Causal forces are a way of summarizing forecasters' expectations about what will happen to a time series in the future. Contrary to the common assumption for extrapolation, time series are not always subject to consistent forces that point in the same direction. Some are affected by conflicting...

The focuses are on the study of risk management of natural disasters from the perspective of complex systems, using the example of Mexico. It develops the theory of an arrival process taking into account an early warning system and we use it to create appropriate actuarial models. Then, it...

At the end of the driest year on record, California faces water shortages whose impacts will be felt with progressive severity through the summer and fall of 1977. Electric power is not entirely exempt from these impacts and could, if severly affected, compound the direct distresses of the...

This paper focuses on how electric utility companies can respond in their decision making to uncertain variables. Here we take a mean- variance type of approach. The mean'' value is an expected cost, on a discounted value basis. We assume that management has risk preferences incorporating a...

Natural resources models serve as important tools to support decision making by predicting environmental indicators. All model predictions have uncertainty associated with them. Model predictive uncertainty, often expressed as the confidence interval around a model prediction value, may serve as...

This investigation addresses a practical question from an agricultural planning and management perspective: are the NOAA/CPC seasonal climate forecasts skillful enough to retain utility after they have been downscaled to field and daily scales for use in crop models to predict impacts on crop...

Ross A Hammond, Ruth LevineEconomic Studies Program, Brookings Institution, Washington DC, USAAbstract: Over the past several decades, obesity has grown into a major global epidemic. In the United States (US), more than two-thirds of adults are now overweight and one-third is obese. In this...