Government and the Consumer

This article takes up four major topics. First, the principal characteristics of governmental action with respect to consumer protection are reviewed, with emphasis on developments during the past thirty years. Second, the traditional pleas for consumer protection are examined with a view toward determining the inadequacies in governmental action. Third, the problems of the consumer are studied in the context of oligopolistic industrial markets in which nonprice competition accentuates the place of advertising and severely restricts the dissemination of factual information that is essential to enlightened purchase decisions. Fourth, the ingredients of a meaningful consumer protection program are outlined and the probabilities for their political implementation appraised

Platform for Health and Wellbeing pilot study: provision of weight management support via the workplace

Introduction: The role of the workplace as an opportunity for improving health has been highlighted in recent reports. The East Midlands Platform for Health and Wellbeing is a network of private, public and voluntary sector organisations working to improve health and reduce obesity. Member organisations commit to undertake actions to improve health and wellbeing of employees, individuals and/or communities. As part of Slimming World’s commitment, this pilot assessed the merits of providing weight management support via the workplace at two large regional employers. Methods: 278 British Gas and Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust employees were offered 12 weeks’ support at either a bespoke workplace group or established community-based Slimming World group. Weight change was recorded weekly. Dietary and physical activity behaviours, along with aspects of psychological health were assessed by questionnaire pre and post-programme. Results: 121 employees (meeting inclusion criteria) joined a workplace-based group and 114 a community-based group. Weight and attendance: Mean joining BMI was 32.4kg/m2. 138 (59%) participants completed the programme (attended within final 4 weeks).Behaviour changes: Participants who completed both questionnaires (n=87), reported positive changes in dietary and physical activity behaviours (all p<.001) (figure 1), and psychological health (mental wellbeing, self-worth and self-esteem, all p<0.05). There were no significant differences between worksite and community intervention groups for any outcomes. Conclusion: Providing weight management support via the workplace significantly reduced weight of participants (-3.9%). Completer analysis also revealed positive changes in healthy eating habits and activity levels, and also importantly psychological health, which may impact on working life. The Slimming World programme works effectively within both the work setting and via community-based provision when employees are recruited via the workplace

Exposing Inequity in Australian Society: Are we all in it Together?

The COVID-19 pandemic does not discriminate, and the Australian government has sought to embrace a sense of universality, adopting the slogan ‘we are all in it together’. However, the pandemic has also exposed layers of systemic, structural and cultural inequities, challenging this notion of a common good. The authors, based in Victoria in Australia, have experienced two periods of lockdown, observing the tensions between individualist, libertarian tendencies and civil society perspectives within the context of Australian multiculturalism and latent colonialism. In this paper, the authors discuss the ways in which whiteness and colonialism are embedded in the government’s public health and social policies whilst being subject to emergent contested spaces. Drawing on media reporting between January and August 2020, the authors analyse the intransigence of white, often xenophobic, privilege and the disruptive, countervailing forces, from the Black Lives Matter movement to localised acts of community solidarity. The COVID-19 virus has exposed layers of social inequity and their entrenched everyday structural and cultural violence in Australia and, in so doing, has provided both opportunities and challenges to people who are striving for social justice and the notion of the common good

A. Season of Service: Introducing Service Learning into the Liberal Arts Curriculum

We live in times when rights and obligations have become uncoupled. Individuals regard themselves almost exclusively as private persons with responsibilities only to family and job and yet possessing endless rights against a distant and alien state in relationship to which they think or themselves, at best, as watchdogs and clients and, at worst, as adversaries and victims. The idea of service to country or to the institutions by which rights and liberty are legitimized and sustained has fairly vanished

Resistive transitions in quench-condensed Bi films near a normal-metal ground plane

We report observations of the zero-field resistive transitions of superconducting quench-condensed Bi0.97Tl0.03 films both near electrically isolated normal-metal ground planes and on clean fire-polished glass. Transition temperatures, obtained by fitting the data with the two-dimensional Aslamazov-Larkin theory of fluctuation conductance, were found to be significantly enhanced for films deposited over ground planes versus those deposited onto insulating substrates. Conductivity enhancement due to superconducting fluctuations was found to be much less than expected for the thinnest samples. This suppression was coincident with broadened superconductor transitions that are consistent with nonuniform sample thickness. Sufficiently thick films showed reasonable agreement with both the fluctuation theory and assumption of uniformity. We discuss discrepancies between our fits and the theory within the context of film morphology

Dancing with physics

Teaching physics by way of the forces on the human body experienced during dance can be an effective way to bring Newton\u27s laws to life

Low-field magnetoresistance in granular Pb films near the insulator-superconductor transition

We have studied the insulator-superconductor transition in quench-condensed granular Pb films from 0.1 to 10 K. Resistance measurements were made in zero magnetic field and low noise conditions. Magnetoresistance measurements were also performed for low magnetic fields (less than 100 G). The magnetoresistance results on the superconducting side of the transition suggest that we are directly probing the finite length scales associated with the range of phase coherence in these granular materials

Hyper-resistivity to global-superconductivity transition by annealing in quench-condensed Pb films

The rapid rise in resistance occurring in barely conducting quench-condensed Pb films cooled through temperatures characteristic of the bulk superconducting transition is found to be strongly current dependent, the resistance increasing rapidly with decreasing current and temperature. Annealing the same film at temperatures below 40 K changes the behavior to that of a conventional superconductor with resistance that drops as the film current and temperature decrease. Experimental evidence suggests this results from a transition from quasiparticle-dominated to Josephson-dominated tunneling