The Farm as an Enterprise – The European Perspective

Farming conditions in Europe are changing substantially. The liberalisation of agricultural commodity markets is accompanied by an increasing societal demand for environmental services to be provided by the farming sector. Significant changes are necessary to enable the farming sector to cope with these challenges. The paper describes some general developments of the past and outlines perspectives for the future. Explicit consideration is given to the future of single ownership family farms on one hand, and the perspectives and structural requirements of large scale farming in crop and livestock production on the other hand. The analysis shows that the future competitiveness of the European farming sector largely depends on political decisions. Given the romantic views of the majority of the population as well as many politicians it is everything but certain that the agricultural policy will provide the basis for an economically efficient and therefore globally competitive farming sector in Europe.Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management,

Anaesthesia associated developmental neurotoxicity (AADN) 2015

The long-term cerebral effects of general anaesthesia at the extremes of age are currently enjoying attention. In children, the concern is that exposure to anaesthesia when less than 4 years of age may cause subsequent learning disabilities and behavioural changes. However, clinical equipoise exists as the available human studies are imperfect and the results of the large-scale multinational trials are not yet available. This structured narrative review summarises the overwhelming amount of information available.‘Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.’(Albert Einstein

The evolution of central banking

Institutions known as central banks emerged or were established as commercial banks or government banks. Their evolution into central banks came with their monopoly issuing notes and their role as lender of last resort, among other functions. Carrying out commercial business on a large scale created a conflict of interest, so this practice was abandoned. Establishing the right degree of dependence was difficult, and changed in times of crisis. Independence is important: it helps to establish reputation, which is everything in banking. The Great Depression, widely attributed to inept Central Bank behavior, interrupted central bank independence, but poor price behavior brought about its return. In the 19th century, laissez faire and the gold standard encouraged and sometimes allowed for considerable independence. Greater changes came in the new dirigiste environment following the Great Depression and the rise of the managed economy. Economies in transition confront high inflation and the problem of maintaining monetary stability just as newly independent developing countries did in the 1960s. How can inflation be controlled? Under fiat regimes, the money supply is controlled by the domestic monetary authority. But can they control monetary growth? Prior and current records are not encouraging. Will authorities have the credibility they need? Options include maintaining a fixed exchange rate or reviving currency boards. Currency boards function like an independent central bank, holding reserves and tying domestic currency to strong foreign currency. There are drawbacks to currency boards, especially for countries in transition. They require a considerable sacrifice of sovereignty, and are unlikely to appeal to countries that are only beginning to recover lost sovereignty.Financial Intermediation,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Stabilization,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Crisis Management&Restructuring

Improving Primo Usability and Teachability with Help from the Users

In the aftermath of a consortium migration to a shared cloud-based resource management and discovery system, a small college library implemented a web usability test to uncover the kinds of difficulties students had with the new interface. Lessons learned from this study led to targeted changes, which simplified aspects of searching, but also enhanced the librarians’ ability to teach more effectively. The authors discuss the testing methods, results, and teaching opportunities, both realized and potential, which arose from implementing changes

Print Culture

Thoreau’s relation to print culture was complicated and at times contradictory, but from his writing life to his family business, he was shaped by it. Scholars note that he was both successful and a failure as a professional author. He published books and articles made possible by technological changes in papermaking and printing to his west on the Housatonic River, and business and market developments in publishing to his east in Boston. Some of these changes brought him a measure of money and renown, and others left him surrounded in his own home by an “inert mass” of unsold paper and print. He wanted to publish in the periodical press and with successful book publishers, and he sold graphite to printers to supply the making of plates. Yet, at the same time he also argued that print offered an insufficient secondhand experience of the world of bodies and things. Nineteenth-century American print culture offered challenges and openings to Transcendentalist thinkers. Noting the ever-expanding scale of print production of print in their lifetimes, Emerson lamented that one could no longer hope to read everything printed, and Thoreau argued against reading anything except the world itself. Both continued to publish their work in books and periodicals. “Much is published, but little printed,” Thoreau writes in “Sounds,” leaving readers to wonder what it meant to leave an impression on the world in the middle of the nineteenth century (W 111).

Models of everywhere revisited: a technological perspective

The concept ‘models of everywhere’ was first introduced in the mid 2000s as a means of reasoning about the environmental science of a place, changing the nature of the underlying modelling process, from one in which general model structures are used to one in which modelling becomes a learning process about specific places, in particular capturing the idiosyncrasies of that place. At one level, this is a straightforward concept, but at another it is a rich multi-dimensional conceptual framework involving the following key dimensions: models of everywhere, models of everything and models at all times, being constantly re-evaluated against the most current evidence. This is a compelling approach with the potential to deal with epistemic uncertainties and nonlinearities. However, the approach has, as yet, not been fully utilised or explored. This paper examines the concept of models of everywhere in the light of recent advances in technology. The paper argues that, when first proposed, technology was a limiting factor but now, with advances in areas such as Internet of Things, cloud computing and data analytics, many of the barriers have been alleviated. Consequently, it is timely to look again at the concept of models of everywhere in practical conditions as part of a trans-disciplinary effort to tackle the remaining research questions. The paper concludes by identifying the key elements of a research agenda that should underpin such experimentation and deployment

The Leverage of Demographic Dynamics on Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Does Age Structure Matter?

This article provides a methodological contribution to the study of the effect of changes in population age structure on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. First, I propose a generalization of the IPAT equation to a multisector economy with an age-structured population and discuss the insights that can be obtained in the context of stable population theory. Second, I suggest a statistical model of household consumption as a function of household size and age structure to quantitatively evaluate the extent of economies of scale in consumption of energy-intensive goods, and to estimate age-specific profiles of consumption of energy-intensive goods and of CO2 emissions. Third, I offer an illustration of the methodologies using data for the United States. The analysis shows that per-capita CO2 emissions increase with age until the individual is in his or her 60s, and then emissions tend to decrease. Holding everything else constant, the expected change in U.S. population age distribution during the next four decades is likely to have a small, but noticeable, positive impact on CO2 emissions

Negotiating the inhuman: Bakhtin, materiality and the instrumentalization of climate change

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness