APPLICATION OF A DYNAMIC PANEL DATA ESTIMATOR TO CROSS-COUNTRY COFFEE DEMAND: A TALE OF TWO ERAS

We estimate price and income elasticities of demand for green coffee beans in panels of up to 40 countries, both during and after the operation of export quotas under International Coffee Agreements. The dynamic panel estimator proposed in Han and Phillips (2007) is used because it is a consistent estimator, for any length of panel, regardless of the presence of unit roots. Dynamic panel data models, of any type, do not seem to have been previously applied to coffee demand. We find evidence of a concave relationship between income and coffee consumption for countries which are members of the International Coffee Organization, but no evidence of such a relationship for other countries. A further conclusion is that measures which increase the price of coffee beans can be expected to have little effect on coffee sales.Coffee Demand, Dynamic Panel Data, International Coffee Organization

“More than a Music, It’s a Movement”: West Papua Decolonization Songs, Social Media, and the Remixing of Resistance

In the 1980s, Melanesian musicians began to compose songs protesting the Indonesian occupation of West Papua. Thirty years on, and facilitated through social media, such songs have begun to proliferate across Melanesia, with musicians from elsewhere in Oceania now contributing. The continuing colonial occupation of West Papua has led to the coalescence of a new wave of Pacific-wide performed resistance. In this study, we focus on a corpus of fifty freedom songs that not only are a manifestation of this movement but are also bound up in the digitally enabled remixing and dissemination processes of the identity, unity, and decolonization discourses that drive it. This article explores links between songs, a popular protest medium, and fan-produced accompanying videos and the new- Pasifika discourse of wansolwara (Melanesian Pidgin: shared ocean), which we argue is closely related to emergent understandings of Pacific indigeneity

The Way to the Stars

This article concerns the mathematics of simple one point perspective projection, a.k.a. Renaissance perspective; its focus the author\u27s intent to quantify that most fundamental of properties regarding our perception of material objects in space

New designs and detection strategies for glow discharge as an alternative spectrochemical source

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Chemistry, 2007Powerful instrumentation exists for the determination of elemental concentrations in a range of samples, but all such instruments are the product of compromises among desirable properties. Sensitivity, accuracy, precision, portability, expense, sample size, speed, and other aspects of analysis are balanced based on the nature of a problem and the available resources. Opportunities exist for new instruments that strike a different balance from existing methods, particularly if these new techniques offer advantages over existing ones. Glow discharge (GD) is a flexible and potent platform from which to develop new spectrochemical methods, including those for elemental analysis. The methods described here seek to improve upon areas where GD falls short of other methods and to exploit the areas where GD excels, particularly speed and cost. Glow discharge has predominately been used for the analysis of solids, and it offers high sensitivity and depth resolution at a comparatively low cost in this application. However, it has historically lacked lateral (in the plane of the sample surface) resolution. This document describes a new method, making use of pulsed GD and monochromatic imaging, that adds lateral resolution better than 100 µm. Traditionally, glow discharges have found little use in the analysis of solutions, largely due to their inefficiency in vaporizing the solvent. Two glow discharges, both operated at atmospheric pressure to improve desolvation, are described and characterized here. The solution-cathode glow discharge (SCGD) is a simplified and improved version of the electrolyte-cathode glow discharge. A high voltage is applied across a gap between a sample solution and an electrode, forming a plasma that directly samples the solution and produces atomic emission that is used to identify and quantify the solution's elemental constituents. Several studies on the SCGD are described, including characterization and improvement of the source. The annular glow discharge (AGD) is another glow discharge for the analysis of solutions. Unlike the SCGD, it is operated between two metal electrodes and the solution does not form a fundamental part of the plasma, which allows greater flexibility in solution composition. Both methods offer competitive analytical performance at low cost and with the potential for portability