Preparing for Blockchain Technology in the Energy Industry: How Energy Sector Leaders Can Make Informed Decisions During the Blockchain Adoption Process

This research was motivated by the lack of literature about the constructs influencing the decision to adopt blockchain technology. This paper contributes to the knowledge by integrating common adoption and diffusion theories with a 2017 framework for blockchain adoption. This paper brings together competing adoption models with different sets of technology acceptance determinants and proposes a new model to identify constructs (i.e., ease of understanding, perceived usefulness, the perceived ease of use, knowledge acquisition, self-efficacy, and the novelty and complexity of the new technology application) as essential determinants of blockchain technology adoption at individual and organizational levels. The study offers a new model and research agenda to help executives and managers prepare for blockchain adoption and make informed decisions to speed up the adoption process. This research is focused on energy companies, which are known to be slow to adopt new technologies

Doubly Robust Smoothing of Dynamical Processes via Outlier Sparsity Constraints

Coping with outliers contaminating dynamical processes is of major importance in various applications because mismatches from nominal models are not uncommon in practice. In this context, the present paper develops novel fixed-lag and fixed-interval smoothing algorithms that are robust to outliers simultaneously present in the measurements {\it and} in the state dynamics. Outliers are handled through auxiliary unknown variables that are jointly estimated along with the state based on the least-squares criterion that is regularized with the $\ell_1$-norm of the outliers in order to effect sparsity control. The resultant iterative estimators rely on coordinate descent and the alternating direction method of multipliers, are expressed in closed form per iteration, and are provably convergent. Additional attractive features of the novel doubly robust smoother include: i) ability to handle both types of outliers; ii) universality to unknown nominal noise and outlier distributions; iii) flexibility to encompass maximum a posteriori optimal estimators with reliable performance under nominal conditions; and iv) improved performance relative to competing alternatives at comparable complexity, as corroborated via simulated tests.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Signal Processin

Tricritical Casimir forces and order parameter profiles in wetting films of 3He^3\text{He} -4He^4\text{He} mixtures

Tricritical Casimir forces in $^3\text{He}$ -$^4\text{He}$ wetting films are studied, within mean field theory, in therms of a suitable lattice gas model for binary liquid mixtures with short--ranged surface fields. The proposed model takes into account the continuous rotational symmetry O(2) of the superfluid degrees of freedom associated with $^4\text{He}$ and it allows, inter alia, for the occurrence of a vapor phase. As a result, the model facilitates the formation of wetting films, which provides a strengthened theoretical framework to describe available experimental data for tricritical Casimir forces acting in $^3\text{He}$ -$^4\text{He}$ wetting films

Occupation, Race, Unemployment and Crime In a Dynamic System

Inthis paper, the relationship between unemployment and property crime is investigated in the context of dynamic system by using quarterly time series data for the United States during the period of 1973 (I) —1981(IV). The results of Granger's causality tests indicate that unemployment by occupation (white and blue collars) is significantly associated with robbery, which is the most serious property crime. Unemployment by race (white, black, and Hispanic) also supports the above finding. In general, the linkage between unemployment rate and property crime seems to become stronger as the degree of seriousness of crime increases.The findings of the dynamic system show that blue collar, Hispanic, and black unemployment rates have persistently positive effects on robbery.Therefore, these above findings suggest that any attempt to reduce property crime through alleviation of unemployment would most efficiently be directed towards specific categories of the labor force.