EU biofuels sustainability standards and certification systems - how to seek WTO-compatibility

Biofuels are increasingly being produced and consumed as a partial substitute to fossil-fuel based transport fuels in the fight against climate change. Sustainability criteria have been introduced recently by some countries to help ensure biofuels perform better than fossil fuels environmentally. Concerns have been expressed from various quarters that such criteria could represent World Trade Organisation (WTO)-incompatible barriers to trade. The present paper addresses two specific issues. First, it argues that biofuels can be expected to be treated like any other traded product under WTO law. Thus an importing country could not impose different trade measures dependent on whether the biofuel complied with its sustainability criteria. Second, the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement (TBTA) provides guidance on how to draw up criteria to help ensure WTO compatibility. This cannot guarantee compatibility, but it can help reduce significantly the chances of WTO Members bringing actions against a fellow Member’s biofuels sustainability criteria. There is little direct case law to draw upon but it is argued that, if the TBT guidance is followed, in the long term the absence of case law can be taken as an indication that the sustainability criteria established are WTO-compatible

State Transfer and Spin Measurement

We present a Hamiltonian that can be used for amplifying the signal from a quantum state, enabling the measurement of a macroscopic observable to determine the state of a single spin. We prove a general mapping between this Hamiltonian and an exchange Hamiltonian for arbitrary coupling strengths and local magnetic fields. This facilitates the use of existing schemes for perfect state transfer to give perfect amplification. We further prove a link between the evolution of this fixed Hamiltonian and classical Cellular Automata, thereby unifying previous approaches to this amplification task. Finally, we show how to use the new Hamiltonian for perfect state transfer in the, to date, unique scenario where total spin is not conserved during the evolution, and demonstrate that this yields a significantly different response in the presence of decoherence.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Using a smartphone app to identify signs of pre-eclampsia and/or worsening blood pressure

Background Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy complicate 10% of pregnancies and can have serious consequences. Aims To explore the experiences of pregnant women with a history of hypertension using an innovative home blood pressure monitoring device. Methods A qualitative study using a grounded theory approach was undertaken. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Women were given a blood pressure machine to monitor their blood pressure daily. They inserted their blood pressure results on a smartphone app and answered questions for signs of pre-eclampsia. Participants were followed up every 2 weeks. Findings The results suggested that women wanted a holistic care pathway for the management of hypertension in pregnancy. Three subcategories (‘empowerment’, ‘comparison of care pathways’ and ‘continuity of care’) were also identified. Conclusions The traditional management of hypertension in pregnancy is not holistic. The home blood pressure service was accepted by women and incorporated elements of holistic care but more is required to meet the standard of care that women need

Continuity of symplectically adjoint maps and the algebraic structure of Hadamard vacuum representations for quantum fields on curved spacetime

We derive for a pair of operators on a symplectic space which are adjoints of each other with respect to the symplectic form (that is, they are sympletically adjoint) that, if they are bounded for some scalar product on the symplectic space dominating the symplectic form, then they are bounded with respect to a one-parametric family of scalar products canonically associated with the initially given one, among them being its ``purification''. As a typical example we consider a scalar field on a globally hyperbolic spacetime governed by the Klein-Gordon equation; the classical system is described by a symplectic space and the temporal evolution by symplectomorphisms (which are symplectically adjoint to their inverses). A natural scalar product is that inducing the classical energy norm, and an application of the above result yields that its ``purification'' induces on the one-particle space of the quantized system a topology which coincides with that given by the two-point functions of quasifree Hadamard states. These findings will be shown to lead to new results concerning the structure of the local (von Neumann) observable-algebras in representations of quasifree Hadamard states of the Klein-Gordon field in an arbitrary globally hyperbolic spacetime, such as local definiteness, local primarity and Haag-duality (and also split- and type III_1-properties). A brief review of this circle of notions, as well as of properties of Hadamard states, forms part of the article.Comment: 42 pages, LaTeX. The Def. 3.3 was incomplete and this has been corrected. Several misprints have been removed. All results and proofs remain unchange