Survey of the Demands of End Users in Europe for Organic Market Data

Few European countries produce complete coverage of important market data, standardization is missing, and data are seldom comparable within one country over time and between countries. Furthermore, detailed information on specific commodities is missing. Many different data collection methods are currently used and the variety of agencies collecting data in the various European countries mean that gaining a European level overview of the quality of existing data is difficult. As part of the EU research project “OrganicDataNetwork”, a survey was carried out in 2012 to identify the needs and demands of end users of organic market data, and to find areas of information asymmetry. A further goal of the survey was to undertake an appraisal of the quality of the existing available data that is used. This contribution presents some of the highlights of the results, which will be published in full during 2013

Testing local-realism and macro-realism under generalized dichotomic measurements

Generalised quantum measurements with two outcomes are fully characterised by two real parameters, dubbed as sharpness parameter and biasedness parameter and they can be linked with different aspects of the experimental setup. It is known that precision of measurements, characterised by the sharpness parameter of the measurements, reduces the possibility of probing quantum features like violation of local-realism (LR) or macro-realism (MR). Here we investigate the effect of biasedness together with sharpness of measurement and find a trade-off between those two parameters in the context of probing violation of LR and MR. Interestingly we also find the above mentioned trade-off is more robust in the later case.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Quantum Zeno effect in the decay onto an unstable level

Under certain assumptions it is shown that the decay of level 2 of a three-level system onto level 1 is slowed down because of the further decay of level 1 onto level 0. It is argued that this phenomenon may be interpreted as a consequence of the quantum Zeno effect. The reason why this may be possible is that the second decay (or accompanying photon radiation) may be considered as a sign of the transition 2 -> 1 so that during the first transition the system is under continuous observation.Comment: 9 pages, LATE