DECOMPOSITION ANALYSIS OF FACTOR COST SHARES: THE CASE OF GREEK AGRICULTURE

An alternative version of decomposition analysis, based on factor cost shares rather than input demand functions, is presented and applied to Greek agriculture. Decomposition analysis shows that most of the changes in factor cost shares during the period from 1973 to 1989 are attributed to technical change and factor substitution, while the role of the scale effect is small, except that of fertilizer. The decomposition analysis results are then used to analyze the implications of Greece's fertilizer and feed subsidy removal, which took place in 1990.Decomposition analysis, Factor cost shares, Greek agriculture, Farm Management,

AEGIS App: Wildfire Information Management for Windows Phone Devices

AbstractNovel technological advances in mobile devices and applications can be exploited in wildfire confrontation, enabling end-users to easily conduct several everyday tasks, such as access to data and information, sharing of intelligence and coordination of personnel and vehicles. This work describes an innovative mobile application for wildfire information management that operates on Windows Phone devices and acts as a complementary tool to the web-based version of the AEGIS platform for wildfire prevention and management. Several tasks can be accomplished from the AEGIS App, such as routing, spatial search for closest facilities and firefighting support infrastructures, access to weather data and visualization of fire management data (water sources, gas refill stations, evacuation sites etc.). An innovative feature of AEGIS App is the support of these tasks by a digital assistant for artificial intelligence named Cortana (developed by Microsoft for Windows Phone devices), that allows information utilization through voice commands. The application is to be used by firefighting personnel in Greece and is potentially expected to contribute towards a more sophisticated transferring of information and knowledge between wildfire confrontation operation centers and firefighting units in the field

Local Oort groups and the isolated differential data criterion

It is conjectured that if k is an algebraically closed field of characteristic p > 0, then any branched G-cover of smooth projective k-curves where the "KGB" obstruction vanishes and where a p-Sylow subgroup of G is cyclic lifts to characteristic 0. Obus has shown that this conjecture holds given the existence of certain meromorphic differential forms on P_1^k with behavior determined by the ramification data of the cover. We give a more efficient computational procedure to compute these forms than was previously known. As a consequence, we show that all D_25- and D_27-covers lift to characteristic zero.Comment: Minor edits, still 16 page

Digital Evidence and Cloud Forensics: Contemporary Legal Challenges and the Power of Disposal

Fighting crime in cyberspace requires law enforcement authorities to immerse in a digital ocean of vast amount of information and also to acquire and objectify the evidence of criminal activity. Handling digital evidence is a complex and multifaceted process as they can provide critical evidentiary information in an unquestionable and irrefutable way. When digital evidence resides in a cloud storage environment the criminal investigation is faced with unprecedented contemporary legal challenges. In this paper, the authors identify three main legal challenges that arise from the current cloud-based technological landscape, i.e., territoriality (the loss of location), possession (the cloud content ownership) and confiscation procedure (user authentication/data preservation issues). On the onset of the identified challenges, the existing American, European and International legal frameworks are thoroughly evaluated. Finally, the authors discuss and endorse the Power of Disposal, a newly formed legal notion and a multidisciplinary solution with a global effect as a result of collaboration between technical, organizational and legal perspectives as an effective first step to mitigate the identified legal challenges

A comparison of alternative parametric efficiency estimates using rank-sum test statistic

The aim of this paper is to compare the empirical results from three alternative parametric efficiency models using rank-sum test statistic. The comparison involves the technical efficiency scores and their hospitals ranking of the following models: a) Battese and Coelli (1992); b) technical inefficiency effect model (Battese and Coelli, 1995); c) non-neutral frontier model (Huang and Liu, 1994). For all models an output – distance production function are estimated using panel data of 112 Greek public hospitals. Technical efficiency scores found to be from 37.10% to 58.10%. Battese and Coelli (1992) model represented higher proportion of hospitals with technical efficiency scores between 50%-70%. Rank-sum test statistic implied that the three stochastic models came from different distribution.technical efficiency; stochastic frontier analysis; rank statistics; hospitals; Greece; parametric efficiency; stochastic modelling; rank-sum test; Greece; healthcare.