Economic evaluation of potential changes in farm program price support for typical Louisiana rice and cotton farming operations

Increased government deficit has led the congress to reduce federal spending. Proposed budget cuts are intended to decrease government spending in several areas, including agriculture. Reductions in farm program spending could cause significant adverse effects on the financial situation of many farms, particularly to rice and cotton enterprises, due to their high reliance on farm program payments as a source of income. Representative rice and cotton operations of one, two, three, and four entities as single crop enterprises were considered and developed for use in this study. Farm enterprise sizes were determined by estimating the acreage level at which a one, two, three, and four entity operations would reach the most restrictive payment limit. Rice and cotton farms were considered to plant and harvest 85 percent of base acreage (100 percent of paid base acreage). For each enterprise evaluated, gross income, variable production costs, fixed equipment costs, and general farm overhead expenses are included in the analysis. Projections of income and expenses are made for a five-year period (2005-2009). For each year of simulation, random market prices and crop yields are generated to allow for inclusion of price and yield risk. Random domestic market prices, world market prices and crop yields per acre, for both rice and cotton, were generated. The analysis includes a comparison of a baseline simulation of projected income and expenses with six alternative program payment reduction scenarios. Continuation of current policy without reductions in farm program spending has shown to generate insufficient net farm income to both rice and cotton enterprises. One entity operations under the baseline scenario have resulted as being non-viable operations. Increasing reductions in program payments had a detrimental effect on the financial situation of both rice and cotton operations. The combination of 5 percent reduction in program payments along with a 10 percent decline in market prices resulted as the worse case scenario for all rice and cotton enterprises placing them in a higher risk of negative returns over variable and total costs. No program reductions below the baseline scenario are recommended for the viability of an already suffering agricultural sector

Reporte de formación complementaria en área de concentración en sistemas embebidos y telecomunicaciones

En este trabajo se presentan tres proyectos relacionados con sistemas embebidos y telecomunicaciones: diseño e implementación de un sistema operativo para sistemas embebidos; transmisión de datos en equivalente pasa-bajas con modulación 4-PSK, y K64 Audio Player V1.0 y amplificador de audio

Static Pairwise Annihilation in Complex Networks

We study static annihilation on complex networks, in which pairs of connected particles annihilate at a constant rate during time. Through a mean-field formalism, we compute the temporal evolution of the distribution of surviving sites with an arbitrary number of connections. This general formalism, which is exact for disordered networks, is applied to Kronecker, Erd\"os-R\'enyi (i.e. Poisson) and scale-free networks. We compare our theoretical results with extensive numerical simulations obtaining excellent agreement. Although the mean-field approach applies in an exact way neither to ordered lattices nor to small-world networks, it qualitatively describes the annihilation dynamics in such structures. Our results indicate that the higher the connectivity of a given network element, the faster it annihilates. This fact has dramatic consequences in scale-free networks, for which, once the ``hubs'' have been annihilated, the network disintegrates and only isolated sites are left.Comment: 7 Figures, 10 page