A New Experimental Pulp Digester Installation with Separate Steam Supply

Part I Literature Survey Up to now, few articles have been written on the subject of Experimental Pulp Digester Installations. In our searches we have been able to find information concerning only The Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada in Montreal, P.Q., Canada, The Chemical Pulp Experimental Department of the Central Laboratory in Finland, and a sulfite digester for research and instruction at the University of Washington at Seattle, Washington, U.S.A

What do Haitians need after the earthquake?

The earthquake that hit Haiti in the beginning of 2010 led to tremendous international solidarity in the recovery effort. Despite the tons of aid sent to Haiti, relatively little is known about the effectiveness of the aid or about the continuing needs of the Haitians. Using data collected from in-person surveys with over 1,000 Haitians, we sought to quantify some of the impacts of the earthquake while determining people’s relative preferences for food and other basic needs in the aftermath of the Haiti’s earthquake. The results indicate that almost two-thirds of Haitians lost a friend in the earthquake, and nearly half lost a family member. People report spending more on food in the aftermath of the earthquake, and the level of food aid received does not appear to have any impact on food expenditures. Among different types of aid, Haitians state being most in need of a job – something difficult for international aid agencies to supply over the long run.best-worst scaling, aid relief, earthquake, survey, disaster, Haiti., Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Is geographic diversification sufficient to limit contract grower risk?

Lending and financial institutions have looked for a variety of ways to expand their portfolios into agriculture, but because of the risks associated with lending to farmers who lack traditional forms of collateral, they face price and yield risks, causing these inroads to be limited. Market-based instruments are readily available for price risk. Organised exchanges offering the most basic of these instruments, futures and options, have operated for a long time, providing transparency to the market and low-cost risk transfer tools for those able to access them. While the use of price risk management instruments is an incomplete solution, it has sufficient merits on its own and will make the overall burden of risk more bearable. The use of these instruments and multi-peril crop insurance products is expensive and does not provide full protection for financial lending institutions to limit their credit risk exposure. This article determines whether geographic diversification would be sufficient as a risk management tool for lending institutions to limit their credit risk.Geographic diversification, Contract grower, Risk, Lending, Rainfall, Yield, Agricultural Finance,

"Demand Constraints and Economic Growth"

In recent years the U.S. has seemed to achieve the best of all possible worlds: robust economic growth, very low unemployment, and low inflation. Many attribute this performance to fewer supply side constraints, as the U.S. has moved away from stifling regulations and other impediments to trade. When compared with the very high unemployment rates suffered in European countries, our lower unemployment rates appear to be due to freer labor markets and to a less generous social safety net that saps private initiative. In this paper we show that although it is true the U.S. has enjoyed a higher employment rate than all of our major competitors, we lag behind all other major countries in per capita GDP growth since 1970. The reason is our dismal rate of productivity growth. We show that when one decomposes per capita GDP growth into its component parts--growth of employment rates and growth of output per employee--the U.S. experience is quite different from that of the other countries. In some sense, countries "choose" high employment paths or low employment paths, but regardless of that choice, economic growth does not appear to be much affected. We argue that this is because countries have not faced significant supply constraints; rather, per capita GDP growth has been largely demand constrained. For this reason policies aimed at removing supply constraints do not lead to more rapid economic growth. The conclusion is that, if one is to trying to increase growth rates, Keynesian "demand side" policies are preferable to "supply side" policies.

"Did the Clinton Rising Tide Raise All Boats? Job Opportunity for the Less Skilled"

During the recent robust expansion only 700,000 of the almost 12 million jobs created went to the half of the population that does not have at least some college education. Even though the number of officially unemployed fell to less than 4 million in the 25 and over age group, there remain in that age group over 26 million potentially employable workers—the combined number of those who are actively seeking work (and are counted as officially unemployed) and those who are currently out of the labor force but would be willing to participate. Since expansion has not proven sufficient to remedy this intolerably high level of wasted human resources, well-targeted, active labor market policies are required. One such policy is a job opportunity program that "hires off the bottom," providing minimum-wage jobs for all those who are ready, willing, and able to work. The program would create a buffer stock of labor from which employers could hire during upturns instead of bidding up the wages of the already employed and thus would offer both full employment and price stability.

Logic analysis of complex systems by characterizing failure phenomena to achieve diagnosis and fault-isolation

A recent result shows that, for a certain class of systems, the interdependency among the elements of such a system together with the elements constitutes a mathematical structure a partially ordered set. It is called a loop free logic model of the system. On the basis of an intrinsic property of the mathematical structure, a characterization of system component failure in terms of maximal subsets of bad test signals of the system was obtained. Also, as a consequence, information concerning the total number of failure components in the system was deduced. Detailed examples are given to show how to restructure real systems containing loops into loop free models for which the result is applicable

Intertemporal and Spatial Location of Disposal Facilities

Optimal capacity and location of a sequence of land.lls are studied, and the interactions between both decisions are pointed out.The decision capacity has some spatial implications, because it a.ects the feasible region for the rest of land.lls, and some temporal implications, because the capacity determines the lifetime of the land.ll and hence the instant of time where next land.lls will need to be constructed.Some general mathematical properties of the solution are provided and interpreted from an economic point of view.The resulting problem turns out to be no convex and therefore it can not be solved by conventional optimization techniques.Some global optimization methods are used to solve the problem in a particular case, in order to illustrate the behavior of the solution depending on parameter values.Landfilling;Optimal Capacity;Optimal Location;Global Optimization