A major and growing problem facing the Health Service is the conflict between a limitless and, apparently, insatiable demand for health care and a limited supply. This is so despite the NHS's increasing share of the national budget, and the future will see the Service striving to restrict demand and to meet it at an acceptable cost-acceptable within the considerations of equity and doctors' dem...

Cultivated coffee trees are under serious threat from climate change, disease and insect pests. The homogeneity of the crop makes it particularly vulnerable: nearly all of the world’s cultivated coffee originated with a handful of plants grown in Ethiopia. Little scientific research has gone into cultivating coffee, but that situation is beginning to change. Scientists are now hurrying to intro...

Production costs in general, and workforce and inventory costs in particular, constitute a large fraction of the operating costs of many manufacturing plants. We introduce cooperative aggregate production planning as a way to decrease these costs. That is, when production planning of two or more facilities (plants) is integrated, they can interchange workforce and products inventory; thus, thei...

The Social Security program is almost certain to have a major influence on the Nation’s rate of capital accumulation. For most Americans, Social Security is the primary form of saving for retirement. As such, the high and increasing level of Social Security benefits can markedly reduce personal saving and private capital accumulation; the evidence reviewed below suggests that this does in fact ...

I develop a model of life-cycle portfolio choice with non-tradeable idiosyncratic labor income where the agent has an option to invest in human capital, for example through education. The inability to borrow against her human capital depresses the agent’s demand for equity, as she is concerned about being liquidity constrained when it is optimal to invest. The model has many predictions that ar...

Recent increase in energy prices has led researchers to find better ways for capacity provisioning in data centers to reduce energy wastage due to the variation in workload. This paper explores the opportunity for cost saving and proposes a novel approach for capacity provisioning under bounded latency requirements for the workload. We investigate how many servers to be kept active and how much...

Last level caches (LLC) play an important role in current and future chip multiprocessors, since they constitute the last opportunity to avoid expensive off-chip accesses. In a tiled CMP, the LLC is typically shared by all cores but physically distributed along the chip, thus providing a global banked capacity memory with high associativity. The memory hierarchy is orchestrated through a direct...

Human immunodeficiency virus infection is the first major pandemic of the 20th century. At present, almost 10 million people are known to be infected with this virus, and it is estimated that by the year 2000, approximately 40 million people will be infected. Transmission of this deadly infection is predominantly by sexual contact. Individuals infected with this virus pass through several predi...