Nonparametric Efficiency Analysis for Coffee Farms in Puerto Rico

Coffee production in Puerto Rico is labor intensive since harvest is done by hand for quality and topography conditions. Färe's nonparametric approach was used to estimate technical, allocative, scale and overall efficiency measures for coffee farms in Puerto Rico during the 2000 to 2004 period. On average Puerto Rico coffee farms were 46% technically efficient, 79% scale efficient, and 74% allocatively efficient.coffee production, nonparametric efficiency, Crop Production/Industries, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Identification of buried archaeological features using the curvelet transform

We present an application of the curvelet transform fusion method between geophysical and remote sensing data. The method was tested in two different archaeological areas in Greece with different historical, archaeological, and environmental characteristics. The final fused images combined all available information reducing the noise and enhancing the interesting features

Almost Sure Convergence of Solutions to Non-Homogeneous Stochastic Difference Equation

We consider a non-homogeneous nonlinear stochastic difference equation X_{n+1} = X_n (1 + f(X_n)\xi_{n+1}) + S_n, and its important special case X_{n+1} = X_n (1 + \xi_{n+1}) + S_n, both with initial value X_0, non-random decaying free coefficient S_n and independent random variables \xi_n. We establish results on \as convergence of solutions X_n to zero. The necessary conditions we find tie together certain moments of the noise \xi_n and the rate of decay of S_n. To ascertain sharpness of our conditions we discuss some situations when X_n diverges. We also establish a result concerning the rate of decay of X_n to zero.Comment: 22 pages; corrected more typos, fixed LaTeX macro