not exhaustive of each interaction under every free trade or investment agreement, it is not possible to say empirically herein whether biodiversity is benefited or harmed on balance. But it is clear that over time these agreements are becoming more explicitly aware of their biodiversity impacts, and the contracting parties are striving for more of a balance between biodiversity protection and economic considerations. The Article is intended to provide insight into the wide range of biodiversity considerations that should be taken into account when drafting future free trade and investment agreements, as well as enforcing those currently in place. It is also intended to apprise environmental practitioners of the potential roadblocks and avenues that these agreements create

NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Cases: Lessons for the Central America Free Trade Agreement

This report describes how Canadian cattle producers are using NAFTA to demand $300 million in compensation from U.S. taxpayer funds, claiming that the Canadian cattle import ban instituted after mad cow disease was found in Canada violates their NAFTA rights. In addition, a Canadian tobacco company is using the private NAFTA tribunals to attack the U.S.tobacco settlements. These claims are among the 42 cases filed thus far by corporate interests and investors under NAFTA's "Chapter 11" investor provisions, which grant foreign interests more expansive legal rights and privileges than those enjoyed by U.S. citizens or corporations. With only 11 of the 42 cases finalized, some$35 million in taxpayer funds have been granted to five corporations that have succeeded with their claims. An additional $28 billion has been claimed from investors in all three NAFTA nations. The U.S. government's legal costs for the defense of just one recent case topped$3 million. Seven cases against the United States are currently in active arbitration. The report documents how "fixes" to the NAFTA investor protection model required by Congress in the 2002 "Fast Track" legislation were not included in the proposed CAFTA. CAFTA's investment provisions include several cosmetic, ineffective tweaks to the NAFTA investor protection language, but otherwise expand the system of new privileges and private enforcement to investors in six additional nations. These rights include the ability to demand compensation when public health and environmental policies -- even when applied equally to domestic and foreign firms -- might undermine a foreign firm's profitability. On this ground and others, CAFTA fails to meet Congress' most significant Fast Track requirement regarding investment rules in future pacts by granting foreign firms greater rights when operating within the United States than U.S. firms or residents enjoy under constitutional property rights interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. CAFTA was signed in 2004 but has not yet been brought up for congressional consideration; support for the deal is limited, in part because of its investment provisions. The United States has not yet lost a case, thanks to an array of lucky technical breaks -- such as an investor relocating into the United States and thus losing foreign investor standing under NAFTA. However, with the overall win-loss ratio of NAFTA investor-state cases running around 50-50, it is just a matter of time before a NAFTA claimant is successful against the United States

Users manual for the US baseline corn and soybean segment classification procedure

A user's manual for the classification component of the FY-81 U.S. Corn and Soybean Pilot Experiment in the Foreign Commodity Production Forecasting Project of AgRISTARS is presented. This experiment is one of several major experiments in AgRISTARS designed to measure and advance the remote sensing technologies for cropland inventory. The classification procedure discussed is designed to produce segment proportion estimates for corn and soybeans in the U.S. Corn Belt (Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois) using LANDSAT data. The estimates are produced by an integrated Analyst/Machine procedure. The Analyst selects acquisitions, participates in stratification, and assigns crop labels to selected samples. In concert with the Analyst, the machine digitally preprocesses LANDSAT data to remove external effects, stratifies the data into field like units and into spectrally similar groups, statistically samples the data for Analyst labeling, and combines the labeled samples into a final estimate

Randomizable phenology-dependent corn canopy for simulated remote sensing of agricultural scenes

Crop health assessment and yield prediction from multi-spectral remote sensing imagery are ongoing areas of interest in precision agriculture. It is in these contexts that simulation-based techniques are useful to investigate system parameters, perform preliminary experiments, etc., because remote sensing systems can be prohibitively expensive to design, deploy, and operate. However, such techniques require realistic and reliable models of the real world. We thus present a randomizable time-dependent model of corn (Zea mays L.) canopy, which is suitable for procedural generation of high-fidelity virtual corn fields at any time in the vegetative growth phase, with application to simulated remote sensing of agricultural scenes. This model unifies a physiological description of corn growth subject to environmental factors with a parametric description of corn canopy geometry, and prioritizes computational efficiency in the context of ray tracing for light transport simulation. We provide a reference implementation in C++, which includes a software plug-in for the 5th edition of the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation tool (DIRSIG5), in order to make simulation of agricultural scenes more readily accessible. For validation, we use our DIRSIG5 plug-in to simulate multi-spectral images of virtual corn plots that correspond to those of a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) site at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), where reference data were collected in the summer of 2018. We show in particular that 1) the canopy geometry as a function of time is in agreement with field measurements, and 2) the radiance predicted by a DIRSIG5 simulation of the virtual corn plots is in agreement with radiance-calibrated imagery collected by a drone-mounted MicaSense RedEdge imaging system. We lastly remark that DIRSIG5 is able to simulate imagery directly as digital counts provided detailed knowledge of the detector array, e.g., quantum efficiency, read noise, and well capacity. That being the case, it is feasible to investigate the parameter space of a remote sensing system via “end-to-end” simulation

Climate Change Hysteria and the Supreme Court: The Economic Impact of Global Warming on the U.S. and the Misguided Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act

In the spring of 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must promulgate automobile tailpipe C02 emission standards under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act (CAA). American environmentalists hailed the Supreme Court's decision as an important victory in the battle to curb global warming. This article argues to the contrary that: 1) a large body of economic work demonstrates that the likely pattern of costs and benefits from climate change in the United States bears no resemblance to the pollution problems that Congress intended to deal with in the Clean Air Act, with moderate climate change predominantly benefiting, rather than harming, the U.S. -- so that that the Clean Air Act cannot reasonably be interpreted to cover greenhouse gas emissions; 2) By effectively forcing the EPA to regulate ghg emissions under a statute that was never intended to cover the very different problem of climate change, the Court has changed the policy status quo in a way that makes socially desirable federal climate change legislation less likely; and 3) given the global nature of the greenhouse gas emission problem, unilateral emission limits in the U.S. are likely to be worse than ineffective, in that they will likely have the perverse effect of lessening the incentive for latecomers to climate change regulation (such as China) to themselves take costly action to reduce such emissions. The article concludes by arguing that a sensible formulation of U.S. climate change policy would involve measures to respond both to the long-term threat to the U.S. and the short-term threat to developing countries. There are policy instruments appropriate to these goals: large increases in subsidies for research and development into clean coal and alternative fuels to respond to the long term threat to the U.S.; redirecting foreign aid to fund climate change adaptation in developing countries to respond to the short term threat to developing countries.