WHY DO FARMERS FORWARD CONTRACT IN FACTOR MARKETS?

This study investigated farmers' incentives to forward purchase inputs. A model of farmer decision making was used to derive an optimal forward contracting rule. Explicit in the model was the tradeoff between the quantity of input to be purchased in advance, and the remaining portion to be purchased later on the spot market. Results indicated that the primary reasons farmers contract inputs are to reduce risk and to speculate on favorable price moves. A numerical example of fertilizer used in corn production indicated that the size of the price discount was the dominant factor in forward contracting decisions.Farm Management,

DATAC bus monitor

The Digital Autonomous Terminal Access Communications (DATAC) bus is a multiple transmitter data bus developed to interconnect various aircraft systems. A typical DATAC bus installation for the NASA B-737 aircraft is shown. A bus monitor unit was developed for the DATAC data bus. The bus monitor unit consists of two systems: A Zilog Z8002 based S100 bus microcomputer system that connects to a DATAC terminal and receives data appearing on the bus, and an IMB PC-compatible computer used to display and interpret that data. Test results of the existing bus monitor have indicated areas for improvement. The most obvious improvement is to increase the speed of the data transfers between the S100 and the MS-DOS systems

NDE of PWA 1480 single crystal turbine blade material

Cantilever bending fatigue specimens were examined by fluorescent liquid penetrant and radioactive gas penetrant (Krypton) non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methods and tested. Specimens with cast, ground, or polished surface were evaluated to study the effect of surface condition on NDE and fatigue crack initiation. Fractographic and metallurgical analyses were performed to determine the nature of crack precursors. Preliminary results show that fatigue strength was lower for specimens with cast surfaces than for specimens with machined surfaces. The liquid penetrant and gas penetrant techniques both provided indications of a large population of defects on the cast surfaces. On ground or polished specimen surfaces, the gas penetrant appeared to estimate the actual number of voids more accurately than the liquid penetrant

Confinement contains condensates

Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and its connection with the generation of hadron masses has historically been viewed as a vacuum phenomenon. We argue that confinement makes such a position untenable. If quark-hadron duality is a reality in QCD, then condensates, those quantities that were commonly viewed as constant empirical mass-scales that fill all spacetime, are instead wholly contained within hadrons; viz., they are a property of hadrons themselves and expressed, e.g., in their Bethe-Salpeter or light-front wave functions. We explain that this paradigm is consistent with empirical evidence, and incidentally expose misconceptions in a recent Comment.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Ridge Production in High-Multiplicity Hadronic Ultra-Peripheral Proton-Proton Collisions

An unexpected result at the RHIC and the LHC is the observation that high-multiplicity hadronic events in heavy-ion and proton-proton collisions are distributed as two "ridges", approximately flat in rapidity and opposite in azimuthal angle. We propose that the origin of these events is due to the inelastic collisions of aligned gluonic flux tubes that underly the color confinement of the quarks in each proton. We predict that high-multiplicity hadronic ridges will also be produced in the high energy photon-photon collisions accessible at the LHC in ultra-peripheral proton-proton collisions or at a high energy electron-positron collider. We also note the orientation of the flux tubes between the quark and antiquark of each high energy photon will be correlated with the plane of the scattered proton or lepton. Thus hadron production and ridge formation can be controlled in a novel way at the LHC by observing the azimuthal correlations of the scattering planes of the ultra-peripheral protons with the orientation of the produced ridges. Photon-photon collisions can thus illuminate the fundamental physics underlying the ridge effect and the physics of color confinement in QCD.Comment: Presented by SJB at Photon 2017: The International Conference on the Structure and the Interactions of the Photon and the International Workshop on Photon-Photon Collisions. CERN, May 22-26, 2017. References adde

Labor – Free or Coerced? An Historical Reassessment of Differences and Similarities

Published in Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues, Tom Brass & Marcel van der Linden, eds.https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/book_sections/1218/thumbnail.jp