Soft power: Power of attraction or confusion?

Despite its popularity soft power remains power of confusion. The paper examines the concept, with a special focus on the nature and sources of soft power. Nye’s notion of soft power is largely ethnocentric and based on the assumption that there is a link between attractiveness and the ability to influence others in international relations. This poses two problems: Firstly, a country has many different actors. Some of them like the attraction and others don’t. Whether the attraction will lead to the ability to influence the policy of the target country depends on which groups in that country find it attractive and how much control they have on policymaking. Secondly, policymaking at the state level is far more complicated than at the personal level; and has different dynamics that emphasise the rational considerations. This leaves little room for emotional elements thus significantly reducing the effect of soft power. Given the nature of soft power being uncontrollable and unpredictable, it would be impossible to wield soft power in any organised and coordinated fashion as Nye suggested. Furthermore, the relationship between two countries is shaped by many complex factors. It is ultimately decided by the geopolitics and strategic interests of nations, in which soft power may play only a limited role. The paper also discusses the link between soft power and nation branding as both concepts are concerned with a nation’s influence on the world stage. Public diplomacy is a subset of nation branding that focuses on the political brand of a nation; whereas nation branding is about how a nation as whole to reshape the international opinions. A successful nation branding campaign will help create a more favourable and lasting image among the international audience thus further enhancing a country’s soft power

Seed production of temperate forage legumes in Southern Brazil.

The objective of this interaction is to identify and prioritize the limiting factors, and overcome them with existing technologies or generating new knowledge through applied research

Factorization and soft-gluon divergences in isolated-photon cross sections

We study the production of isolated photons in $e^+e^-$ annihilation and give the proof of the all-order factorization of the collinear singularities. These singularities are absorbed in the standard fragmentation functions of partons into a photon, while the effects of the isolation are consistently included in the short-distance cross section. We compute this cross section at order \as and show that it contains large double logarithms of the isolation parameters. We explain the physical origin of these logarithms and discuss the possibility to resum them to all orders in \as.Comment: 18 pages, LaTex, 2 eps figures, few modifications in the text, results unchange

Quality characterization, phenolic and carotenoid content of new orange, cream and yellow-fleshed sweetpotato genotypes.

Eight new genotypes of sweetpotato produced by Embrapa Hortaliças (orange-fleshed: MD09026-OF and MD09024-OF; cream-fleshed: MD09011-CF, MD09004-CF, MD10039-CF, and MD10004-CF; yellow-fleshed: MD09017-YF and MD12002-YF) and two cultivars used as controls (Beauregard and Brazlândia Roxa) were evaluated for color, soluble solids, dry matter, phenolic compounds, total carotenoids and β-carotene. Hue angles differed even between those sweetpotatoes with the same flesh color. The orange-fleshed genotypes MD09024-OF, MD09026-OF, and Beauregard, had the lowest L*, showing to be darker than the others

The QCD/SM Working Group: Summary Report

This Report documents the results obtained by the Working Group on Quantum ChromoDynamics and the Standard Model for the Workshop ``Physics at TeV Colliders'', Les Houches, France, 21 May - 1 June 2001. The account of uncertainties in Parton Distribution Functions is reviewed. Progresses in the description of multiparton final states at Next-to-Leading Order and the extension of calculations for precision QCD observables beyond this order are summarized. Various issues concerning the relevance of resummation for observables at TeV colliders is examined. Improvements to algorithms of jet reconstruction are discussed and predictions for diphoton and photon pi-zero production at the LHC are made for kinematic variables of interest regarding searches for a Higgs boson decaying into two photons. Finally, several improvements implemented in Monte-Carlo event generators are documented

Functional characterization of biofortified sweet potato flour dried at different temperatures.

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.) is an abundant source of carotenoids, and the processing of its tubers as flour is an alternative to add value and expand its use. The objective was to characterize flour from the pulp of biofortified sweet potato dried at different drying temperatures. Biofortified sweet potatoes (accession CNPH1210) were dried in a forced air ventilation oven, under four temperature conditions: 45, 55, 65 and 75 °C. Drying continued until the sliced roots reached moisture content of 14 % (d.b.). Fibers, phenolic compounds, carotenoids, β-carotene, antioxidant capacity by ABT and DPPH, scanning electron microscopy, high-field magnetic resonance imaging, infrared absorption spectrometry were evaluated. Flours obtained from sliced roots dried at 45, 55, 65 and 75 ºC showed stability in their morphological characteristics. The temperature of 45 °C was the most indicated for the production of biofortified sweet potato flours, as the produced flours had higher contents of bioactive compounds, being a significant source of carotenoids

Distribuição espacial dos componentes morfológicos ao longo do perfil vertical do dossel forrageiro de capim sudão sob lotação contínua e intermitente.

CONGREGA

QCD

We discuss issues of QCD at the LHC including parton distributions, Monte Carlo event generators, the available next-to-leading order calculations, resummation, photon production, small x physics, double parton scattering, and backgrounds to Higgs production.Comment: 115 pages, Latex, 47 figures, to appear in the Report of the ``1999 CERN Workshop on SM Physics (and more) at the LHC'', S. Catani, M. Dittmar, D. Soper, W.J. Stirling, S. Tapprogge (convenors