The Texas Pecan Board was established in 1998 to administer the Texas Pecan Checkoff Program and is financed through a one-half cent per pound assessment on grower pecan sales. The Board spends the assessment collections on a variety of advertising campaigns in an attempt to expand demand for Texas pecans, both improved and native varieties, and increase the welfare of Texas pecan growers. This study presents an evaluation of the economic effectiveness of the Texas Pecan Checkoff Program in expanding sales of Texas pecans. First, the effects of Texas Pecan Board promotion on sales of all Texas pecans are determined using the ordinary least squares estimator (OLS) followed by a test for differential effects of Texas Pecan Board promotion on sales of improved and native Texas pecan varieties using the seemingly unrelated regression. The analysis indicates that the Texas Pecan Checkoff Program has effectively increased sales of improved varieties of Texas pecans, but has had no impact on sales of native varieties of Texas pecans. A benefit-cost analysis determines that the additional sales revenues generated is relatively large compared to the dollar value spent on promotion indicating that the Texas pecan promotion program has been financially successful.

Phytosterol is a healthful ingredient that helps reduce blood cholesterol levels. It has been over ten years since the first phytosterol-enriched product, Benecol margarine, was launched in Finland in 1995; however, understanding of this product is still limited. In addition, it has been shown in the literature that health-related concerns have an influence on consumers’ decisions to consume harmful or beneficial ingredients. This study estimates the demand for three phytosterol-enriched products in the categories of margarine, orange juice and yogurt. The objectives of this study are (1) to estimate price and expenditure elasticities for phytosterol-enriched brands and comparative non-phytosterol brands, (2) to identify cannibalization effects with a proposed methodology, and, (3) to estimate the welfare effects associated with the introduction of a product. Subsuming LA/AIDS, Rotterdam, CBS and NBR demand systems, the Barten synthetic demand system is applied to margarine weekly scanner data. Phytosterol-enriched margarine brands (Benecol and Take Control) commanded significantly higher prices relative to other margarine brands. Strong substitutability among the phytosterol brands was evident as suggested by the statistically significant and relatively large compensated cross-price elasticities. Cannibalization is defined as the competition between products offered by the same firm. Cannibalization studies are important to multi-product firms because they provide insights into the benefits of offering product variety. In addition, the identification and assessment of cannibalization are integral factors for strategic decisions of new product introductions. However, there are no standard measures to identify its effects. We use the Barten synthetic demand system along with two conventional measures to illustrate that the use of cross-price elasticities derived from a flexible demand system is a viable alternative to identify cannibalization effects. The third objective analyzes the consumer welfare effects associated with a new functional food product introduction. Using the Barten synthetic model and pre- and post-introduction scanner data, we estimate direct price and variety effects associated with the introduction of a new functional food product (i.e., phytosterol-enriched product). With post-introduction data and an assumed demand structure, we also estimate indirect price effects. Our results suggest notable welfare effects consisting of a relatively small price effect and a large variety effect.

Abstract Business competition is violent due to globalization and large-scale production. For the purpose of improving competition advantage, enterprises had integrated their business flow in Supply chain. Business move their competition advantages from firm base to supply chain base gradually.The flow of supply chain was redesigned not only considering of cost down by the way of collaboration ,also transfer Supply Chain Management to Demain Chain Management further. To respond the need from customer quickly and compete with the rival, market requirement pulling instead the material planning pushing. This article is a case study in stainless steel industry to interpret the requirement of inbound and outbound information in demand chain management. The main inbound information is market requirement forecasting that could planning the requirement from customer in order to process efficient supply and reduce cost in production. The information in outbound include sales¡Bmaking¡Bdelivery message to support customer know the situation of purchasing order well. Also,it can help customer do a good planning for resale or reprocess in B2B transaction. The research focus on three domains: 1.Industrial environment-including partnership¡Binformation intension, 2.Business management:including information level¡Binformation quality and source, 3.Information technology:including information infrastructure. After analysis the impact of the information sharing factors ,we found firm scale and business model influence the level of business information. While business collaboration in progress due to the considering of benefits and limitation of information infrastructure,the informations sharing couldn,t proceed efficiently,So, the information between two business couldn¡¦t integrated and no efficient business model was created. Business management model and IT ability determine the need¡Bwish and ability of demand chain information sharing. The content of information sharing in transaction should be distinct to find what measurement should be consider.Then we could recognize the necessity and benefit of information sharing ,and find solution to drive out the obstacle of information sharing.

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Over the past decade, researches on operating systems have been shifted from monolithic kernels towards microkernels for several reasons. Of them are: (1) It is easier to understand and debug because the kernel is much smaller. (2) It is much more secure and flexible because the kernel is small, and most of the kernel functions can be implemented as servers running in the user space instead of in the kernel space. (3) The message passing technique that is in the core of the microkernel has been improved, and thus the overhead required for the message passing has been highly reduced. Minix 3 is one of the microkernels developed over the past decade and is aimed for educational purpose and small PCs. It is implemented on the IA-32 architecture and is based on the segmented memory model of IA-32. The purpose of this thesis is to use Minix 3 as a case study and to convert the segmented memory model adopted by the current implementation to coexisted with the demand paged memory model, which is also supported by the IA-32 architecture. That said, the thesis can be divided into two parts: The first part is to implement a new server called pager, which would take over the memory management subsystem of the Minix 3 microkernel and be used to offload the overhead of the kernel. The second part is to implement a virtual memory management subsystem that uses the segmentation with paging memory model of the IA-32 architecture.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-48).

This study investigated the water use of lactating sows (experiment 1), suckling piglets (experiment 2), weaned piglets (experiments 3, 6 and 8) and growing pigs (experiments 4, 5, 7 and 9), according to 3 specific objectives which assessed the effects of: age, live weight, feed intake and physiological status on water demand (experiments 1 to 3); different types of drinker on water use (experiments 4 to 6); dietary mineral content on water demand (experiments 7 and 8). For all classes of pig, feed intake explained between 53 and 83% of the variation in water use (P < 0.001). The relationship between stage of lactation and live weight (experiments 3, 6 and 7) was confounded by feed intake. In sows water use increased linearly in the week before farrowing (P < 0.001) which then decreased from 12.3 ± 1.10 1 the day before, to 9.3 ± 0.84 1 the day of farrowing (P < 0.001). Water use averaged 18.9 ± 0.27 1/day in a 21 day lactation. With suckling piglets, provision of water and/or creep feed between days 8 and 21 did not influence growth ( P > 0.05). Provision of creep feed reduced water use (0.22 ± 0.019 v 0.53 ± 0.035 1/litter day; P < 0.001), but water provision did not influence feed intake (34.7 ± 3.4 g/litter day; P > 0.05). Early weaned piglets (21 d) showed a disturbed pattern of water use in week 1 and water use averaged 0.94 ± 0.050 1/piglet day between weeks 1 and 3. In growing pigs, water use per unit of feed intake decreased linearly from 17 to 81 kg W and water use averaged 5 ± 0.16 1/day. Type of drinker influenced performance immediately after weaning (P < 0.001), but results with growing pigs were less conclusive. Water use from the Mono-flo nipple drinker was about twice that from 5 other types of drinker (P < 0.001). Dietary potassium (K) increased the water use of growing pigs by 1 1/day for every 1% increase in K between 7 and 15 g/kg feed (P < 0.05) , but performance was not affected (P > 0.05). With piglets water use and performance were not affected by variations in dietary K and Cl contents between 6.7 and 15.6; 1.4 and 3.0 g/kg feed respectively (P > 0.05). Growing pigs fed liquid diets utilised a supplementary water supply even though the water added to the meal exceeded ARC (1981) recommended allowances (experiment 9). Daily weight gain and conversion of dry matter improved as the moisture content of the liquid diets was increased from 67 to 88% (P < 0.05).

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The goal of this dissertation is to examine the theoretical and empirical implications of the inventory theoretic approach to the demand for money. Chapter 1 reviews the existing inventory theoretic frameworks and empirical money demand literature and provides an overview of this thesis. One of the main conclusions is that the elasticity results from the existing inventory theoretic models are not robust. Chapter 2 develops a partial equilibrium inventory theoretic model, in which a fixed cost is involved per cash transfer. The key feature is that a firm endogenously chooses the frequency of pay periods, which a household takes as given. When the firm must borrow working capital and pay wages by cheque, I show that both the firm and the household choose to transfer cash every payday only. The model keeps the basic result from the classical inventory theoretic approach that both the income and interest elasticity of money demand are 0.5. Chapter 3 extends the partial equilibrium model into a general equilibrium framework and shows that the partial equilibrium elasticity results no longer apply in the general equilibrium. First, the income elasticity is 1 in the general equilibrium. Second, the interest elasticity has two values depending on a threshold interest rate. When interest rates are below this threshold, the model is the Cash-In-Advance model with a constant income velocity of money and zero interest elasticity; otherwise the interest elasticity is close to 0.5 and the velocity fluctuates in response to variations in interest rates. Finally, the general equilibrium elasticity results are robust across alternative specifications of the agent's utility. Chapter 4 calibrates the general equilibrium model to the last 40 years of US data for M1. By constructing a residual measure of money transaction costs from the structural money demand function, I find that a structural break in the transaction costs occurred in 1981 might have been responsible for the instability of long-run money demand. The benefit of this approach is that it can explain this pattern of money demand without appealing to an exogenous structural break in the money demand function.