EU Policy-Making: Reform of the CAP and EU Trade in Beef & Dairy with Developing Countries

The present study is part of the PPLPI effort to identify significant political and institutional factors and processes that currently hinder or prevent the poor in developing countries from taking greater advantage of opportunities to benefit from livestock. The study examines the political economy of policy-making concerning trade in livestock and livestock products (LLPs) between the European Union (EU) and developing countries (DCs). The main objective is to determine and assess how relevant EU policy is made, including the role of key actors and forces both domestic and international. The political economy of relevant LLP trade-related issues are examined at four levels: (a) the EU member state, (b) the European Union itself, (c) the international trading system, and (d) developing countries. Several issues cross, or are relevant to, the different levels of analysis. A related objective is to identify "entry points" and provide strategic recommendations aimed at achieving positive change. Two livestock commodities, beef and dairy, were selected as central to the study. The EU is a prodigious producer of livestock and livestock products, and it plays a major role in international trade in LLPs. EU subsidies and trade barriers have been the subject of intense criticism by some European Union member states, developed and developing country trading partners, international organizations, academics, advocacy NGOs and others.European Union, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Policy Making, Trade, Developing Countries, Livestock, Beef, Dairy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

Blanche Armwood of Tampa and the Strategy of Interracial Cooperation

Blanche Armwood was born in Tampa on January 3, 1890, into a well-established middle-class black family. Her maternal grandfather, Adam Holloman, had been appointed in 1875 to the Hillsborough County Commission by then-Governor Marcellus L. Stearns. That same year he purchased four parcels of land which totalled 123 acres. Her great uncle, John Armwood, had been a negotiator between the Seminoles and white settlers on the southern Florida frontier. He also became an early landowner when he successfully homesteaded 159 acres in Hillsborough County. Her father, Levin Armwood, was Tampa’s first black policeman and subsequently served as county deputy sheriff. He and Blanche’s brother, Walter, jointly owned and operated the Gem, which was for many years Tampa’s only black drugstore. Walter Armwood also held positions as professor at Bethune-Cookman College and, during World War I, as Florida state supervisor for the U.S. Bureau of Negro Economics. One of her sisters, Idela Street, became a licensed businesswoman in Tampa in 1910. Blanche matriculated from St. Peter Claver Catholic School, Tampa’s best school for blacks at the time, at the age of twelve. She then passed the Florida State Uniform Teachers Examination that same year. Enrolling immediately at Spelman Institute in Atlanta, she graduated at age 16 with a degree in English and Latin.1 During the next seven years she taught in the Tampa public schools. During those early years she developed a deep and lasting concern for the social questions which her education and experiences raised in her

The relation of socioeconomic and scholastic aptitude variants to academic achievement for males and females at third and fifth grades

To determine the relation of socioeconomic and scholastic aptitude variants to academic achievement, data were collected from 332 elementary students in a small midwestern city. Independent variables included group aptitude test scores from third grade and fifth grade administrations, sex of subjects, family socioeconomic status (SES) based on parental occupation, and school of attendance (Title I versus Nontitle I). Dependent variables included group achievement test scores from third and fifth grade administrations and teacher grades for Reading and Math at fifth grade. Group aptitude indices included total aptitude scores and the difference between verbal and nonverbal aptitude scores. The study was designed to examine: (a) whether achievement patterns were the same for males and females when different levels of SES, total aptitude, and differences between verbal and nonverbal aptitude were considered; (b) whether similar results would be found at third and fifth grades and across various achievement measures (i.e., achievement subtests and teacher grades at fifth grade; and (c) whether SES distinctions based on family characteristics versus more general sociological characteristics (i.e., school of attendance) provided similar information about a student\u27s probable level of academic achievement. In general, the data support achievement differences between males and females based on the interaction between total aptitude and verbal-nonverbal discrepancies. The contrast between high verbal and high nonverbal students was most pronounced for females with low to average total aptitude scores at third grade and for low total aptitude females again at fifth grade. A moderate degree of similarity was found between third and fifth grade results. Little similarity was found between achievement test performance and teacher grades at fifth grade. The variables of SES, total aptitude, and difference score accounted for approximately twice the variance in Reading Total and Math Total as in Reading Grade and Math Grade. The measurement of achievement based on SES and school were similar; with total aptitude partialled out, there was a differential effect by sex. Females were more sensitive to quality of school while males were more sensitive to quality of home

Improving the Security of United States Elections with Robust Optimization

For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test deck of ballots into each voting machine and confirming the machine produces the expected vote total for each candidate. We bring a scientific perspective to LAT by introducing the first formal approach to designing test decks with rigorous security guarantees. Specifically, our approach employs robust optimization to find test decks that are guaranteed to detect any voting machine misconfiguration that would cause votes to be swapped across candidates. Out of all the test decks with this security guarantee, our robust optimization problem yields the test deck with the minimum number of ballots, thereby minimizing implementation costs for election officials. To facilitate deployment at scale, we develop a practically efficient exact algorithm for solving our robust optimization problems based on the cutting plane method. In partnership with the Michigan Bureau of Elections, we retrospectively applied our approach to all 6928 ballot styles from Michigan's November 2022 general election; this retrospective study reveals that the test decks with rigorous security guarantees obtained by our approach require, on average, only 1.2% more ballots than current practice. Our approach has since been piloted in real-world elections by the Michigan Bureau of Elections as a low-cost way to improve election security and increase public trust in democratic institutions

TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting. In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201

Evaluation of Biochemical Soil Additive Vineyard Study

This item is part of the Agricultural Experiment Station archive. It was digitized from a physical copy provided by the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information, please email CALS Publications at [email protected]