The Efficiency Gains from Fully Delineating Rights in an ITQ Fishery

Individual transferable quota (ITQ) regulation relies on a decentralized market mechanism and a single price to allocate access to a stock of fish. The resulting allocation will not be fully efficient if the stock being allocated is heterogeneous or if there are potential gains from centralized coordination of harvesting effort. If stocks are heterogeneous in their density, location, or unit value during the season, harvesters governed by an ITQ policy will not be indifferent to when or where they exercise their quotas. Stocks that are relatively dense and/or close to port will be preferred to those less dense or more remote. Because an ITQ policy assigns the same opportunity cost for each unit harvested, individual harvesters have an incentive to compete for higher-valued units, and such competition may dissipate part of the fishery’s potential rent. A similar phenomenon arises when stock densities vary in an unknown way over space or time, so harvesters must engage in costly search. Individual harvesters governed by an ITQ policy still face a collective action problem which limits the incentive to share information on stock locations. This can lead to redundant search effort. We demonstrate that both sources of inefficiency can be eliminated either by defining ITQ rights more precisely or by an agreement among harvesters to coordinate their effort. We develop models that illustrate these effects and identify the factors that determine their likely size. Anecdotal evidence on practices adopted by fishery cooperatives is presented to illustrate the practical relevance of the issues we raise.ITQ fishery, cooperative, search, game theory, property rights, Environmental Economics and Policy, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, International Relations/Trade, Q22, D23, K11,

SODA-IIoT4RailTransport: Application to Railway Signalling System to ensure correct configuration through secure updates

Co-designed with Alstom Transport, SODA-IIoT4RailTransport offers a secure way to update the configuration of the railway signalling systemInternational audienceRailway urban systems are complex interconnected systems combining heterogeneous components (Control system based on some hardware and software components, communication devices and physical plant)One important maintenance function for Alstom is to update a coherent configuration in a secure manner. In this work, this function is performed by the SODA-IIoT infrastructure developed within IRT SystemX.The configuration parameters (firmware, OS, drivers, applications, operation parameters...) of these computational nodes are updated through a blockchain infrastructure (with redundant nodes) and secure gateways (manage access rights and secure communications). In this manner, the integrity of a new configuration is ensured and with high availability

Office Vacancy - data, evidence and opportunity

This article interrogates the Government's (DCLG, 2013) announcemen,of permitted development rights for office to residential conversion and reviews the availability and reliability of data to quantify and identify the extent of office vacancy in England and Wales. It argues that the announcement can be positive in certain circumstances, although this is contested and currently difficult to evidence, while available vacant property data resources are variable in quality and often difficult to access

Flexible Yet Secure De-Duplication Service for Enterprise Data on Cloud Storage

The cloud storage services bring forth infinite storage capacity and flexible access capability to store and share large-scale content. The convenience brought forth has attracted both individual and enterprise users to outsource data service to a cloud provider. As the survey shows 56% of the usages of cloud storage applications are for data back up and up to 68% of data backup are user assets. Enterprise tenants would need to protect their data privacy before uploading them to the cloud and expect a reasonable performance while they try to reduce the operation cost in terms of cloud storage, capacity and I/Os matter as well as systems’ performance, bandwidth and data protection. Thus, enterprise tenants demand secure and economic data storage yet flexible access on their cloud data. In this paper, we propose a secure de-duplication solution for enterprise tenants to leverage the benefits of cloud storage while reducing operation cost and protecting privacy. First, the solution uses a proxy to do flexible group access control which supports secure de-duplication within a group; Second, the solution supports scalable clustering of proxies to support large-scale data access; Third, the solution can be integrated with cloud storage seamlessly. We implemented and tested our solution by integrating it with Dropbox. Secure de-duplication in a group is performed at low data transfer latency and small storage overhead as compared to de-duplication on plaintext

A Fuzzy Association Rule Mining Expert-Driven (FARME-D) approach to Knowledge Acquisition

Fuzzy Association Rule Mining Expert-Driven (FARME-D) approach to knowledge acquisition is proposed in this paper as a viable solution to the challenges of rule-based unwieldiness and sharp boundary problem in building a fuzzy rule-based expert system. The fuzzy models were based on domain experts’ opinion about the data description. The proposed approach is committed to modelling of a compact Fuzzy Rule-Based Expert Systems. It is also aimed at providing a platform for instant update of the knowledge-base in case new knowledge is discovered. The insight to the new approach strategies and underlining assumptions, the structure of FARME-D and its practical application in medical domain was discussed. Also, the modalities for the validation of the FARME-D approach were discussed

The Virtues of Redundancy in Legal Thought

Redundancy has a bad reputation among legal intellectuals. When someone says, for example, that the ninth and tenth amendments are redundant, we can be pretty sure that this person attaches little importance to these constitutional provisions. Listen to one of the definitions of redundant provided by the Oxford English Dictionary: superabundant, superfluous, excessive. \u27 In this essay, the author proposes that legal theorists pay serious attention to the concept of redundancy used by engineers. He explains how redundancy--in this special sense--is essential to any intellectual enterprise in which we try to reach action-guiding conclusions, including the enterprise of law. The author describes the virtues of redundancy in legal thought

Duplicating RTP streams

Packet loss is undesirable for real-time multimedia sessions but can occur due to a variety of reasons including unplanned network outages. In unicast transmissions, recovering from such an outage can be difficult depending on the outage duration, due to the potentially large number of missing packets. In multicast transmissions, recovery is even more challenging as many receivers could be impacted by the outage. For this challenge, one solution that does not incur unbounded delay is to duplicate the packets and send them in separate redundant streams, provided that the underlying network satisfies certain requirements. This document explains how Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) streams can be duplicated without breaking RTP or RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) rule

Structural educational reform : evidence from a teacher's displacement program in Armenia

This paper reviews the experience of Armenia with the displacement of more than 7,000 teachers during 2003-07 as part of structural reforms in general education. In addition to supplementary severance payments, a variety of services were needed to address difficulties commonly experienced by displaced employees, including job search assistance and counseling services, provision of information on the labor market, on legal rights of job seekers, on services and service providers available, including training, relocation assistance, and so forth. The findings of the paper suggest that the staff rationalization program has resulted in significant efficiency gains: the student-teacher ratio increased from 10.8 in 2003 to 13.9 in 2006. The considerable reduction in staff positions has allowed the government to significantly increase nominal wages and salaries for teaching and non-teaching staff.Labor Markets,,Tertiary Education,Primary Education,Education For All