Evaluating Alternative Safety Net Programs in Alberta: A Firm-level Simulation Analysis

This paper examines alternative risk management strategies in terms of their effectiveness for three representative Alberta farm operations. Stochastic dynamic simulation methods are used to model financial performance for these farms, and alternative risk management programs are compared in terms of their ability to stabilize returns, support income and reduce the probability of bankruptcy. The results suggest that government programs such as the Net Income Stabilization Account (NISA) program or the Farm Income Disaster Program (FIDP) in Alberta have some benefits in terms of supporting income levels and reducing the chances of farm failure. Neither program is very effective, however, in stabilizing year to year income or cash flow for the farm operations. As a risk management program, FIDP is more effective than NISA but this improved performance comes at the price of higher government costs. Performance of NISA and FIDP, relative to alternative risk management programs and strategies such as forward contracting or crop insurance, is mixed. In some cases, NISA does not seem to provide benefits beyond those available from other strategies, while FIDP tends to perform better than the alternatives. Finally, while increased debt load weakens firm financial performance, NISA and FIDP still provide some benefits in terms of supporting income and reducing the probability of bankruptcy.Farm Management, Risk and Uncertainty,

Complementary Algorithms For Tableaux

We study four operations defined on pairs of tableaux. Algorithms for the first three involve the familiar procedures of jeu de taquin, row insertion, and column insertion. The fourth operation, hopscotch, is new, although specialised versions have appeared previously. Like the other three operations, this new operation may be computed with a set of local rules in a growth diagram, and it preserves Knuth equivalence class. Each of these four operations gives rise to an a priori distinct theory of dual equivalence. We show that these four theories coincide. The four operations are linked via the involutive tableau operations of complementation and conjugation.Comment: 29 pages, 52 .eps files for figures, JCTA, to appea

A crossover for the bad configurations of random walk in random scenery

In this paper, we consider a random walk and a random color scenery on Z. The increments of the walk and the colors of the scenery are assumed to be i.i.d. and to be independent of each other. We are interested in the random process of colors seen by the walk in the course of time. Bad configurations for this random process are the discontinuity points of the conditional probability distribution for the color seen at time zero given the colors seen at all later times. We focus on the case where the random walk has increments 0, +1 or -1 with probability epsilon, (1-epsilon)p and (1-epsilon)(1-p), respectively, with p in [1/2,1] and epsilon in [0,1), and where the scenery assigns the color black or white to the sites of Z with probability 1/2 each. We show that, remarkably, the set of bad configurations exhibits a crossover: for epsilon=0 and p in (1/2,4/5) all configurations are bad, while for (p,epsilon) in an open neighborhood of (1,0) all configurations are good. In addition, we show that for epsilon=0 and p=1/2 both bad and good configurations exist. We conjecture that for all epsilon in [0,1) the crossover value is unique and equals 4/5. Finally, we suggest an approach to handle the seemingly more difficult case where epsilon>0 and p in [1/2,4/5), which will be pursued in future work.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOP664 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Gulf Coast Libraries and Their Disaster Planning

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, becoming infamous for the destruction it wrought to communities from Louisiana to Alabama. Most notably, it caused massive flooding in New Orleans and surrounding parishes by breaching the levee system. The storm\u27s impact on the region\u27s population, buildings, and collective psyche is impossible to measure. As was the case with other Gulf Coast institutions in the path of Hurricane Katrina, the region\u27s libraries also suffered extensively. Through examination of the available literature and first-hand accounts of library professionals, this thesis examines the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on libraries in southeastern Louisiana, the New Orleans metropolitan area, and Southern Mississippi. It also considers the role disaster plans played in preserving select libraries\u27 collections as well as some of the problems occurring with their implementation during the disaster. It was discovered that library disaster plans are designed to mitigate small, localized disasters, not those on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. It was also found that large scale disasters, like a hurricane or earthquake, render such plans ineffective, though action taken by library staff before and immediately afterward can make some difference. The thesis concludes with a list of recommendations for library disaster planning in the future

Comments: Adjusting Accountants\u27 Liability for Negligence: Recovery for Reasonably Foreseeable Users of Financial Statements

The privity requirement has traditionally served as a bar for many investors who have relied to their detriment on negligently prepared financial statements. This restriction of an accountant\u27s liability has recently been broadened by some courts, which allow specifically and even reasonably foreseeable users of financial statements to bring negligence actions against the accountant. This comment examines the role of the financial statement in modern investment practice, discusses the recent expansion of the test, and advocates the adoption of a reasonably foreseeable standard

Divergence Model for Measurement of Goos-Hanchen Shift

In this effort a new measurement technique for the lateral Goos-Hanchen shift is developed, analyzed, and demonstrated. The new technique uses classical image formation methods fused with modern detection and analysis methods to achieve higher levels of sensitivity than obtained with prior practice. Central to the effort is a new mathematical model of the dispersion seen at a step shadow when the Goos-Hanchen effect occurs near critical angle for total internal reflection. Image processing techniques are applied to measure the intensity distribution transfer function of a new divergence model of the Goos-Hanchen phenomena providing verification of the model. This effort includes mathematical modeling techniques, analytical derivations of governing equations, numerical verification of models and sensitivities, optical design of apparatus, image processin

Comments: Adjusting Accountants\u27 Liability for Negligence: Recovery for Reasonably Foreseeable Users of Financial Statements

The privity requirement has traditionally served as a bar for many investors who have relied to their detriment on negligently prepared financial statements. This restriction of an accountant\u27s liability has recently been broadened by some courts, which allow specifically and even reasonably foreseeable users of financial statements to bring negligence actions against the accountant. This comment examines the role of the financial statement in modern investment practice, discusses the recent expansion of the test, and advocates the adoption of a reasonably foreseeable standard

Interoceptive robustness through environment-mediated morphological development

Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or neural network architecture) using evolutionary or learning algorithms. Another but not unrelated longstanding property of these systems is their brittleness to slight aberrations, as highlighted by the growing deep learning literature on adversarial examples. Here we show robustness can be achieved by evolving the geometry of soft robots, their control systems, and how their material properties develop in response to one particular interoceptive stimulus (engineering stress) during their lifetimes. By doing so we realized robots that were equally fit but more robust to extreme material defects (such as might occur during fabrication or by damage thereafter) than robots that did not develop during their lifetimes, or developed in response to a different interoceptive stimulus (pressure). This suggests that the interplay between changes in the containing systems of agents (body plan and/or neural architecture) at different temporal scales (evolutionary and developmental) along different modalities (geometry, material properties, synaptic weights) and in response to different signals (interoceptive and external perception) all dictate those agents' abilities to evolve or learn capable and robust strategies