The Effects of Hurricane Katrina on Corn, Wheat and Soybean Futures Prices and Basis

Hurricane Katrina caused considerable damage to transportation infrastructure, grain export facilities, and to some crop areas in 2005. Assuming that financial market participants considered the disruption of the grain transportation system by Katrina as having an important impact on fundamental supply and demand factors, futures and/or national basis would subsequently adjust. The objective of this research was to determine the reaction in corn, wheat, and soybean futures and basis due to Katrina using an event study methodology. One parametric (Constant mean return) and one nonparametric procedure (Corrado's rank test) were used to define whether there were statistically significant abnormal returns. During Katrina abnormal returns were larger on the wheat futures market than on the corn and soybean futures markets, which could be partially explained by the timing of the Katrina's landfall with the grain export activities. However, there were only a few statistically significant daily abnormal returns in the futures prices due to the hurricane. There was some evidence of significant cumulative abnormal returns in the corn and wheat futures markets prior to and surrounding the Katrina's landfall. In conclusion, the majority of the corn market reaction to Katrina's damage occurred in the basis and not in the futures market. For the soybean market there was weak evidence of significant reaction in both basis and futures prices. In the case of wheat, the basis was not evaluated and wheat futures prices reacted to the disruption caused by Katrina. The reaction in the corn, wheat and soybean futures prices due to Katrina could have being moderated by the presence of large stocks and large expected production levels of these grains in 2005 or simply by the fact that the damage caused by the hurricane did not affect fundamental supply and demand factors; rather, they only affected transportation logistics.Marketing,

Concept for passive system to control gas flow independently of temperature

Volumetric flow rate of gas is maintained at a constant value independent of temperature by passing the gas through a parallel or series combination of turbulent flow and laminar flow restrictors. By proper combination of restrictors, the flow rate may be automatically made to vary as an increasing or decreasing function of temperature

Optimizing Outreach and Application Assistance Services in Community-based Organizations: Evaluation Findings from The Colorado Trust's Outreach and Enrollment for Children and Youth Grant Strategy

This report discusses findings from the evaluation of The Colorado Trust's three-year, $3.3 million grant strategy (2009-2011) to help expand enrollment of children and youth in public health insurance programs in Colorado. These findings focus on how 12 community-based organizations, with little previous experience in providing application assistance to families to enroll children and youth in public health insurance, offered targeted outreach and application assistance services. These findings provide new insights into the time, effort and outcomes associated with implementing outreach and application assistance services, reinforcing and expanding upon previous literature demonstrating the promise and potential pitfalls of this approach

Statistical properties of the GALEX spectroscopic stellar sample

The GALEX General Data Release 4/5 includes 174 spectroscopic tiles, obtained from slitless grism observations, for a total of more than 60,000 ultraviolet spectra. We have determined statistical properties of the sample of GALEX stars. We have defined a suitable system of spectroscopic indices, which measure the main mid-UV features at the GALEX low spectral resolution and we have employed it to determine the atmospheric parameters of of stars in the range 4500<Teff<9000 K. Our preliminary results indicate that the sample is formed by a majority of main sequence F- and G-type stars, with metallicity [M/H]>-1 dex.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Science, UV universe special issu

Appearance of Saturn's F ring azimuthal channels for the anti-alignment configuration between the ring and Prometheus

In this article we explore the aspect of the F ring with respect to the anti-alignment configuration between the ring and Prometheus. We focus our attention on the shape of the F ring's azimuthal channels which were first reported by Porco et al. (2005) and numerically explored by Murray et al. (2005), who found excellent agreement between Cassini's ISS reprojected images and their numerical model via a direct comparison. We find that for anti-alignment the channels are wider and go deeper inside the ring material. From our numerical model we find a new feature, an island in the middle of the channel. This island is made up of the particles that have been perturbed the most by Prometheus and only appears when this satellite is close to apoapsis. In addition, plots of the anti-alignment configuration for different orbital stages of Prometheus are obtained and discussed here.Comment: Number of pages: 12, number of tables: 1, number of figures: