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Joined-up food policy? The trials of governance, public policy and the food system
To address the policy malfunctions of the recent past and present, UK food policy needs to link policy areas that in the past have been dealt with in a disparate manner, and to draw on a new ecological public health approach. This will need a shift within the dominant trade liberalizationānational economic competitiveness paradigm that currently informs UK food policy, and the international levels of the EU and the WTO trade rules, and grants the large corporate players in the food system a favoured place at the policyāmaking tables. The contradictions of the food system have wrought crises that have engendered widespread institutional change at all levels of governance. Recent institutional reforms to UK food policy, such as the FSA and DEFRA, reflect a bounded approach to policy integration. Initiatives seeking a more integrated approach to food policy problems, such as the Social Exclusion Unitās access to shops report, and the Policy Commission on the Future of Food and Farming, can end up confined to a particular policy sector framed by particular interestsāa process of āpolicy confinementā. However, the UK can learn from the experience of Norway and Finland who have found their own routes to a more joinedāup approach to public health and a sustainable food supply by, for example, introducing a national food policy council to provide integrated policy advice. Also, at the local and community levels in the UK, policy alternatives are being advanced in an ad hoc fashion by local food initiatives. More structuralālevel interventions at the regional and local governance levels are also needed to address the social dimensions of a sustainable food suppl
A Laplace Transform Method for Molecular Mass Distribution Calculation from Rheometric Data
Polydisperse linear polymer melts can be microscopically described by the
tube model and fractal reptation dynamics, while on the macroscopic side the
generalized Maxwell model is capable of correctly displaying most of the
rheological behavior. In this paper, a Laplace transform method is derived and
different macroscopic starting points for molecular mass distribution
calculation are compared to a classical light scattering evaluation. The
underlying assumptions comprise the modern understanding on polymer dynamics in
entangled systems but can be stated in a mathematically generalized way. The
resulting method is very easy to use due to its mathematical structure and it
is capable of calculating multimodal molecular mass distributions of linear
polymer melts
Quantum critical behaviour of the plateau-insulator transition in the quantum Hall regime
High-field magnetotransport experiments provide an excellent tool to
investigate the plateau-insulator phase transition in the integral quantum Hall
effect. Here we review recent low-temperature high-field magnetotransport
studies carried out on several InGaAs/InP heterostructures and an InGaAs/GaAs
quantum well. We find that the longitudinal resistivity near the
critical filling factor ~ 0.5 follows the universal scaling law
, where . The critical exponent equals ,
which indicates that the plateau-insulator transition falls in a non-Fermi
liquid universality class.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Yamada
Conference LX on Research in High Magnetic Fields (August 16-19, 2006,
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