Measuring your Garden Footprint

The work reports on a Garden Organic (working name of Henry Doubleday Research Association, Coventry UK) members experiment in 2007. Garden Organic members were surveyed with a detailed paper questionnaire to calculate an average gardening footprint of committed (self-selected) organic gardeners in the UK. This was used to develop a garden footprinting methodology and to create a benchmark of committed organic gardening in the UK. This was then compared to commerical orangic growing and to other household activities with their respective footprint and potential for improvement. Summary findings: (116 responses 85% reponse rate). o The average UK food and drink ecological footprint is around 1.4 gha/ha o About a quarter of this (25% =0.35 gha/ha) is due to fruit and vegetable production and consumption o Our members taking part in this survey produced about half their own with an average ecological footprint for their gardening activities of 0.15gha/ha o This equates to a ‘saving’ of around 0.02 gha/ha, or a saving of 13% on the average UK footprint attributable to fruit and vegetables o This equates to about a 6% savings in total food and drink footprint which is on a par with double glazing, replacing an old boiler or reduced car use o Our members could take measures to reduce their gardening footprint by: - buying ‘good quality’ tools that last a long time - using manual tools where possible - buying ‘good quality’ power tools and keeping them well maintained to reduce relative fuel consumption and embedded energy costs - by being wary of substituting long ‘food chains’ for long ‘supply chains’ of products that they use in their gardens - by trying to close nutrient cycles; e.g. producing amendments at home (e.g. comfrey), fixing N in situ (e.g. green manures), composting biodegradable materials - using protected cropping only where necessary and in an ‘environmentally friendly way’ e.g. reuse of materials, second hand strucutures etc. - reducing fridge and/or freezer use; e.g. turning them off when not in use and buying new A++-rated energy-efficient appliances o It is still uncertain what positive contributions waste and recycling can make in reducing gardening footprint as some of the issues are quite complex. Many are the subject of ongoing research. o Producing food at home leads to other ecologically efficient habits as witnessed by the low overall ecological and carbon footprints of our members. o It is important to realise that as you reduce your personal footprint the proportion due to services and infrastructure spent on your behalf becomes much more important. Solutions to this are likely to be collective and political. Many are likely to revolve around community based activities

The effect of organic amendments on clubroot (Plasmodiophora brassicae)

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Clubroot (Plasmodiophora brassicae) is an important disease of organic brassica crops. Organic soil amendments were added at realistic rates and times to infested organic soil in pot trials in order to evaluate their effect on the disease. Both chitin and straw amendments reduced disease incidence compared to other amendments but straw also reduced plant vigour

Maximally Atomic Languages

The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We introduce a new class of regular languages, called the maximally atomic languages, consisting of all languages meeting these bounds. We prove the following result: If L is a regular language of quotient complexity n and G is the subgroup of permutations in the transition semigroup T of the minimal DFA of L, then L is maximally atomic if and only if G is transitive on k-subsets of 1,...,n for 0 <= k <= n and T contains a transformation of rank n-1.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527

Maximal Syntactic Complexity of Regular Languages Implies Maximal Quotient Complexities of Atoms

We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states induced by non-empty words in the minimal deterministic finite automaton accepting the language. If the language has n left quotients (its minimal automaton has n states), then its syntactic complexity is at most n^n and this bound is tight. The second measure consists of the quotient (state) complexities of the atoms of the language, where atoms are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients. A regular language has at most 2^n atoms and this bound is tight. The maximal quotient complexity of any atom with r complemented quotients is 2^n-1, if r=0 or r=n, and 1+\sum_{k=1}^{r} \sum_{h=k+1}^{k+n-r} \binom{h}{n} \binom{k}{h}, otherwise. We prove that if a language has maximal syntactic complexity, then it has 2^n atoms and each atom has maximal quotient complexity, but the converse is false.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

On the omega-limit sets of tent maps

For a continuous map f on a compact metric space (X,d), a subset D of X is internally chain transitive if for every x and y in D and every delta > 0 there is a sequence of points {x=x_0,x_1, ...,x_n=y} such that d(f(x_i),x_{i+1}) < delta for i=0,1, ...,n-1. It is known that every omega-limit set is internally chain transitive; in earlier work it was shown that for X a shift of finite type, a closed subset D of X is internally chain transitive if and only if D is an omega-limit set for some point in X, and that the same is also true for the tent map with slope equal to 2. In this paper, we prove that for tent maps whose critical point c=1/2 is periodic, every closed, internally chain transitive set is necessarily an omega-limit set. Furthermore, we show that there are at least countably many tent maps with non-recurrent critical point for which there is a closed, internally chain transitive set which is not an omega-limit set. Together, these results lead us to conjecture that for those tent maps with shadowing (or pseudo-orbit tracing), the omega-limit sets are precisely those sets having internal chain transitivity.Comment: 17 page

The use of mixed species cropping to manage pests and diseases – theory and practice

This paper was presented at the UK organic research 2002 on behalf of colloquium of Organic Researchers (COR). Mixed species cropping is often perceived as a viable tool to increase on-farm biodiversity in organic agriculture and is a potentially important component of any sustainable cropping system. Apart from increasing total farm productivity, mixed species cropping can bring many important benefits such as improvement of soil fertility management and suppression of pests and/or diseases. In this sense it can be seen as performing different eco-services in the farm system. This paper discusses mixed cropping in this context while focusing on its potential and actual use as a tool to manage pests and diseases in organic farming systems

Democracy and Legitimacy in the Shadow of Purposive Competence

This article argues that the way EU competences are defined plays an important role in the social legitimacy problems of the EU. The fact that its powers are purposive compels the EU to privilege narrow functional goals and act in a highly focussed way. This has the consequence that politics cannot be meaningful within the EU, since essential choices of direction are pre-empted. It also has the consequence that EU law is over-instrumental and lacks expressive qualities, alienating the public. Now that EU law is so broad, the same defects are being imposed increasingly on Member States. Without another form of conferred power the legitimacy of the EU, and of law and government in Europe, will be increasingly undermined. The constitutional DNA which has been a functional success for Europe may also be its political nemesis