Response to ‘Protected areas and climate change Reflections from a practitioner's perspective

Cliquet et al. 1 provide a thought-provoking analysis of the challenges posed to the EU's protected areas by climate change. This paper seeks to build on some of the perspectives they brought to what is a highly challenging area of nature conservation law, policy and practice. While there is much to support in their analysis of the relationships between protected areas and climate change, there are two key strands we seek to develop further, based on the RSPB's experience of this area of nature conservation policy and practice: first, is the ecological model for adapting to climate change and second, the legal framework provided by the Birds2 and Habitats3 Directives (the Nature Directives) as it relates to the delivery of such adaptive actions

Apprentice pay in Britain, Germany and Switzerland: Institutions, market forces and market power

This is the accepted version of the original publication in the European Journal of Industrial Relations, which is available online at http://ejd.sagepub.com/content/19/3/201.The pay of metalworking apprentices is high in Britain, middling in Germany and low in Switzerland. We analyse these differences using fieldwork evidence and survey data, drawing on both economic and institutionalist theories. Several institutional attributes influence apprentice pay, partly by affecting supply and demand in markets for training places. Institutional support for apprenticeship training appears to involve important complementarities in both Germany and Switzerland, in contrast to Britain’s less coherent and more market-driven approach.We thank the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, Anglo-German Foundation, SKOPE (Oxford), the Swiss federal government (OPET/SERI) and WZB (Berlin) for financial support

Effects of Strong Magnetic Fields on the Hadron-Quark Deconfinement Transition

The aim of the present work is to investigate the effects of strong magnetic fields on the hadron-quark phase transition point at zero temperature. To describe the hadronic phase, a relativistic mean field (RMF) model is used and to describe the quark phase a density dependent quark mass model (DDQM) is employed. As compared with the results obtained with non-magnetised matter, we observe a shift of the transition point towards higher pressures and, generally also towards higher chemical potentials. An investigation of the phase transitions that could sustain hybrid stars is also performed.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Composable security of delegated quantum computation

Delegating difficult computations to remote large computation facilities, with appropriate security guarantees, is a possible solution for the ever-growing needs of personal computing power. For delegated computation protocols to be usable in a larger context---or simply to securely run two protocols in parallel---the security definitions need to be composable. Here, we define composable security for delegated quantum computation. We distinguish between protocols which provide only blindness---the computation is hidden from the server---and those that are also verifiable---the client can check that it has received the correct result. We show that the composable security definition capturing both these notions can be reduced to a combination of several distinct "trace-distance-type" criteria---which are, individually, non-composable security definitions. Additionally, we study the security of some known delegated quantum computation protocols, including Broadbent, Fitzsimons and Kashefi's Universal Blind Quantum Computation protocol. Even though these protocols were originally proposed with insufficient security criteria, they turn out to still be secure given the stronger composable definitions.Comment: 37+9 pages, 13 figures. v3: minor changes, new references. v2: extended the reduction between composable and local security to include entangled inputs, substantially rewritten the introduction to the Abstract Cryptography (AC) framewor

Fulfilling the Promise of Adolescence: Applying Developmental Knowledge to Create Systems Change

Adolescence—beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20s—is a distinct developmental period marking the transition between early childhood and adulthood. Although adolescence is now understood as a period of exceptional learning and growth, it is still frequently characterized as a time of increased risk and vulnerability. This mischaracterization of adolescence, combined with the deeply rooted societal inequities, has left the promise of adolescence unrealized for too many youth. A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine entitled The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Youth explores the socio-behavioral and neurobiological science of adolescence and provides recommendations for how this science can be applied by youth-serving systems. This paper outlines the principles of adolescent development identified in the report and details 5practices that can be implemented by youth-serving practitioners to promote positive adolescent development and ameliorate disparities in adolescent outcomes