Cultivating Sustainable Coffee: Persistent Paradoxes

This chapter discusses the relationship and interconnections among changing the livelihoods of farmers, initiatives for sustainable coffee, and the production of shade-grown coffee. It examines the advantages and opportunities for farmers and producers engaged in coffee certification and diversification programs. The role of Fair Trade and organic networks in creating awareness of biodiversity conservation, the social and environment costs of coffee systems, and the need for supporting small farmers are also discussed. The methods to increase accountability and improve the efficiency of coffee cooperatives are presented in this chapter, as are the importance of understanding the sustainability initiatives and their implications for the regulators, along with the use of land patterns for coffee cultivation

Bangor: Its Points of Interest and Its Representative business men; including an historical sketch of Brewer

Introduction It is less than 130 years since the first permanent settlement bv white men was made upon the banks of the Penobscot, or long after towns had heen established in other parts of the present State of Maine, very few of which possesed natural advantages comparable with those offered along the valley of Maine\u27s noblest river, but these advantages. although appreciated to some extent by the English colonists in this region, were neutralized so far as they were concerned by the fact that the French held absolute and almost undisputed sway over the Penobscot country and would have quickly destroyed any English settlement in that section. The seventeenth century had barely opened when the French made their first appearance on the Penobscot, for they arrived as early as 1603, and subsequently made frequent visits, mainly for the purpose of establishing and extending trade relations with the Indians, with whom they were on the most amicable terms. The Penobscot Indians belonged to the famous Tarratine tribe, and as regards intelligence, knowledge, honor, skill and industry were far above the average and had reached a degree of civilization paralleled by but very few other Indian tribes in the country. Hence they fully appreciated the advantages to he gained by trading with the French, and not only allowed them to traverse the country unmolested, but welcomed their coming and honorably fulfilled all trade and other agreements made with them.https://digicom.bpl.lib.me.us/books_pubs/1203/thumbnail.jp

Addressing retention and completion in MOOCs - a student-centric design approach

The recent development of massively open online courses (MOOCs) has led to a plethora of courses being offered to the general public, as students, but these have had extreme issues of retention and completion with MOOCs typically returning less than 10% of students completing the course. As part of the dCCDFLITE EU project, the authors developed a MOOC on entrepreneurship and innovation, highlighting distributed concurrent design (dCCD) and the Osterwalder Canvas as tools for student use. The course was designed to be student-centric, expecting that students would work through the learning materials independently and then form in groups, using CCD, to develop their business plans. However, the experience of this MOOC, presented statistically in this paper, was no different from the norm, which leads the authors to consider whether we require new pedagogical models for this type of online learning, and how we should measure success in such environments

Worker power, trade union strategy, and international connections: dockworker unionism in Colombia and Chile

This article analyzes the constitution of dockworkers’ power and its impact on trade union strategy in recent labor disputes in Chile and Colombia. Dockworkers’ strategic location in the economies of both countries would predict a high degree of shop-floor power among both groups. In practice, however, Colombian dock-workers had far less shop-floor power than their Chilean counterparts, as a result of mitigating social and political factors. Consequently, they developed a strategy this study terms human rights unionism, relying on external allies and lawsuits for leverage, rather than shop-floor action. Dockworkers in Chile, by contrast, adopted a strategy termed class struggle unionism, relying on nationally and internationally coordinated shop-floor action. This article therefore proposes an expanded model of workers’ structural power, incorporating the roles of state and society to better account for power differentials and divergent strategic pathways among workers who share a common position in the economic system

Life on the line: exploring high-performance practices from an employee perspective

Through a case-based approach, this study addresses the call for employee-focused research to help us understand whether the high-performance causal chain is the result of discretionary effort or management control and work intensification. Findings highlight the role of the manager and workplace relationships and emphasise the need for 'good practice'

A non-hybrid method for the PDF equations of turbulent flows on unstructured grids

In probability density function (PDF) methods of turbulent flows, the joint PDF of several flow variables is computed by numerically integrating a system of stochastic differential equations for Lagrangian particles. A set of parallel algorithms is proposed to provide an efficient solution of the PDF transport equation, modeling the joint PDF of turbulent velocity, frequency and concentration of a passive scalar in geometrically complex configurations. An unstructured Eulerian grid is employed to extract Eulerian statistics, to solve for quantities represented at fixed locations of the domain (e.g. the mean pressure) and to track particles. All three aspects regarding the grid make use of the finite element method (FEM) employing the simplest linear FEM shape functions. To model the small-scale mixing of the transported scalar, the interaction by exchange with the conditional mean model is adopted. An adaptive algorithm that computes the velocity-conditioned scalar mean is proposed that homogenizes the statistical error over the sample space with no assumption on the shape of the underlying velocity PDF. Compared to other hybrid particle-in-cell approaches for the PDF equations, the current methodology is consistent without the need for consistency conditions. The algorithm is tested by computing the dispersion of passive scalars released from concentrated sources in two different turbulent flows: the fully developed turbulent channel flow and a street canyon (or cavity) flow. Algorithmic details on estimating conditional and unconditional statistics, particle tracking and particle-number control are presented in detail. Relevant aspects of performance and parallelism on cache-based shared memory machines are discussed.Comment: Accepted in Journal of Computational Physics, Feb. 20, 200

Early modern intertextuality: post structuralism, narrative systems, and 'A midsummer night's dream'

Central to both early modern critical study and the theory of intertextuality are concepts such as the plurality of discourse, the mutually informing relationship between cultural ideologies and texts, and the instability of texts. Following revised critical approaches, this essay argues that there is potential in the direct application and exploration of the theory of intertextuality in early modern literature, particularly in the sense of engagement with and the extensive refiguring of elements from available narrative systems including classical mythology, folklore, and contemporary continental writing through allegory, allusion and translation. Critical consideration of reading, creative imitation, and interpretative variety are central to both fields. This essay argues that these central aspects of early modern creative writing constitute a valid application of intertextual theory, which can be used to generate detailed and multilayered critical readings. It outlines an understanding of intertextuality, demonstrates how the theory is illustrated both in the period and in inherited classical textual theory, and offers a brief applied case study, reading Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) as an overtly intertextual text

Analytical shear and flexion of Einasto dark matter haloes

N-body simulations predict that dark matter haloes are described by specific density profiles on both galactic- and cluster-sized scales. Weak gravitational lensing through the measurements of their first and second order properties, shear and flexion, is a powerful observational tool for investigating the true shape of these profiles. One of the three-parameter density profiles recently favoured in the description of dark matter haloes is the Einasto profile. We present exact expressions for the shear and the first and second flexions of Einasto dark matter haloes derived using a Mellin-transform formalism in terms of the Fox H and Meijer G functions, that are valid for general values of the Einasto index. The resulting expressions can be written as series expansions that permit us to investigate the asymptotic behaviour of these quantities. Moreover, we compare the shear and flexion of the Einasto profile with those of different mass profiles including the singular isothermal sphere, the Navarro-Frenk-White profile, and the S\'ersic profile. We investigate the concentration and index dependences of the Einasto profile, finding that the shear and second flexion could be used to determine the halo concentration, whilst for the Einasto index the shear and first and second flexions may be employed. We also provide simplified expressions for the weak lensing properties and other lensing quantities in terms of the generalized hypergeometric function.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485-1635

Published version of article deposited in accordance with Sherpa Romeo guidelines. © University of Chicago Press, 2010publication-status: AcceptedNot long after Shakespeare’s birth (1564) the last witnesses to the reign of Richard III (1483-85) would have reached the end of their lives. Richard III (c. 1592) occupies a distinctive historical moment in relation to its subject – a period after the extinction of living memory, but still within the horizon of communicative memory, the period in which stories and recollections may be transmitted across multiple generations. This essay explores how memories and “postmemories” of Richard’s reign were preserved, transmitted and transformed over the course of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. Whilst reflecting the powerful influence of emerging contexts including the Reformation and, ultimately, Shakespeare’s play, these memories remained distinct from and sometimes at odds with textual history. They survived because they offered their bearers a resource for interpreting and resisting the predicaments of the present, from the problem of tyranny to the legacies of the Reformation

A Comparison of Two Shallow Water Models with Non-Conforming Adaptive Grids: classical tests

In an effort to study the applicability of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques to atmospheric models an interpolation-based spectral element shallow water model on a cubed-sphere grid is compared to a block-structured finite volume method in latitude-longitude geometry. Both models utilize a non-conforming adaptation approach which doubles the resolution at fine-coarse mesh interfaces. The underlying AMR libraries are quad-tree based and ensure that neighboring regions can only differ by one refinement level. The models are compared via selected test cases from a standard test suite for the shallow water equations. They include the advection of a cosine bell, a steady-state geostrophic flow, a flow over an idealized mountain and a Rossby-Haurwitz wave. Both static and dynamics adaptations are evaluated which reveal the strengths and weaknesses of the AMR techniques. Overall, the AMR simulations show that both models successfully place static and dynamic adaptations in local regions without requiring a fine grid in the global domain. The adaptive grids reliably track features of interests without visible distortions or noise at mesh interfaces. Simple threshold adaptation criteria for the geopotential height and the relative vorticity are assessed.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, preprin