It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle is not confined to individual anecdotes or case studies, but has been borne out in econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance across a comprehensive sample of countries. The ...

A Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) is a unique and stable physical characteristic of a piece of hardware, due to variations in the fabrication processes. Prior works have demonstrated that PUFs are a promising cryptographic primitive to enable hardware-based device authentication and identification. A diverse number of PUFs have been explored, e.g., delay-based PUFs in dedicated circuits, S...

Coastal ports operate through the interactions of shippers, carriers, dock owners, operators, pilots and the various governmental agencies responsible for maintaining and operating channels for safe and efficient movements. Monte Carlo simulation models of vessel movements in ports can be useful in determining the value of improvements such as channel widening or dredging. Such models require, ...

Secure supply of wood remains a challenge partly due to resource conservation efforts that have failed to focus on the sawn wood supply chain as a whole. This study investigated the influence of sawn wood commodity chain profile on its performance. Data were collected from the production and distribution chain of 35 production units selected randomly. Production batches comprising of at least f...

This research presents the Enhanced Commodity Forward Buy (ECFB) heuristic, a new method for commodity purchasing, which allows strategic forward buying of commodities for products that include commodity components or materials. The Enhanced Commodity Forward Buy addresses limitations of existing methods by considering stochastic demand and stochastic commodity prices for products that contain ...

Using a structural VAR with block exogeneity, diagonality and identifying restrictions, this paper analyzes: first, the macroeconomic linkages among the oil price, U.S. output, interest rate, money supply, general price level and exchange rate and second, the relationships of the macroeconomic variables with the price indices of ten international nonfuel commodity groups. By assuming the block ...

 Commodity markets: overview, description and structure  Commodity spot price models, their performance and calibration  Forward curve modeling for commodities  Modeling commodity price volatility  Correlations/dependencies in commodity portfolios  Modeling risk of a commodity portfolio  Typical commodity derivatives (quanto, Asian, spread and basket options, volumetric and swing options...

The entry price of supercomputing has traditionally been very high. As processing elements, operating systems, and switch technology become cheap commodity parts, building a powerful supercomputer at a fraction of the price of a proprietary system becomes realistic. We have recently purchased, in support of both our local and national collaborations, a dedicated computational cluster of eight D...

In this paper, we address optimal network coding schemes for two-user unicast networks. Using previous results on the relationship between graph structure and informationtheoretic capacity, we characterize the capacity region for a class of two-user unicast networks by finding a combination network coding/routing scheme to achieve an outer bound on capacity. This scheme has the remarkable prope...