THE VALUE OF INCREASING THE LENGTH OF DEER SEASON IN OHIO

Growing deer populations are controlled through changes in hunting regulations including changes in both hunter bag limits and season length. Such action results in direct benefits to hunters and indirect benefits to motorists and the agricultural sector as a lower deer population leads to fewer incidences of human-deer encounters. Traditional recreation demand models are often employed to examine the welfare implications of changes in daily hunting bag limits. Studies measuring the effects of changes in season length, however, are noticeably absent from the literature. This study uses a nested random utility model to examine hunter choice over site and season selection to derive the welfare implications of changes in season length.random utility models, recreation, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A DYNAMIC EXERCISE IN REDUCING DEER-VEHICLE COLLISIONS: MANAGEMENT THROUGH VEHICLE MITIGATION TECHNIQUES AND HUNTING

The costs of deer-vehicle collisions (DVCs) nationwide are estimated to be in excess of $1 billion annually. In this study, factors contributing to the abundance of DVCs are identified and the potential effectiveness of various deer management strategies in reducing DVCs is investigated. The added benefits of such strategies are also evaluated in a bioeconomic context by comparing alternative outcomes achievable from implementing DVC mitigation techniques. Focusing on Ohio, results suggest potentially large economic gains exist from reducing DVCs, especially with strategies that combine both deer management schemes and DVC mitigation techniques.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Facilitating Informed Decision-Making in Financial Service Encounters

While advice-giving encounters form an integral part of banks’ services, clients often buy inappropriate products and face financial consequences. Legislators have started to put banks under pressure to ensure that clients are properly educated. However, the literature describes barriers due to which client education is doomed to fail applying current advice-giving practices. Practicable alternatives to the predominant perfect agent style of advice-giving are dismissed, mainly with the argument of client-side cognitive limitations. This paper challenges this assumption by suggesting a decision-making process that seamlessly integrates educational interventions, thus supporting informed client decision-making. In the spirit of design science research, the authors take a fresh look at the problems of client education in cooperation with a large Swiss retail bank to derive generalizable requirements, and design a novel IT-supported advice-giving process. An evaluation demonstrates the design’s utility in significantly improving client learning, compared to traditional service encounters. This research extends the current discourse on service encounter design, and seeks to help practitioners to design the financial service encounters of tomorrow

Equal but not Similar? Historical perspectives on vocation-related paths to the university in Germany and Austria

Dem Anspruch der Öffnung der Hochschulen für beruflich Qualifizierte steht bislang im deutschsprachigen Raum eine geringe Nachfrage entsprechender Studierender gegenüber. Als mit ein Grund dafür wird im vorliegenden Beitrag die gesellschaftlich vorherrschende Überzeugung der Höherwertigkeit schulisch erworbener gegenüber beruflich erworbener Bildung geortet. Dieser Befund hat, so die These, nachweisbare Auswirkungen auf den historisch gewachsenen Zuschnitt von Hochschulzugangsformen und Bildungsinstitutionen. Der Autor und die Autorin beleuchten die historische Entwicklung alternativer, berufsbezogener Hochschulzugangswege in Deutschland und Österreich. Ein Schwerpunkt wird dabei auf rechtliche und praktische Zugangsbeschränkungen bzw. -erschwernisse gelegt. (DIPF/Orig.)In German-speaking countries, little use has been made of the right of access to universities for adults with vocational qualifications by these kinds of students. This article sees one reason for this in the idea prevalent in society that education acquired at school or at university is of higher value than vocational education. According to the thesis, this has had a measurable impact on the kind of forms of access to a university education and educational institutions that has evolved over time. The authors illuminate the historical development of alternative, vocation-related paths to a university education in Germany and Austria. Emphasis is placed on the legal and practical limitations to and difficulties with access. (DIPF/Orig.

Creating, Reinterpreting, Combining, Cuing: Paper Practices on the Shopfloor

Despite the advent of a flurry of digital technologies, paper prevails on manufacturing shopfloors. To understand the roles and value of paper on the shopfloor, we have studied the manufacturing practices at two state-of-the-art automotive supplier facilities, applying ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, as well as photo and document analysis. We find that paper has unique affordances that today’s digital technologies cannot easily supplant on current shopfloors. More specifically, we find four paper practices: (1) creating and adapting individual information spaces, (2) reinterpreting information, (3) combining information handover with social interaction, and (4) visual cuing. We discuss these practices and the unique affordance of paper that currently support shopfloor workers and also consider the limitations of paper, which are becoming increasingly apparent, since more tasks increasingly depend on real-time information

The complete cost of cofactor h=1

This paper presents optimized software for constant-time variable-base scalar multiplication on prime-order Weierstraß curves using the complete addition and doubling formulas presented by Renes, Costello, and Batina in 2016. Our software targets three different microarchitectures: Intel Sandy Bridge, Intel Haswell, and ARM Cortex-M4. We use a 255-bit elliptic curve over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{255}-19}$ that was proposed by Barreto in 2017. The reason for choosing this curve in our software is that it allows most meaningful comparison of our results with optimized software for Curve25519. The goal of this comparison is to get an understanding of the cost of using cofactor-one curves with complete formulas when compared to widely used Montgomery (or twisted Edwards) curves that inherently have a non-trivial cofactor

Kyber terminates

The key generation of the lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanism CRYSTALS-Kyber (or short, just Kyber) involves a rejection-sampling routine to produce coefficients modulo $q=3329$ that look uniformly random. The input to this rejection sampling is output of the SHAKE-128 extendable output function (XOF). If this XOF is modelled as a random oracle with infinite output length, it is easy to see that Kyber terminates with probability 1; also, in this model, for any upper bound on the running time, the probability of termination is strictly smaller than 1. In this short note we show that an (unconditional) upper bound for the running time for Kyber exists. Computing a tight upper bound, however, is (likely to be) infeasible. We remark that the result has no real practical value, except that it may be useful for computer-assisted reasoning about Kyber using tools that require a simple proof of termination

What is the speed limit of martensitic transformations?

Structural martensitic transformations enable various applications, which range from high stroke actuation and sensing to energy efficient magnetocaloric refrigeration and thermomagnetic energy harvesting. All these emerging applications benefit from a fast transformation, but up to now their speed limit has not been explored. Here, we demonstrate that a thermoelastic martensite to austenite transformation can be completed within 10 ns. We heat epitaxial Ni-Mn-Ga films with a nanosecond laser pulse and use synchrotron diffraction to probe the influence of initial temperature and overheating on transformation rate and ratio. We demonstrate that an increase in thermal energy drives this transformation faster. Though the observed speed limit of 2.5 × 1027 (Js)1 per unit cell leaves plenty of room for further acceleration of applications, our analysis reveals that the practical limit will be the energy required for switching. Thus, martensitic transformations obey similar speed limits as in microelectronics, as expressed by the Margolus–Levitin theorem

NewHope on ARM Cortex-M

Recently, Alkim, Ducas, Pöppelmann, and Schwabe proposed a Ring-LWE-based key exchange protocol called NewHope (Usenix Securitz 2016) and illustrated that this protocol is very efficient on large Intel processors. Their paper also claims that the parameter choice enables efficient implementation on small embedded processors. In this paper we show that these claims are actually correct and present NewHope software for the ARM Cortex-M family of 32-bit microcontrollers. More specifically, our software targets the low-end Cortex-M0 and the high-end Cortex-M4 processor from this family. Our software starts from the C reference implementation by the designers of NewHope and then carefully optimizes subroutines in assembly. In particular, compared to best results known so far, our NTT implementation achieves a speedup of almost a factor of 2 on the Cortex-M4. Our Cortex-M0 NTT software slightly outperforms previously best results on the Cortex-M4, a much more powerful processor. In total, the server side of the key exchange executes in only 1,476,101 cycles on the M0 and only 834,524 cycles on the M4; the client side executes in 1,760,837 cycles on the M0 and 982,384 cycles on the M4

Post-quantum TLS without handshake signatures

We present KEMTLS, an alternative to the TLS 1.3 handshake that uses key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) instead of signatures for server authentication. Among existing post-quantum candidates, signature schemes generally have larger public key/signature sizes compared to the public key/ciphertext sizes of KEMs: by using an IND-CCA-secure KEM for server authentication in post-quantum TLS, we obtain multiple benefits. A size-optimized post-quantum instantiation of KEMTLS requires less than half the bandwidth of a size-optimized post-quantum instantiation of TLS 1.3. In a speed-optimized instantiation, KEMTLS reduces the amount of server CPU cycles by almost 90% compared to TLS 1.3, while at the same time reducing communication size, reducing the time until the client can start sending encrypted application data, and eliminating code for signatures from the server\u27s trusted code base