Transforum system innovation towards sustainable food. A review

Innovations in the agri-food sector are needed to create a sustainable food supply. Sustainable food supply requires unexpectedly that densely populated regions remain food producers. A Dutch innovation program has aimed at showing the way forward through creating a number of practice and scientific projects. Generic lessons from the scientific projects in this program are likely to be of interest to agricultural innovation in other densely populated regions in the world. Based on the executed scientific projects, generic lessons across the whole innovation program are derived. We found that the agricultural sector requires evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes to reshaping institutions. Measuring sustainability is possible against benchmarks and requires stakeholder agreement on sustainability values. Results show the importance of multiple social views and multiple stakeholder involvement in agricultural innovation. Findings call for flexible goal rather than process-oriented management of innovation. Findings also emphasise the essential role of profit in anchoring sustainable development in business. The results agree with concepts of evolutionary innovation. We conclude that there is no single best solution to making the agri-food sector more sustainable densely populated areas, but that the combination of a range of solutions and approaches is likely to provide the best way forward

Do Groups Exclude Others More Readily Than Individuals in Coalition Formation?

The present research compared interindividual and intergroup coalition processes. We examined whether groups are more likely to form small coalitions than individuals, and whether this tendency would depend on the social value orientation of the coalition party. Consistent with our hypothesis, results revealed that proselfs formed more small coalitions in intergroup settings than in interindividual settings whereas prosocials formed a similar number of small coalitions in both intergroup and interindividual settings. These and complementary findings add credence to the claim that people who are self-oriented are more likely to exclude others to maximize their own payoff and that such processes are especially pronounced in intergroup settings

Olfactomedin 4 Serves as a Marker for Disease Severity in Pediatric Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) Infection

Funding: Statement of financial support: The study was financially supported by the VIRGO consortium, an Innovative Cluster approved by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative and partially funded by the Dutch Government (BSIK 03012). The authors have indicated they have no personal financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose. Data Availability Statement: The data is accessible at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE69606.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Global assessment of manure management policies and practices

In 2014 an assessment of livestock manure policies was performed in 34 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, followed by an in-depth assessment of manure management practices in Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Ethiopia, Malawi, Argentina and Costa Rica. The assessments revealed the key barriers for improving integrated manure management and identified six opportunities for actual practice changes to improve manure related policies as well as farm practices with the overall objective of improving food security while mitigating methane emissions at the same tim

Slavery as a national crime: Defining Britishness in Encounters with the Flying Dutchman

Early British gothic fiction has often been analyzed in terms of the religious, political and cultural oppositions it helps to construct between Britain and the European continent, in particular in Catholic countries like France and Spain. One could argue that the cultural work of Gothic in these cases is to (re)define cultural differences between spaces that are geographically already separate. This division of territorial space is obviously much less clear at sea, and so this raises the question if and how national boundaries and identities are being upheld and transgressed in nautical Gothic. The figure of the Flying Dutchman, the ghostly captain doomed to sail the world seas forever, provides and interesting case study for exploring this issue of constructing such national identities. Nineteenth century British culture demonstrates a persistent preoccupation with the ghostly Dutchman. Numerous adaptations and manifestations of the Dutchman in British poetry, fiction, popular song and drama attest to the often problematic ‘Doppelgänger dilemmas’ (Rubright) the Flying Dutchman presents to a British audience: part of his frightening quality is that he is too close for comfort. In my article I will analyze representations of the Flying Dutchman in two British dramas (Fitzball & Taylor), a novel (Marryat), as well as some British poems and songs (1820-1860) in connection to encounters at sea and in the colonies. I will argue that in British nautical gothic the Flying Dutchman often serves as a projection screen for racist attitudes and pro-slavery opinions, but that British characters in these texts do not always succeed in warding off these attitudes