A Distributed Economics-based Infrastructure for Utility Computing

Existing attempts at utility computing revolve around two approaches. The first consists of proprietary solutions involving renting time on dedicated utility computing machines. The second requires the use of heavy, monolithic applications that are difficult to deploy, maintain, and use. We propose a distributed, community-oriented approach to utility computing. Our approach provides an infrastructure built on Web Services in which modular components are combined to create a seemingly simple, yet powerful system. The community-oriented nature generates an economic environment which results in fair transactions between consumers and providers of computing cycles while simultaneously encouraging improvements in the infrastructure of the computational grid itself.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

The Fiduciary Duty of Care: A Perversion of Words

This article begins by defining the problem of conflation of the duty of care and the duty of loyalty. In Part I the Mothew case is discussed. The confusion between the duty of loyalty and the duty of care is clearly explained by the court. Duty of care is a negligence concept, whereas duty of loyalty is a breach of the duty of loyalty. Part II is a discussion of the Delaware corporate law cases which ignore established legal concepts and jumble together negligence and intent. Part III is a discussion of the confusing cases called “fiduciary breach.

Dissipation-Scale Turbulence in the Solar Wind

We present a cascade model for turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas that follows the nonlinear cascade of energy from the large scales of driving in the MHD regime to the small scales of the kinetic Alfven wave regime where the turbulence is dissipated by kinetic processes. Steady-state solutions of the model for the slow solar wind yield three conclusions: (1) beyond the observed break in the magnetic energy spectrum, one expects an exponential cut-off; (2) the widely held interpretation that this dissipation range obeys power-law behavior is an artifact of instrumental sensitivity limitations; and, (3) over the range of parameters relevant to the solar wind, the observed variation of dissipation range spectral indices from -2 to -4 is naturally explained by the varying effectiveness of Landau damping, from an undamped prediction of -7/3 to a strongly damped index around -4.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in AIP Conference Proceedings on "Turbulence and Nonlinear Processes in Astrophysical Plasmas

IMPORTANCE, CAUSES, AND MANAGEMENT RESPONSES TO FARM RISKS: EVIDENCE FROM FLORIDA AND ALABAMA

Despite the contention that risk and uncertainty play an important role in agriculture in North Florida and South Alabama, very little is known about producers' perceptions of risk. This paper describes the procedures used and the results obtained from a statistically random survey of farmers' perceptions of the importance of various sources of risk and alternative risk management practices. Initially, farmers were asked to define risk and then to rank various sources of risk and management responses to risk based on the relative importance of each to their operation. Summary statistics, Chi-squares analyses, and logistic regression techniques were used to analyze the data.Farm Management, Risk and Uncertainty,

Laser interferometry for the Big Bang Observer

The Big Bang Observer is a proposed space-based gravitational-wave detector intended as a follow on mission to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). It is designed to detect the stochastic background of gravitational waves from the early universe. We discuss how the interferometry can be arranged between three spacecraft for this mission and what research and development on key technologies are necessary to realize this scheme