Dancing with the Dragon Heads: Enforcement, Innovations and Efficiency of Contracts between Agricultural Processors and Farmers in China

Contractual breaches are very common in developing countries such as China. In order to prevent breaches of contract, the contractual designs between farmers and agricultural processors (Dragon Head Firms) in China are innovating in two ways: organizational innovations and contractual innovations. Due to contractual innovations, simple price-quantity contracts are evolving into complex cooperation contracts. Using data for over 500 state key processors in 2003 from the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, we construct econometric models to study contractual choices, contract intensity, and their impacts on sales and profits for agricultural processors in China. The results indicate that capital and the number of contracted farmers are endogenous to contract choices. Processors are more likely to use cooperation contracts compared with price-quantity contracts as the number of contracted farmers increases, because the costs of coordinating, monitoring and enforcing price-quantity contracts may increase dramatically under these circumstances . On the other hand, contract types are not important for the number of contracted farmers, the intensity of contracts, or sales and profits for processors. The results also indicate that the elasticity of profits with respect to capital is 0.52, which implies that the returns to investing in the food processing industry are relatively high in China.Agribusiness,

Variation in _PNPLA3_ is associated with outcomes in alcoholic liver disease

Two recent genome-wide association studies have described associations of SNP variants in _PNPLA3_ with nonalcoholic fatty liver and plasma liver enzyme levels in population based cohorts. We investigated the contributions of these variants to clinical outcomes in Mestizo subjects with a history of excessive alcohol consumption. We show that non-synonymous variant rs738409[G] (I148M) in _PNPLA3_ is strongly associated with alcoholic liver disease and progression to alcoholic cirrhosis (unadjusted OR = 2.25, P = 1.7x10^-10^; ancestry-adjusted OR = 1.79, P = 1.9x10^-5^)

An Initial Design of a Website Snapshot Management System

A website snapshot is the state of a web site at a specific point in time. It supports applications that require historical data. Most website snapshots are created by making a copy of the website. These date-time stamped physical snapshots are unable to satisfy users’ need for snapshots of different snapshot times. This research proposes a scheme that is able to create website snapshots that meet any snapshot time requirements by recording changes to a website in a log. For web pages producing dynamic content from a database, this scheme will allow the pages to access a database snapshot at the website snapshot time

The Extended Commands for the Management of Database Snapshots for Internet Decision Support Applications

Database snapshots have been an effective way of supporting decision support applications, and will continue to play an important role in providing data in an Intranet decision support environment. This paper discusses the special characteristics of the database snapshot management in an Intranet decision support environment, review the major components involved in the management of snapshots, and then define new commands for the management of snapshots in this environment

The Design of a Web Snapshot Management System for Decision Support Applications

Database snapshots that are defined and/or delivered via the Web are called web snapshots. This paper addresses the requirements for web snapshot management. A web snapshot management system is proposed; its architecture and functions of the major components are described; new commands are defined to perform web snapshot management activities

Tracking a Web Site\u27s Historical Links with Temporal URLs

he historical links of a web site include the URLs invalidated due to web site reorganization, document removal, renaming or relocation, or links to document snapshots, which are defined as the document’s contents as of a specific point in time. Tracking historical links will allow users to use out-of-date URLs, retrieve removed documents and document snapshots. This paper presents a logging and archiving scheme to track a document’s history of changes, and a Temporal URL scheme for users to submit a URL with temporal requirements. With the proposed schemes, a web site is able to track its historical links and provide better searching and information for its users

The Design of a Web Document Snapshots Delivery System

A web document snapshot is a point-in-time capture of its code and the resulting presentation of executing the code. It is used as a way of electronically preserving historical information published in web documents enabling an organization to audit a web document’s contents at a point in the past and perform business analyses with historical information recorded in it. It is also an archived copy of a web document when it is changed. This research develops a system to deliver snapshots of a web document’s static and dynamic contents when it is requested. The system consists of a Database Snapshot Manager for providing database snapshots and a Web Document Snapshot Manager for providing web document snapshots. Algorithms supporting the two managers are presented