BOUNDING THE SMARANDACHE FUNCTION

The article illustrates the importance of being able to calculate the Smarandache function for prime powers. This paper will be considering that process

Newspapers Turning Ideas into Dollars: Four Revenue Success Stories

The report follows a year-long effort to identify newspaper successes in the search for new business models. This report analyzes four such dailies -- the Naples (Fla.) Daily News, the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat, the (Salt Lake City) Deseret News, the Columbia (Tenn.) Daily Herald -- whose executives explained, in detail, the motivation and strategy behind their experiments and shared internal data about the results. Their innovations-ranging from sales force restructuring to rebranding the print product to web consulting for local merchants-are generating significant new income

Where have all the packing plants gone? : the new meat geography in rural America

The meat industry is an economic powerhouse for rural America---accounting for roughly one of every 16 rural manufacturing jobs. Moreover, this rural powerhouse is adding jobs at a fast clip, with recent growth of 8.5 percent a year versus just 1.2 percent a year for all rural manufacturing industries. Finally, rural America has captured a commanding 52 percent of all meat industry jobs, far above the level of a decade ago.> While all these figures are welcome news to rural areas eager to expand employment, geographic shifts under way in the industry raise fresh doubts over which rural communities will land new meat plants. Once concentrated in midwestern urban centers like Chicago, the meat industry is now most often found in rural towns and hamlets---and often far from the Midwest. Poultry-processing has moved to the Southeast. Beef packing plants have moved to the Great Plains. And pork packing plants have begun moving out of the Corn Belt to the Southeast and Great Plains, but where they go next is highly uncertain, with the future location of hog production itself very much in question.> What geographic shifts lie ahead for the meat-processing industry? And what do the shifts in this powerhouse industry mean for the future of the rural economy? Drabenstott, Henry, and Mitchell review some critical trends in the meat industry by examining for the first time a special database on the industry, the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) maintained by the Bureau of the Census. They conclude that the meat industry is likely to concentrate geographically even more in the future, promising a new source of economic growth for some rural communities while leaving many others behind. Yet even in areas where the industry does locate, a sharp drop in industry wages raises new questions about its local economic impact.Meat industry and trade ; Rural development

Learning from the Anthropocene: Adaptive Epistemology and Complexity in Strategic Managerial Thinking

open access articleTurbulence experienced in the business and social realms resonates with turbulence unfolding throughout the biosphere, as a process of accelerating change at the stratigraphic scale termed the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is understood as a multi‐dimensional limit point, one dimension of which concerns the limits to the lineal epistemology prevalent since the Age of the Enlightenment. This paper argues that future conditions necessitate the updating of a lineal epistemology through a transition towards resilience thinking that is both adaptive and ecosystemic. A management paradigm informed by the recognition of multiple equilibria states distinguished by thresholds, and incorporating adaptive and resilience thinking is considered. This paradigm is thought to enhance flexibility and the capacity to absorb influences without crossing thresholds into alternate stable, but less desirable, states. One consequence is that evaluations of success may change, and these changes are considered and explored as likely on‐going challenges businesses must grapple with into the future

Reconfiguring Household Management in Times of Discontinuity as an Open System: The Case of Agro-food Chains

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This article is based upon a heterodox approach to economics that rejects the oversimplification made by closed economic models and the mainstream concept of ‘externality.’ This approach re-imagines economics as a holistic evaluation of resources versus human needs, which requires judgement based on understanding of the complexity generated by the dynamic relations between different systems. One re-imagining of the economic model is as a holistic and systemic evaluation of agri-food systems’ sustainability that was performed through the multi-dimensional Governance Assessment Matrix Exercise (GAME). This is based on the five capitals model of sustainability, and the translation of qualitative evaluations into quantitative scores. This is based on the triangulation of big data from a variety of sources. To represent quantitative interactions, this article proposes a provisional translation of GAME’s qualitative evaluation into a quantitative form through the identification of measurement units that can reflect the different capital dimensions. For instance, a post-normal, ecological accounting method, Emergy is proposed to evaluate the natural capital. The revised GAME re-imagines economics not as the ‘dismal science,’ but as one that has potential leverage for positive, adaptive and sustainable ecosystemic analyses and global ‘household’ management. This article proposes an explicit recognition of economics nested within the social spheres of human and social capital which are in turn nested within the ecological capital upon which all life rests and is truly the bottom line. In this article, the authors make reference to an on-line retailer of local food and drink to illustrate the methods for evaluation of the five capitals model

Subsea salt flows in the Atlantis II Deep and Tethis Deep, Red Sea

In the area of today’s Red Sea, evaporites were widely deposited during the Miocene. Due to the ongoing rifting and seafloor spreading, the evaporites have lost their lateral constraint and started to move downslope. High sediment temperatures near the Red Sea graben and the weak rheology of halite may also favour evaporite movement. However, the deformation mechanism as well as the velocity of these flows is largely unknown. New high-resolution multibeam and seismic data were recorded in March 2011 (P408-2 cruise) within the framework of the project “The Jeddah Transect”, a cooperation between King Abdulaziz University, Saudi-Arabia and GEOMAR, Germany. The data give new insights into evaporite flows in the area of the Atlantis II Deep. This ~400 m deep seafloor depression is located at about 21°N in the central Red Sea graben and is partly filled with hot saline brine (T~68°C, S~270h. The brine-seawater interface at about 2050 mbsl coincides with the depth of a subseafloor salt layer in the seismic reflection data. The rough seafloor morphology of the Atlantis II Deep area is dominated by a sequence of normal faults showing vertical offsets of several hundred meters. However, SW-NE directed lineaments parallel to the seafloor gradient in the south east and possibly north-west of the deep, with typical heights between 20 and 40 m, widths between 300 and 1000 m and lengths exceeding 10 km in places, are interpreted as surface indications of subsurface evaporite flow. The fronts of some of these flows are well rounded, and their occurrence is limited to areas of low seafloor gradients. Generally, the appearance of evaporite flows in the Atlantis II Deep is comparable to salt flows in the Thetis Deep at ~23°N (Mitchell et al., 2010). Furthermore, deformed hemipelagic layers deposited on top of the Miocene evaporites indicate salt movement 60 km off the central rift axis. A second research cruise is planned in March 2012 (RV Pelagia) to obtain more high-resolution seismic data on the morphological structures related to the evaporite flows at 21°N. Additionally, repeated multibeam measurements in the Thetis Deep will constrain the maximum movement rate of the evaporites. Mitchell, N. C. ; Ligi, M. ; Ferrante, V. ; Bonatti, E. ; Rutter, E.: Submarine salt flows in the central Red Sea. In: Geological Society of America Bulletin vol. 122 (2010), Nr. 5-6, pp. 701–71

Death Spiral or Euthanasia? The Demise of Generous Group Health Insurance Coverage

Employers must determine which sorts of healthcare insurance plans to offer employees and also set employee premiums for each plan provided. Depending on how they structure the premiums that employees pay across different healthcare insurance plans, plan sponsors alter the incentives to choose one plan over another. If employees know they differ by risk level but premiums do not fully reflect these risk differences, this can give rise to a so-called "death spiral" due to adverse selection. In this paper use longitudinal information from a natural experiment in the management of health benefits for a large employer to explore the impact of moving from a fixed dollar contribution policy to a risk-adjusted employer contribution policy. Our results suggest that implementing a significant risk adjustment had no discernable effect on adverse selection against the most generous indemnity insurance policy. This stands in stark contrast to previous studies, which have tended to find large impacts. Further analysis suggests that previous studies which appeared to detect plans in the throes of a death spiral, may instead have been experiencing an inexorable movement away from a non-preferred product, one that would have been inefficient for almost all workers even in the absence of adverse selection.

The Development of Health and Human Capital Accumulation

Childhood health affects both future health and skill accumulation, giving rise to disparities in human capital. I estimate flexible production functions of health, cognition and socio-emotional skill between 9 months-14 years of age that capture dynamic relationships between past stocks of human capital, parental human capital and household investments. Using multiple measures of inputs and a latent factor structure, I find that health development is highly self-productive and influenced by parental health, but that skills affect its development in late childhood. Health is important for cognitive development at key early and late stages, and excluding it overstates cognition's role in skill accumulation. Simulations show that interventions aimed at improving the health of children or their parents lead to improvements in health and skills at 14

Slow Moving Capital

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While multi-strategy hedge funds who were not capital constrained increased their positions, a large fraction of these funds actually acted as net sellers consistent with the view that information barriers within a firm (not just relative to outside investors) can lead to capital constraints for trading desks with mark-to-market losses. Our findings suggest that real world frictions impede arbitrage capital.