Strategic Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Innovation and New Technology Introduction during Volatile Times1

Deere and Company, uncertainty, real option, organizational structure, option, risk, innovation, Industrial Organization, Risk and Uncertainty, Q1,

Distributions of Human Exposure to Ozone During Commuting Hours in Connecticut using the Cellular Device Network

Epidemiologic studies have established associations between various air pollutants and adverse health outcomes for adults and children. Due to high costs of monitoring air pollutant concentrations for subjects enrolled in a study, statisticians predict exposure concentrations from spatial models that are developed using concentrations monitored at a few sites. In the absence of detailed information on when and where subjects move during the study window, researchers typically assume that the subjects spend their entire day at home, school or work. This assumption can potentially lead to large exposure assignment bias. In this study, we aim to determine the distribution of the exposure assignment bias for an air pollutant (ozone) when subjects are assumed to be static as compared to accounting for individual mobility. To achieve this goal, we use cell-phone mobility data on approximately 400,000 users in the state of Connecticut during a week in July, 2016, in conjunction with an ozone pollution model, and compare individual ozone exposure assuming static versus mobile scenarios. Our results show that exposure models not taking mobility into account often provide poor estimates of individuals commuting into and out of urban areas: the average 8-hour maximum difference between these estimates can exceed 80 parts per billion (ppb). However, for most of the population, the difference in exposure assignment between the two models is small, thereby validating many current epidemiologic studies focusing on exposure to ozone

Traversing non-convex regions

This paper considers a method for dealing with non-convex objective functions in optimization problems. It uses the Hessian matrix and combines features of trust-region techniques and continuous steepest descent trajectory-following in order to construct an algorithm which performs curvilinear searches away from the starting point of each iteration. A prototype implementation yields promising resultsPeer reviewe

The Birth of the Tourist out of the Spirit of Modernity: The travel bug from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to Houellebecq's Platform

Zygmunt Bauman once proposed 'the tourist' as one of the four archetypal characters of the postmodern. This suggests more than a coincidental link between postmodernity and the rise of mass tourism. Modernity itself has, of course, long been associated with increasing ease and speed of travel. This piece reviews some of the theoretical and literary reflections on the relation between the rise of leisure travel and the transformation of the sense of space from modernity to postmodernity, or even what Augé called 'super-modernity'. Towards the end of the piece there is a discussion of Michel Houellebecq's novel, Platform (2001), a provocative take on long-haul sex tourism and the global tourism business around the year 2000. Houellebecq's novel is read alongside Daniel Defoe's classic tale of travel, adventure and business, Robinson Crusoe (1719). These two novels - one a classic of early modernity, the other of postmodernity - are discussed here in the context of a long history of reflections on the significance of travel and the transformations of the sense of space in modernity and postmodernity, drawing on theorists including Guy Debord, Richard Sennett, Zygmunt Bauman, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio and Rem Koolhaas

Dubliners 1914 - Dubliners 100 (2014): Local Histories of Troubled Sexuality?

In twenty-first-century Dublin, it is difficult to see what caused all the fuss that delayed the publication of Joyce's Dubliners for so long, but part of the problem was his - actually rather subtle - treatment of sexuality.[1] In Dubliners, Joyce examined a colonial culture dominated, as Marilyn French argued, by popular Catholicism and ideas of propriety, both of which resulted in the repression of 'the sexual' along with 'the sensual and sensuous'. Dubliners 100 (2014) is a collection of rewritten versions of Joyce’s Dubliners by contemporary Irish writers, using the same titles and showing several parallels with the original stories, but set in early twenty-first-century Dublin, many around the time of the financial crisis of 2008. Sexuality features in many of these stories too, but in ways that illustrate some of the changes in attitudes to sex and the social and cultural context of sexuality in Ireland since the late nineteenth century. Some of the contemporary stories also reveal a culture in which the expression of the sexual, the sensual and the sensuous is still dominated and constrained, if by different powers than in Joyce’s day. This article will compare a selection of Joyce's stories ('Araby', 'Eveline', 'The Boarding House', and 'Clay') with the contemporary versions, specifically in terms of the treatment of sexuality. [1] According to Ellmann, one of the passages printers objected to was a line in 'Counterparts' referring to a 'woman's changing the position of her legs often and brushing against a man's chair'. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford, London…: Oxford University Press, 1982), 220

Future Agribusiness Challenges: Strategic Uncertainty, Innovation and Structural Change

The IFAMR is published by the International Food and Agribusiness Management Association.(IFAMA) www.ifama.orgStrategic uncertainty, innovation, structural change, Agribusiness, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Risk and Uncertainty, ISSN #: 1559-2448,