While the majority of security practice — and spending — is focused on post-development products and enterprise approaches, some have sought to change the focus of security from the networks we manage to the systems we build. The burgeoning Secure Software Engineering (SSE) community has sought to identify and espouse activities, built upon traditional software engineering, that address the int...

This paper develops a model to explain farmers’ decision to move from agricultural activities to forestry. Farmers in Ireland have strong links with land and are reluctant to enter into forestry even when the returns from it exceed those from farming. This paper examines whether the reluctance among farmers to plant forestry originates in the nature of forestry investment, which is characterise...

This study assesses the reported farm income crisis in Canada and uses farm financial data to illustrate the importance and impact that management skills and practices have on farm income and net worth. For grain and oilseed farms, large farms produce higher revenues per hectare and achieve economies of scale on operating expenses, interest and depreciation, making them significantly more profi...

Stochastic budgeting is used to simulate the business and financial risk and the performance over a six-year planning horizon on a Norwegian dairy farm. A major difficulty with stochastic whole-farm budgeting lies in identifying and measuring dependency relationships between stochastic variables. Some methods to account for these stochastic dependencies are illustrated. The financial feasibilit...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the relationship between forest tenure and investment in silviculture. Silvicultural activities and expenditures on a large number of recently logged tracts in British Columbia, under four distinct forms of tenure, are assessed using a silvicultural investment model based on the conventional theory of capital. The empirical results indicate that silvicu...

Planning information security investment is somewhere between art and science. This paper reviews and compares existing scientific approaches and discusses the relation between security investment models and security metrics. To structure the exposition, the high-level security production function is decomposed into two steps: cost of security is mapped to a security level, which is then mapped...

The recent empirical literature on economic sustainability of certified export crops shows that certification standards that enhance yields are important for improving farm revenues and farmer welfare. However, limited evidence exists on the impact of organic certification on the adoption of agro-ecological practices. In this study, we use unique farm-level data from Ghana to examine the impact...

The valuation of farmland is a perennial issue for agricultural policy, given its importance in the farm investment portfolio. Despite the significance of farmland values to farmer wealth, prediction remains a difficult task. This study develops a dynamic information measure to examine the informational content of farmland values and farm income in explaining the distribution of farmland values...