A central question in designing server farms today is how to efficiently provision the number of serversto handle unpredictable demand patterns, so as to extract the best performance while not wastingenergy. While one would like to turn servers off when they become idle to save energy, the largesetup cost (both, in terms of setup time and energy penalty) needed to switch the server ...

A reflection of highly prevalent endemic wildlife trichinellosis is seen in wild boar farming in Finland. During the last five years, 0.7% (15/2265) of wild boars undergoing official meat inspection have been determined to be Trichinella-positive. These findings originate from six different farms. In Finland, T. spiralis and T. pseudospiralis have been discovered in meat inspection of wild boar...

New panel data from India are used to examine the relationship between farm size and productivity based on a model incorporating agency costs favoring family workers, scaledependent returns to mechanization arising from the fact that a larger contiguous land area is better-suited for high-capacity machinery, and falling credit costs with owned land. The model provides guidance for imputing the ...

2. Given what we know about how farms become and stay efficient, competitive, and poverty-reducing, what type of technical progress helps them do so—and is any type harmful? 3. How can research lead to more of the “helpful” technical progress and less of the “harmful” sort—or, to disaggregate the question, what kind of research might improve smallholder access, or returns, to key inputs (water,...

The necessity of surface water for irrigation and its increasing scarcity in developing economies motivate the need for its efficient distribution. Surface water is distributed from its source to individual farms via simple canals, which are surface pathways dug through farms. The inequity in this distribution arises due to the relative physical locations of the farms. Head-reach (primary) farm...

In this study, we parametrize a stochastic individual-based model of the transmission dynamics of Escherichia coli O157 infection among Scottish cattle farms and use the model to predict the impacts of both targeted and non-targeted interventions. We first generate distributions of model parameter estimates using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Despite considerable uncertainty in parameter va...

Currently more and more agents are involved in human routine activities and a mixed human-agent society is thus formed by the humans and the agents involved. The relationship between humans and agents in this mixed society is subtle and it is vital to explore the influence that agents bring into the society. In this paper, we try to investigate a few questions: will humans act differently towar...

Let X1,X2, . . . , be independent random variables with EXi = 0 and write Sn = ∑ n i=1 Xi and V 2 n = ∑ n i=1 X i . This paper provides an overview of current developments on the functional central limit theorems (invariance principles), absolute and relative errors in the central limit theorems, moderate and large deviation theorems and saddle-point approximations for the self-normalized sum S...