Who is coming from Vanuatu to New Zealand under the new Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) program?

New Zealand’s new Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) program allows workers from the Pacific Islands to come to New Zealand for up to seven months to work in the horticulture and viticulture industries. One of the explicit objectives of the program is to encourage economic development in the Pacific. In this paper we report on the results of a baseline survey taken in Vanuatu, which allows us to examine who wants to participate in the program, and who is selected amongst those interested. We find the main participants are males in their late 20s to early 40s, most of whom are married and have children. Most workers are subsistence farmers in Vanuatu and have not completed more than 10 years of schooling. Such workers would be unlikely to be accepted under existing migration channels. Nevertheless, we find RSE workers from Vanuatu to come from wealthier households, and have better English literacy and health than individuals not applying for the program. Lack of knowledge about the policy and the costs of applying appear to be the main barriers preventing poorer individuals applying

Analysing Linkages between Strategy, Performance, Management Structure and Culture in the Spanish Fresh Produce Industry

This article reports the results of an industry-level study that seeks to identify empirical regularities between firm strategy, management style, organisational structure and performance in the Spanish fresh fruit and vegetable (fresh produce) industry using strategic group analysis. Groups were formed from key dimensions reflecting firms' strategic orientations. Performance levels did not differ systematically between strategic groups, but performance was found to be influenced by the alignment between entrepreneurial culture and organisational structure. A move towards greater flexibility and/or adopting an entrepreneurial style are both likely to contribute to an improvement in the overall performance of the firm.Strategic groups, Business strategy, Management structure, Fresh, Agribusiness, Crop Production/Industries,

Black hole formation from a null fluid in extended Palatini gravity

We study the formation and perturbation of black holes by null fluxes of neutral matter in a quadratic extension of General Relativity formulated a la Palatini. Working in a spherically symmetric space-time, we obtain an exact analytical solution for the metric that extends the usual Vaidya-type solution to this type of theories. We find that the resulting space-time is formally that of a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole but with an effective charge term carrying the wrong sign in front of it. This effective charge is directly related to the luminosity function of the radiation stream. When the ingoing flux vanishes, the charge term disappears and the space-time relaxes to that of a Schwarzschild black hole. We provide two examples that illustrate the formation of a black hole from Minkowski space and the perturbation by a finite pulse of radiation of an existing Schwarzschild black hole.Comment: 8 pages, double column (revtex4-1), 4 figure

Optical absorption of divalent metal tungstates: Correlation between the band-gap energy and the cation ionic radius

We have carried out optical-absorption and reflectance measurements at room temperature in single crystals of AWO4 tungstates (A = Ba, Ca, Cd, Cu, Pb, Sr, and Zn). From the experimental results their band-gap energy has been determined to be 5.26 eV (BaWO4), 5.08 eV (SrWO4), 4.94 eV (CaWO4), 4.15 eV (CdWO4), 3.9-4.4 eV (ZnWO4), 3.8-4.2 eV (PbWO4), and 2.3 eV (CuWO4). The results are discussed in terms of the electronic structure of the studied tungstates. It has been found that those compounds where only the s electron states of the A2+ cation hybridize with the O 2p and W 5d states (e.g BaWO4) have larger band-gap energies than those where also p, d, and f states of the A2+ cation contribute to the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band (e.g. PbWO4). The results are of importance in view of the large discrepancies existent in prevoiusly published data.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Real space mapping of topological invariants using artificial neural networks

Topological invariants allow to characterize Hamiltonians, predicting the existence of topologically protected in-gap modes. Those invariants can be computed by tracing the evolution of the occupied wavefunctions under twisted boundary conditions. However, those procedures do not allow to calculate a topological invariant by evaluating the system locally, and thus require information about the wavefunctions in the whole system. Here we show that artificial neural networks can be trained to identify the topological order by evaluating a local projection of the density matrix. We demonstrate this for two different models, a 1-D topological superconductor and a 2-D quantum anomalous Hall state, both with spatially modulated parameters. Our neural network correctly identifies the different topological domains in real space, predicting the location of in-gap states. By combining a neural network with a calculation of the electronic states that uses the Kernel Polynomial Method, we show that the local evaluation of the invariant can be carried out by evaluating a local quantity, in particular for systems without translational symmetry consisting of tens of thousands of atoms. Our results show that supervised learning is an efficient methodology to characterize the local topology of a system.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Dynamical generation of wormholes with charged fluids in quadratic Palatini gravity

The dynamical generation of wormholes within an extension of General Relativity (GR) containing (Planck's scale-suppressed) Ricci-squared terms is considered. The theory is formulated assuming the metric and connection to be independent (Palatini formalism) and is probed using a charged null fluid as a matter source. This has the following effect: starting from Minkowski space, when the flux is active the metric becomes a charged Vaidya-type one, and once the flux is switched off the metric settles down into a static configuration such that far from the Planck scale the geometry is virtually indistinguishable from that of the standard Reissner-Nordstr\"om solution of GR. However, the innermost region undergoes significant changes, as the GR singularity is generically replaced by a wormhole structure. Such a structure becomes completely regular for a certain charge-to-mass ratio. Moreover, the nontrivial topology of the wormhole allows to define a charge in terms of lines of force trapped in the topology such that the density of lines flowing across the wormhole throat becomes a universal constant. To the light of our results we comment on the physical significance of curvature divergences in this theory and the topology change issue, which support the view that space-time could have a foam-like microstructure pervaded by wormholes generated by quantum gravitational effects.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, revtex4-1 style. New content added on section VI. Other minor corrections introduced. Final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Frictions, cracks and micro-resistances: physical activity and sport as strategies to dignify imprisoned women

Discipline and control are key concepts within industrial and capitalist societies. In this context, prisons are a warning tool about the consequences of non-conformity [Foucault, M., 1995. Discipline and Punish: The birth of Prison. NY: Vintage Books]. As a result, punitive power is used as a corrective technique to transform prisoners into docile and useful citizen. However, power in prison is no static and inmates can create various strategies of resistance. The aim of this research is to understand how physical activity and sport are used by incarcerated women to confront social control and negotiate power relations. Underpinned within a critical feminist epistemology, we interviewed 16 women about their prison sports experience. According to the interviewees, physical activity and sport helped them to cope with the sentence while it was a useful tool confronting and negotiating the patriarchal punitive power. The women pointed out that the prison did not fully subdue them. Also, they highlighted their abilities to minimally destabilize the prison order. This enabled them to regain some autonomy and identity, while opposing to the total institution. Engaging in physical practices enabled incarcerated women to create small spaces of freedom and frictions within a limiting a prohibitive prison environmen

Complementary effects of species abundances and ecological neighborhood on the occurrence of fruit-frugivore interactions

Species interactions are traditionally seen as the outcome of both ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. Among them, the two most frequently studied are the neutral role of species abundances in determining encounter probability and the deterministic role of species identity (traits and evolutionary history) in determining the compatibility of interacting species. Nevertheless, the occurrence of pairwise interactions also depends on the spatio-temporal context imposed by the ecological neighborhood (i.e., the indirect effect of other local species sharing traits and interaction potential with the focal ones). Although a few studies have begun to examine neighborhood effects on community interactions, these have not incorporated neighborhood structure as a complementary driver of pairwise interactions within an integrative approach. Here we describe the spatial structure of pairwise interactions between three fleshy-fruited tree species and six frugivorous thrush species within the same locality of the Cantabrian Range (Iberian Peninsula). Using a spatio-temporally fine-grained dataset sampled during 3 years, we aimed to detect spatial patterns of interactions and to evaluate their concordance across years. We also evaluated the simultaneous roles played by species abundance, species identity and the ecological neighborhood in determining the pairwise interaction frequencies based on fruit removal. Our results showed that the abundances of fruit and bird species involved in plant-frugivore interactions, and the spatial patterns of these interactions, varied among years, and this was mainly due to different fruiting landscapes responding to masting events of distinct plant species. Despite high interannual differences in species abundances and pairwise interaction frequencies, the main mechanisms underpinning the occurrence of pairwise interactions remained constant. Most of the variability in pairwise interactions was always explained by interacting fruit and bird species' abundances. Ecological neighborhood, characterized as the net quantity of forest cover, heterospecific fruit crops, and heterospecific bird abundances in the immediate surroundings, also affected pairwise interaction frequency through its indirect effects on the abundance of interacting bird species. Our results highlight the prevalence of neutral forces in highly generalized plant-frugivore assemblages as well as the influence of indirect interactions (competition and/or facilitation with other local species) as another important driver to consider when predicting pairwise interactions

Blurred Lines Between Competition and Parasitism

Accurately describing the ecological relationships between species is more than mere semantics-doing so has profound practical and applied implications, not the least of which is that inaccurate descriptions can lead to fundamentally incorrect predicted outcomes of community composition and functioning. Accurate ecological classifications are particularly important in the context of global change, where species interactions can change rapidly following shifts in species composition. Here, we argue that many common ecological interactions-particularly competition and parasitism-can be easily confused and that we often lack empirical evidence for the full reciprocal interaction among species. To make our case and to propose a theoretical framework for addressing this problem, we use the interactions between lianas and trees, whose outcomes have myriad implications for the ecology and conservation of tropical forests (e.g., Schnitzer et al. 2015)