Combining Agri-Environment Schemes For Environmental And Financial Benefit - Tir Gofal And Organic Farming

Peter Davies farms 750 acres in the Vale of Glamorgan. He has a suckler herd and sheep, with arable crops for sale off the farm and for livestock feed. The farm began conversion in 1999 and most of it will finish in 2001. It was accepted into the Tir Gofal whole farm agri-environment scheme in 2000. In this interview with Will John he explains how the two schemes work together. He has researched and planned the changes carefully and expects his farm enterprise to benefit in the long term

QuestionBuddy – A collaborative question search and play portal.

Generally itembanks are inaccessible to students. Current use of itembanks focus on the teacher as having responsibility to organise questions (place them in pools, associate them with course content) and make them available/deliver them to students. This limits students to the teachers perspective and to the questions that the teacher has made available. As the practice of itembanking increases it may be appropriate to encourage students to use questions from pools not directly prepared by their teacher. A mechanism for searching across itembanks and sharing recommendations with peers would be of help in facilitating this. We describe QuestionBuddy, a collaborative filter based question portal for students, built to study student usage of, and attitudes to, such a system

Call to arms for shaking up social sciences relies on false premise that science alone can solve all social problems.

A new form of ‘interdisciplinarity’ may be emerging but has so far failed to devote equal demands on the natural sciences, as well as on the social sciences. Will Davies responds to the calls for a social science shake-up by questioning the status of the social sciences in 2014 as something other than mere understudies to the natural sciences. The shared terrain of the two, he argues, seems to rest on various acts of forgetting on the part of the social sciences, but no acts of learning on the part of the natural sciences

Color Constancy, Illumination, and Matching

Colour constancy is a foundational and yet puzzling phenomenon. Standard appearance invariantism is threatened by the psychophysical matching argument, which is taken to favour variantism. This argument, however, is inconclusive. The data at best support a pluralist view: colour constancy is sometimes variantist, sometimes invariantist. I add another potential explanation of these data, complex invariantism, which adopts an atypical six-dimensional model of colour appearance. Finally I prospect for a unifying conception of constancy among two neglected notions: discriminatory colour constancy and relational colour constancy. The former arguably marks a common core capacity that is present across widely differing viewing contexts

Succession Economics: Sustaining prosperity beyond death

Contemporary economic and ecological politics frequently revolves around a fundamental problem, of what has been left to us by previous generations, and what we will leave to our successors. This has grave collective, indeed planetary, dimensions where climate change is concerned. However, as economic outcomes are increasingly determined by the power of assets and rents, so capitalist societies are witnessing a revival of dynastic forms of intergenerational advantage and disadvantage, where families and defensive legal instruments (such as trusts) sustain wealth privately. The rising influence of inherited wealth since the 1970s means that liberal ideals of ‘meritocracy’ and rewards for effort and innovation become harder to credit. The paper considers these themes via two literatures. Firstly, by reflecting on the question of a sustained or ‘immortal’ common world, as explored in the work of theorists such as Honig and Arendt. Secondly, by looking at development of private wealth and its transmission beyond the lifespan, as explored by Piketty and others. By reading these literatures together, we confront a core existential problem of contemporary capitalism: the extent to which the need to sustain the common world has become channeled into an instinct to sustain private property

Anger Fast & Slow: Mediations of justice and violence in the Age of Populism

The rise of populist political rhetoric and mobilisation, together with a conflict-riven digital public sphere, has generated growing interest in anger as a central emotion in politics. Anger has long been recognised as a powerful driver of political action and resistance, by feminist scholars amongst others, while political philosophers have reflected on the relationship of anger to ethical judgement since Aristotle. This article seeks to differentiate between two different ideal types of anger, in order to illuminate the status of anger in contemporary populist politics and rhetoric. Firstly, there is anger that arises in an automatic, pre-conscious fashion, as a somatic, reactive and performative way, to an extent that potentially spirals into violence. Secondly, there is anger that builds up over time in response to perceived injustice, potentially generating melancholia and ressentiment. Borrowing Kahneman’s dualism, the article refers to these as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ anger, and deploys the distinction to understand how the two inter-act. In the hands of the demagogue or troll, ‘fast anger’ can be deployed to focus all energies on the present, so as to briefly annihilate the past and the ‘slow anger’ that has been deposited there. And yet only by combining the conscious reflection of memory with the embodied response of action can anger ever be meaningfully sated in politics

The inscrutability of colour similarity

This paper presents a new response to the colour similarity argument, an argument that many people take to pose the greatest threat to colour physicalism. The colour similarity argument assumes that if colour physicalism is true, then colour similarities should be scrutable under standard physical descriptions of surface reflectance properties such as their spectral reflectance curves. Given this assumption, our evident failure to find such similarities at the reducing level seemingly proves fatal to colour physicalism. I argue that we should dispense with this assumption, and thus endorse the inscrutability of colour similarity. This strategy is inspired by parallels between the colour similarity argument and the explanatory gap between mind and body made vivid by Jackson’s (1986) knowledge argument, and in particular by type-B physicalist responses to that argument. This inscrutability response is further motivated by cases in chemistry and biochemistry in which analogous scrutability theses fail to hold. Along the way, I present a challenge to standard formulations of the colour similarity argument based on the extreme context sensitivity of the similarity relation. Most presentations of the argument fail to control for such contextual variation, which raises the distinct possibility that the argument equivocates on the similarity relation across its premises. Although ultimately inconclusive, this context challenge forces a significant reformulation of the colour similarity argument, and highlights the need for much greater care in handling claims about colour similarity

The Revenge of Sovereignty on Government? The Release of Neoliberal Politics from Economics Post-2008

Liberal government, as analysed by Foucault, is a project of measured, utilitarian political activity, that takes ‘population’ as its object, dating back to the late seventeenth century. The rise of nationalism, authoritarianism and populism directly challenges this project, by seeking to re-introduce excessive, gratuitous and performative modes of power back into liberal societies. This article examines the relationship and tensions between government and sovereignty, so as to make sense of this apparent ‘revenge of sovereignty on government’. It argues that neoliberalism has been a crucial factor in the return of sovereignty as a ‘problem’ of contemporary societies. Neoliberalism tacitly generates new centres of sovereign power, which have become publicly visible since 2008, leading to a dramatic resurgence of discourses and claims to ‘sovereignty’