The involvement of Caribbean youth in drug distribution (marijuana from the mid-1960s to 1981; cocaine hydrochloride powder and crack from 1981 to 1987, the time of writing) throughout the Circum-Caribbean area and in North America is described. Social, economic, and cultural outcomes of these engagements are highlighted, and the relationship between the underground economy of drugs and the cor...

The aim of this paper is to explore how a recent methodology developed to look at export dynamics in a region in a large economy can be extended to look at export dynamics in a small open economy, where local market size means that enterprises tend to engage in exporting at an early stage in their development. Building on work by Wagner (2004) and in the context of the recent trade modelling of...

This paper compares two approaches to the measurement of the resources devoted to the organisational task in the economy, i.e. Porat and Rubin’s ‘Information Economy’ and Wallis and North’s ‘Transaction Sector’. While there have been a number of studies using the information economy approach, it seems to have made way for a narrower focus on the information technology economy in recent years. T...

BACKGROUND Africa is being described as the wretched of the earth, despite this, the continent is endowed with natural resources, dynamic ecosystem, and different species of plants and animals, and species derivatives. This paper area of departure is to focus on Hoodia, a plant that is being a source of food, medicine and water for the San and Khoe indigenous peoples before the advent of Europe...

The Science-of-Team-Science (SciTS) has become an important area of study as collaborative research becomes more normative throughout science inquiry and especially in medical and healthcare sectors. Team science aims for higher and collaborative levels of inquiry that operate within economies of knowledge similar to transdisciplinarity that strive to synthesize knowledge and innovate as a resu...

The Continuous Double Auction (CDA) is the dominant market institution for real-world trading of equities, commodities, derivatives, etc. We describe a series of laboratory experiments that, for the first time, allow human subjects to interact with software bidding agents in a CDA. Our bidding agents use strategies based on extensions of the Gjerstad-Dickhaut and Zero-Intelligence-Plus algorith...

a Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 It'enhua Road, Shenyang, 110015 China School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri-Columbia, 203M ABNR Building, Columbia, MO 65211 USA " Department of Forest Ecology and Management, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Dr., Madison, WI 53706 USA R' '-' $a Received 3 September 1999; received in revised form 29 Septem...

In a grid computing environment, it is important to be capable of agilely quantifying the quality of service achievable by each alternative composition of resources. This capability is an essential driver to not only efficiently utilizing the resources but also promoting the virtual economy. In this paper, we design an efficient scheduling algorithm of minimizing completion time for component-b...