An overview of emergency relief system design practice

Cost effective loss prevention requires an optimizing strategy to prevent, moderate (relieve) and contain runaway reactions. Ensuring that an emergency relief system design will either avoid or accommodate two-phase vapor-liquid flow is of particular importance. Use of adiabatic runaway reaction test information in combination with digital computer simulation is a powerful method to design an emergency relief system.     

Incorporating the Operating Environment Into a Nonparametric Measure of Technical Efficiency

The ability of a production unit to transform inputs into outputs is influenced by its technical efficiency and external operating environment. This paper introduces a nonparametric, linear programming, frontier procedure for obtaining a measure of managerial efficiency that controls for exogenous features of the operating environment. The approach also provides statistical tests of the effects of external conditions on the efficient use of each individual input (for an input oriented model) or for each individual output (for an output oriented model). The procedure is illustrated for a sample of nursing homes.     

One world money, then and now

The case for monetary simplification and unification has been made since the middle of the nineteenth century. It rests on four principal arguments; reduced transaction costs; establishing credibility; preventing bad policy in other states; political integration via money. In this paper we argue that the case for monetary integration is becoming increasingly less persuasive. In making our case we posit a different concept of money to the one that underlay the nineteenth century discussions which we term “Newtonian” since it was based on the assumption of a single reference external to the state reflected in the definition of value in terms of precious metals. In the twentieth century, views of money have shifted to a more “Einsteinian” or relativistic conception. Measures of value that move relative to each other are helpful in terms of dealing with large shifts in relative prices that affect different countries very differently. In the current age of globalization, “Einsteinian” money is capable of accommodating shifts that were politically destructive in the “Newtonian” world.