Effects of organic and ‘low input’ production methods on food quality and safety

The intensification of agricultural production in the last century has resulted in a significant loss of biodiversity, environmental problems and associated societal costs. The use of shorter rotations or monocropping and high levels of mineral fertilisers, pesticides and crop growth regulators may also have had negative impacts on food quality and safety. To reverse the negative environmental and biodiversity impacts of agricultural intensification, a range of different ‘low input’ farming systems have been developed and are now supported by EU and government support schemes. A range of recent reviews concluded that switching to low input, integrated or organic farming practices results in significant environmental benefits and increased biodiversity in agro-ecosystems. Some recent studies also reported higher levels of nutritionally desirable compounds (e.g. vitamins, antioxidants, mineral nutrients) in foods from organic and ‘low input’ production systems compared to food from conventional systems. The increasing demand and current price premiums achieved by foods from low input and especially organic production systems were shown to be closely linked to consumer perceptions about nutritional and health benefits of such foods. However, there are other studies reporting no significant differences in composition between low input and conventional foods, or inconsistent results. There is currently a lack of (a) factorial studies, which allow the effect of individual production system components (e.g. rotation design, fertility management, crop health management, variety choice) on food composition to be assessed and (b) dietary intervention or cohort studies which compare the effect of consuming foods from different production systems on animal and/or human health. It is therefore currently not possible to draw overall conclusions about the effect of low input production on food quality and safety. This paper will (a) describe the range of organic and other ‘low input’ standards, certification and support systems currently used, (b) summarise the currently available information on effects of organic and other low input crop production systems on the environment, biodiversity and food quality, and (c) describe the methodologies and results from subproject 2 of the EU-funded Integrated project QualityLowInputFood. This project focused on improving our knowledge about the effect of organic and low input crop and livestock production systems on food quality and safety parameters

Narrowing Chevron’s Domain

Chevron deference has become increasingly controversial. Some Justices on the Supreme Court have stated that they would overrule Chevron, and others have urged that it be curtailed. If Chevron were merely modified rather than overturned, it is unclear what that modified Chevron would look like. This Article argues that the time has come to narrow Chevron’s domain by limiting Chevron deference to interpretations announced in rulemaking and not those announced in adjudication. Under the classic formulation of Chevron, a court should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory language. This formulation is grounded in the notion that Congress, at least implicitly, signals a preference for agency rather than judicial decisionmaking when it delegates broad policymaking discretion as part of charging an agency with implementing and administering a statute. In United States v. Mead Corp., the Supreme Court began defining what has come to be known as Chevron’s domain—holding that Congress did not intend courts to defer to every agency resolution of statutory ambiguity, but rather only to those articulated in agency actions that carry legal force and thus reflect the exercise of delegated power. As a consequence of the Mead Court’s analysis, courts typically defer under the Chevron standard to interpretations offered in notice-and-comment rulemakings and in formal adjudications, and apply the less deferential Skidmore standard in reviewing those advanced through less formal formats like interpretative rules and policy statements. Meanwhile, interpretations announced via informal adjudications represent a gray area for Mead’s analysis. With the benefit of hindsight, we believe that Mead did not go far enough in curtailing Chevron’s reach. Applying Chevron to interpretations announced through adjudication has proven problematic in practice and has fueled a great deal of the anti-Chevron criticism. Meanwhile, Chevron’s claim to stare decisis in the context of adjudications is surprisingly weak. Using a novel dataset of cases, this Article shows that the Supreme Court has applied Chevron only rarely in evaluating agency adjudications. We submit that this relative dearth of precedent is best explained by the fact that Chevron makes the most conceptual sense when applied to agency rulemakings. Accordingly, if the Court is looking for a way to address deference short of eliminating it, the soundest way to revisit Chevron is by narrowing its domain to exclude most if not all agency adjudications

The Future of Chevron Deference

Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka och få kunskap om förskollärarnas tankar kring pedagogisk dokumentation och reflektion i förskolan. Vår första frågeställning utgick från förskollärarnas åsikter om vad pedagogisk dokumentation hade för betydelse i verksamheten. Den andra och tredje frågeställningen inriktade sig på hur förskollärarna tolkade begreppet reflektion samt vad de ansåg att den hade för betydelse i förskolan. Den sista frågeställningen fokuserades på vilka erfarenheter förskollärarna hade av just reflektion i förskolan. Vi genomförde tio kvalitativa intervjuer i tre olika kommuner. Förskollärarna hade en ålder mellan 25-63 år och de avslutade förskollärarutbildningen vid olika tillfällen. Intervjuresultaten visade att det fanns möjligheter och svårigheter med både pedagogisk dokumentation och reflektion i förskolan. Pedagogiska dokumentationer möjliggjorde för att både barnens och pedagogernas synvinklar kunde lyftas fram. Det visade även den utveckling och lärande som förekom i verksamheten. Resultatet uppvisade också att förskollärarna hade olika uppfattningar om hur reflektioner skulle gå till. Informanterna var eniga om att det kunde synliggöra hela förskolans verksamhet. Förskollärarna hade däremot varierande erfarenheter kring hur reflektionen kunde ta form i förskolan

A New Look at the Axial Anomaly in Lattice QED with Wilson Fermions

By carrying out a systematic expansion of Feynman integrals in the lattice spacing, we show that the axial anomaly in the U(1) lattice gauge theory with Wilson fermions, as determined in one-loop order from an irrelevant lattice operator in the Ward identity, must necessarily be identical to that computed from the dimensionally regulated continuum Feynman integrals for the triangle diagrams.Comment: 1 figure, LaTeX, 18 page

Finite-Time Disentanglement via Spontaneous Emission

We show that under the influence of pure vacuum noise two entangled qubits become completely disentangled in a finite time, and in a specific example we find the time to be given by $\ln \Big(\frac{2 +\sqrt 2}{2}\Big)$ times the usual spontaneous lifetime.Comment: revtex, 4 pages, 2 figure

Further Validation of the Realness Scale: Are Celebrity Worshipers Unreal?

We administered the Realness Scale (RS), Celebrity Attitude Scale (CAS), and the modified Authentic Living Subscale (ALS) from the Authenticity Scale (AS) to undergraduate students from four American institutions of higher learning. We sought to further validate the RS by showing that it correlated positively with the ALS and negatively with the CAS. We also hypothesized that African Americans would score lower than Whites on the RS. Our results supported the first hypothesis, but we found only weak or non-existent support for the other two hypotheses. Discussion focused on reasons why our latter two hypotheses yielded mostly negative results and suggested improvements for future research

High-fidelity simulations of CdTe vapor deposition from a new bond-order potential-based molecular dynamics method

CdTe has been a special semiconductor for constructing the lowest-cost solar cells and the CdTe-based Cd1-xZnxTe alloy has been the leading semiconductor for radiation detection applications. The performance currently achieved for the materials, however, is still far below the theoretical expectations. This is because the property-limiting nanoscale defects that are easily formed during the growth of CdTe crystals are difficult to explore in experiments. Here we demonstrate the capability of a bond order potential-based molecular dynamics method for predicting the crystalline growth of CdTe films during vapor deposition simulations. Such a method may begin to enable defects generated during vapor deposition of CdTe crystals to be accurately explored

Long-range coupling and scalable architecture for superconducting flux qubits

Constructing a fault-tolerant quantum computer is a daunting task. Given any design, it is possible to determine the maximum error rate of each type of component that can be tolerated while still permitting arbitrarily large-scale quantum computation. It is an underappreciated fact that including an appropriately designed mechanism enabling long-range qubit coupling or transport substantially increases the maximum tolerable error rates of all components. With this thought in mind, we take the superconducting flux qubit coupling mechanism described in PRB 70, 140501 (2004) and extend it to allow approximately 500 MHz coupling of square flux qubits, 50 um a side, at a distance of up to several mm. This mechanism is then used as the basis of two scalable architectures for flux qubits taking into account crosstalk and fault-tolerant considerations such as permitting a universal set of logical gates, parallelism, measurement and initialization, and data mobility.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure

Strong "quantum" chaos in the global ballooning mode spectrum of three-dimensional plasmas

The spectrum of ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pressure-driven (ballooning) modes in strongly nonaxisymmetric toroidal systems is difficult to analyze numerically owing to the singular nature of ideal MHD caused by lack of an inherent scale length. In this paper, ideal MHD is regularized by using a $k$-space cutoff, making the ray tracing for the WKB ballooning formalism a chaotic Hamiltonian billiard problem. The minimum width of the toroidal Fourier spectrum needed for resolving toroidally localized ballooning modes with a global eigenvalue code is estimated from the Weyl formula. This phase-space-volume estimation method is applied to two stellarator cases.Comment: 4 pages typeset, including 2 figures. Paper accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Letter