Suchergebnisse

AbstractWe investigate the economic impacts of the 2015 HPAI outbreak on turkey producers in Minnesota and the United States. Using a partial equilibrium model of the meat and poultry industry we find that the cost of the outbreak to U.S turkey producers was $225 million; $207 million of which were due to the loss in exports. However, it could have been worse if not for implementation of regional bans by trading partners who have negotiated free trade agreements with the United States. Our results show that for every percentage point of additional exports, U.S. turkey producers avoided a loss of about $6 million.

AbstractThe influence of sociodemographic and lifestyle factors on body weight conditional upon endogenous physical activity (PA) is examined for adults in Malaysia. We find an inverse link between body weight and PA at elevated PA levels. Vigorous PA with metabolic equivalent of task (MET) of 1500 minutes per week and above is required for healthy changes in body weight. Older individuals and those with low education and a family history of illnesses are associated with higher body mass index (BMI) across PA levels. Individuals of Chinese and other ethnicity, males, smokers, and persons working long hours have lower BMI at all PA levels.

We discuss the problem of accountability when multiple parties cooperate towards an end result such as multiple companies in a supply chain or departments of a government service under different authorities. In cases where a full trusted central point does not exist, it is difficult to obtain a trusted audit trail of a workflow when each individual participant is unaccountable to all others. We propose AudiWFlow, an auditing architecture which makes participants accountable for its contributions in a distributed workflow. Our scheme provides confidentiality in most cases, collusion detection and availability of evidence after the workflow terminates. AudiWFlow is based on verifiable secret sharing and real-time peer-to-peer verification of records; it further supports multiple levels of assurance to meet a desired trade-off between the availability of evidence and the overhead resulting from the auditing approach. We propose and evaluate two implementation approaches for AudiWFlow. The first one is fully distributed except for a central auxiliary point that, nevertheless, needs only a low level of trust. The second one is based on smart-contracts running on a public blockchain which is able to remove the need of any central point but requires the integration with a blockchain.