Problems of Strategic Management Formation in Russian Agrarian Sector

The rapid changes in Russian agriculture during the last fifteen years require development of particular strategies for efficient farm management. The West-European approaches of strategic management and planning decisions are not directly applicable in the Russian agricultural economy; Russian large and medium-sized agricultural enterprises act on different organisational principles, due to the specific peculiarities of their business mentality. The objective of the research is to adopt modern strategic management concepts to the peculiarities of Russian agriculture and to work out proposals on formation of strategic planning system in agricultural production. To this end it is necessary to define the strategic planning features which take into account the nature of modern stage of the development of Russian economy and the specific character of agricultural production; to indicate the preconditions which promote the wide implementation of strategic planning into economic practice; to establish the features of the concept of strategic planning for agricultural enterprises and to elaborate a methodical set of instructions providing formalized character to strategic planning. Applying the methodologies of monographic research and expert interviews, we conducted the analysis of peculiarities and problems of Russian agricultural production, revealed and systematized the features of development of strategy for agricultural enterprises. Based on the results of our investigation we developed strategic development models for the agricultural enterprises of Stavropol region applying the approach of Strength /Neutral / Weakness (SNW) analysis of the methodology of comparative advantage. The usefulness and empirical value of the developed models have been approved on the example of “LUCH” agricultural enterprise, which is the first in the region according to effectiveness indicators and the fourth according to its relative size.Farm Management,

Should Russia comply with EU food safety norms in the wheat sector?

The impressive volumes of wheat production in Russia on the one hand, and the good baking quality of Russian wheat on the other hand enabled Russia to become one of the important wheat producers and exporters of the world since the recent few years. However Russia has a long way to go in the “front” of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS), i.e. food safety, standards. As part of a larger study, financed by the German Research Foundation, the current research addresses the objective of estimating the potentials of wheat production in Russia under more stringent food safety standards as the current Russian national SPS regulations are. The comparative advantage analysis based on the Domestic Resource Cost approach (DRC) is applied to estimate the possible compliance of Russian norms with EU SPS standards. The DRC analysis resulting in a ratio of 0,37 provides evidence of high social profitability of wheat chain in Stavropol region. Also the scenarios of compliance of Russian food safety norms with those of EU offers plausible solutions with DRC ratios varying within the range of 0,49 – 0,96 dependent on the fluctuations of model parameters. This is the third paper from the series of analysis of competitiveness of the Russian wheat sector under different food safety policies. The first paper estimated the policy of the full enforcement of national SPS regulations . The second work assessed the policy of compliance with the international SPS norms and considered also the sensitivity analysis under this policy. As far as the EU SPS norms are more stringent as the international standards, there is a necessity to assess also this policy option.DRC, wheat, food safety standards., Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Modelling Interregional Trade of Energy Crops in Eastern Germany

Renewable resources gain in importance in our modern society. The line of reasoning is based on their positive effects on agriculture, the environment and the economy. To support renewable energy from biomass the EU promotes the cultivation of energy crops. A spatial equilibrium model is applied based on the concept of maximizing net welfare, to provide information whether energy crop production competes with food production for land area. The Model of Interregional Trade of Energy Crops (ITEC) refers to Eastern Germany and adjacent areas of Poland. First results show that the regions have enough feedstocks to meet the required demand for food and biofuel production. In many cases both food crops and biofuels are either traded on interregional basis or exported to "Rest of Europe" indicating that there is no competition between food and energy crops. Only green maize for biogas production strongly competes in areas where the crop is required as feed for cattle.Energy crops, spatial equilibrium analysis, interregional trade, International Relations/Trade,

Exploratory analyses of crime-scene characteristics in cyber-related homicides

Despite the alarming nature of homicides in which the offender meets the victim online, or cyber-initiated homicides, little empirical attention has been devoted to this phenomenon. The present study was designed to explore the behavioral patterns found prior to and during a cyber-initiated homicide event. Data on 61 homicide cases from various countries were collected through news media and legal sources. Smallest space analysis revealed that cyber homicides were characterized by four distinct themes: Excessive violence; fatal escalation; crime-related incidents; and predatory behavior. Implications of the findings and avenues for future research are discussed

Elliptic flow in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV

The angular correlations measured in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV are decomposed into contributions from back to back emission and elliptic flow. Modeling the dominant term in the correlation functions as a momentum conservation effect or as an effect of the initial transverse velocity of the source, the remaining elliptic flow component can be estimated. The elliptic flow coefficient extracted from the CMS Collaboration data is 0.04-0.08. No additional small-angle, ridge-like correlations are needed to explain the experimental data

Gradient boosting decision trees classification of blazars of uncertain type in the fourth Fermi-LAT catalog

The deepest all-sky survey available in the $\gamma$-ray band - the last release of the Fermi-LAT catalogue (4FGL-DR3) based on the data accumulated in 12 years, contains more than 6600 sources. The largest population among the sources is blazar subclass - 3743, $60.1\%$ of which are classified as BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) or Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs), while the rest are listed as blazar candidates of uncertain type (BCU) as their firm optical classification is lacking. The goal of this study is to classify BCUs using different machine learning algorithms which are trained on the spectral and temporal properties of already classified BL Lacs and FSRQs. Artificial Neural Networks, \textit{XGBoost} and LightGBM algorithms are employed to construct predictive models for BCU classification. Using 18 input parameters of 2219 BL Lacs and FSRQs, we train (80\% of the sample) and test (20\%) these algorithms and find that LightGBM model, state-of-the-art classification algorithm based on gradient boosting decision trees, provides the highest performance. Based on our best model, we classify 825 BCUs as BL Lac candidates and 405 as FSRQ candidates, however, 190 remain without a clear prediction but the percentage of BCUs in 4FGL is reduced to 5.1\%. The $\gamma$-ray photon index, synchrotron peak frequency, and high energy peak frequency of a large sample are used to investigate the relationship between FSRQs and BL Lacs (LBLs, IBLs, and HBLs).Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

A Rationale for Long-lived Quarks and Leptons at the LHC: Low Energy Flavour Theory

In the framework of gauged flavour symmetries, new fermions in parity symmetric representations of the standard model are generically needed for the compensation of mixed anomalies. The key point is that their masses are also protected by flavour symmetries and some of them are expected to lie way below the flavour symmetry breaking scale(s), which has to occur many orders of magnitude above the electroweak scale to be compatible with the available data from flavour changing neutral currents and CP violation experiments. We argue that, actually, some of these fermions would plausibly get masses within the LHC range. If they are taken to be heavy quarks and leptons, in (bi)-fundamental representations of the standard model symmetries, their mixings with the light ones are strongly constrained to be very small by electroweak precision data. The alternative chosen here is to exactly forbid such mixings by breaking of flavour symmetries into an exact discrete symmetry, the so-called proton-hexality, primarily suggested to avoid proton decay. As a consequence of the large value needed for the flavour breaking scale, those heavy particles are long-lived and rather appropriate for the current and future searches at the LHC for quasi-stable hadrons and leptons. In fact, the LHC experiments have already started to look for them.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur