When my son Jason was an economics Ph.D. student at Harvard in the 1990s, he said: “I have observed that only two economists can push you around, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.” I agreed but argued that it was a good thing. Everyone needed heroes, and Gary had only Milton. Milton had no one, except Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, but Reagan did not really qualify as an economist. Arthur Burns may...

The last decade has witnessed many clever constructions of parameterized families of pairing-friendly elliptic curves that now enable implementors targeting a particular security level to gather suitable curves in bulk. However, choosing the best curves from a (usually very large) set of candidates belonging to any particular family involves juggling a number of efficiency issues, such as the n...

In precision agriculture systems, remote sensing has played an essential role in crop and environment monitoring, hyperspectral imaging is a particularly effective tool this regard [...]

The spectrum of risks that affect the income of agricultural producers and agribusinesses is quite broad. The two predominant risks are: price risk, reflecting variations in market prices for agricultural commodities and production inputs; and production risk, which encompasses variations in the volume or quality of the commodity produced. This note focuses on one of the most pervasive producti...