WHAT MANUFACTURERS WANT IN FOOD INGREDIENTS

Agribusiness,

Financial Reporting? - ICorporate Reporting Revisited

There is an acute and growing awareness across the international investment community that annual reports and accounts currently provided too much emphasise on accounting profit - financial data, and that they are typically out of date before they are released. This is in a large part due to the regulatory environment with which companies must comply, as well as reflecting a tradition of market communication which avoids detail on how business value is created and sustained, concentrating instead on 'hard' financial data.

Overcoming the gridlock in EMU decision-making. CEPS Policy Insights No 2020-03 / March 2020

The completion of EMU, and banking union as its critical component, requires that certain taboos in the policy debate are brought out in the open. First, the Commission must stop pretending that Italian public debt is sustainable under current policies and shift from politically motivated forbearance to serious implementation of the SGP and notably its debt rule. Second, it is necessary to acknowledge that crisis management by the ESM is crippled as long as its financial assistance can only be granted after the country in need is close to losing market access and, in addition, this threatens the financial stability of the entire euro area. The already-existing alternative to assist a country that is not respecting the SGP is to utilise the enhanced conditional credit line (ECCL) introduced by the ESM reform, approved by the European Council and awaiting national ratifications, in order to agree on a full-fledged adjustment programme before any euro area member (Italy) comes to the brink again – without any preventive conditions on the sustainability of public debt. And, third, the completion of the banking union requires a reduction of banks’ home sovereign portfolios, that can be incentivised by the introduction of mild concentration charges. However, the system will not work without simultaneously offering the banks and financial investors in general a true European safe asset, fully guaranteed by its member states. Our proposal is that such a safe asset could be offered by the ESM, which would purchase in exchange the sovereigns held by the ESCB as a result of the quantitative easing asset purchase programme. The risk of losses on these sovereigns would continue to lie with the national central banks, thus avoiding the transfer of new risks to the ESM

Interference fracturing: Nonuniform distributions of perforation clusters that promote simultaneous growth of multiple hydraulic fractures

One of the important hurdles in horizontal-well stimulation is the generation of hydraulic fractures (HFs) from all perforation clusters within a given stage, despite the challenges posed by stress shadowing and reservoir variability. In this paper, we use a newly developed, fully coupled, parallel-planar 3D HF model to investigate the potential to minimize the negative impact of stress shadowing and thereby to promote more-uniform fracture growth across an array of HFs by adjusting the location of the perforation clusters. In this model, the HFs are assumed to evolve in an array of parallel planes with full 3D stress coupling while the constant fluid influx into the wellbore is dynamically partitioned to each fracture so that the wellbore pressure is the same throughout the array. The model confirms the phenomenon of inner-fracture suppression because of stress shadowing when the perforation clusters are uniformly distributed. Indeed, the localization of the fracture growth to the outer fractures is so dominant that the total fractured area generated by uniform arrays is largely independent of the number of perforation clusters. However, numerical experiments indicate that certain nonuniform cluster spacings promote a profound improvement in the even development of fracture growth. Identifying this effect relies on this new model's ability to capture the full hydrodynamical coupling between the simultaneously evolving HFs in their transition from radial to Perkins-Kern-Nordgren (PKN)-like geometries (Perkins and Kern 1961; Nordgren 1972)

How Infectious Was #Deflategate?

On Monday January 19, 2015 a story broke that the National Football League (NFL) had started an investigation into whether the New England Patriots deliberately deflated the footballs they used during their championship win over the Indianapolis Colts. Like an infectious disease, discussion regarding Deflategate grew rapidly on social media sites in the hours and days after the release of the story. However, after the Super Bowl was over, the scandal slowly began to dissipate and lost much of the attention it had originally had, as interest in the NFL wained at the completion of its season. We construct a simple epidemic model for the infectiousness of the Deflategate news story. We then use data from the social media site Twitter to estimate the parameters of this model using standard techniques from the study of inverse problems. We find that the infectiousness (as measured by the basic reproduction number) of Deflategate rivals that of any infectious disease that we are aware of, and is actually more infectious than recent news stories of greater importance - both in terms of the basic reproduction number and in terms of the average amount of time the average tweeter continued to tweet about the news story.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

On the thermal conductivities of certain poor conductors

We have been engaged for several years in an attempt to measure, by the aid of the so called "Wall Method," the thermal conductivities of certain relatively poor conductors; and the variations of these conductivities with the temperature. ..