Cheese Makers are Always Women: Gendered Representations of Farm Life in the Agricultural Press

Drawing upon the 'Farmlife' pages of Farmer's Weekly, the most significant farming publication in the UK, this paper assesses the ways in which gender identities in farming are represented by its text and images. Lead articles from 1976 and 1996 issues of Farmlife are taken as the research focus to determine how representations have altered in line with restructuring of the agricultural industry. Reference is made to Connell's (1987) notions of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity to inform the analysis about the ways in which these gender identities are (re)produced through the British farming media. A simple typology is derived from the articles which assists in revealing a remarkable degree of consistency in the portrayal of gender identities over time. The findings augment evidence from international research suggesting that dominant gender identities within agriculture are being perpetuated through the farming media. The implications of this are highlighted and suggestions made for research with the consumers of these media products

Using remarkability to define coastal flooding thresholds.

Coastal flooding is increasingly common in many areas. However, the degree of inundation and associated disruption depend on local topography as well as the distribution of people, infrastructure and economic activity along the coast. Local measures of flooding that are comparable over large areas are difficult to obtain. Here we use the remarkability of flood events, measured by flood-related posts on social media, to estimate county-specific flood thresholds for shoreline counties along the east coast of the United States. While thresholds in most counties are statistically-indistinguishable from minor flood thresholds of nearby tide gauges, we find evidence that several areas experience noticeable flooding at tide heights lower than existing flood thresholds. These 22 counties include several major cities such as Miami, New York, and Boston, with a total population over 13 million. Our analysis implies that large populations might currently be exposed to nuisance flooding not identified via standard measures

On Gravitino properties in a Conformal Supergravity Model

In the context of a conformal Supergravity (SUGRA) model in the Einstein frame, in which the (next to) minimal supersymmetric standard model can embedded naturally to produce chaotic inflation scenarios, we study properties of gravitino in the cases where it is stable or unstable. In the latter case, we demonstrate that for large dilaton scale factors there is an enhanced magnitude of the gravitino width, when it decays to neutralino dark matter, as compared with the standard SUGRA case. In this context, we discuss the associated consequences as far as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constraints and avoidance of gravitino overproduction are concerned.Comment: 7 pages latex, two eps figures incorporate

Alternative Archaeological Representations within Virtual Worlds

Traditional VR methods allow the user to tour and view the virtual world from different perspectives. Increasingly, more interactive and adaptive worlds are being generated, potentially allowing the user to interact with and affect objects in the virtual world. We describe and compare four models of operation that allow the publisher to generate views, with the client manipulating and affecting specific objects in the world. We demonstrate these approaches through a problem in archaeological visualization

What is really in the economic partnership agreements for the Southern African region? A perspective from Botswana’s beef export markets

The signing of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and the African Caribbean Pacific (ACP) nations dominated the multilateral trade agenda in late 2007 and early 2008. While the Caribbean nations signed the full EPAs, some of the African countries only singed interim agreements with the EU and a number of West African countries chose not to sign any EPA. Using the case of Botswana’s export markets, especially in agriculture, it is argued that the interim Southern African Development Community (SADC) EPA, which was signed by Botswana and her neighbours, with the exception of South Africa, may have been economically sensible in protecting Botswana’s rural poor, at least in the short run. By tracing trade flows from the border to specifically poor sectors of the country, the importance of the beef exports sector to the poor and rural communities was found. The potential effects on the most significant exports of tariff bands associated with preferential agreements with the EU were found to be most beneficial in comparison to the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) and the South Africa-EU Trade Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA) tariff bands. But it is also argued that the EPA will most likely have far reaching long run costs on regional economic development and institutional integration, within the SADC and Southern African Customs Union (SACU).Botswana, economic partnership agreements, European Union, exports, beef,

Augmented Sustainability Measures for Scotland

We estimate and compare two empirical measures of the weak sustainability of an economy for the first time: the change in augmented green net national product (GNNP), and the interest on augmented genuine savings (GS). Yearly calculations are given for each measure for Scotland during 1992-99. Augmentation means including, using projections to 2020, production possibilities enabled by exogenous technical progress or changing terms of trade. In passing, we clarify the treatment of environmental expenditures in green accounting. The change in augmented GNNP and interest on augmented GS are both always positive, showing no sustainability problem for Scotland; but the former greatly exceeds the latter, showing an unresolved problem with the theorysustainability, Scotland, genuine savings, green NNP, augmentation

Monitoring Macroalgae in the Great Bay Estuary for 2014

Four more intertidal fixed transect sites were added to the long5term macroalgal monitoring array, resulting in a total of eight sites for the Great Bay Estuary. Monitoring results from 2014 show high levels of cover of nuisance green and red algae (Ulva and Gracilaria, respectively) at all sites except near the mouth of the Estuary. Seasonal sampling of algal cover confirmed earlier work that showed mid5summer accumulations of green algae (primarily Ulva)lactuca) were largely replaced in late summer and fall by red algae (two species of Graciliaria, one native and the other introduced). A determination of whether intertidal macroalgal populations are increasing over time will require a longer time series and would likely benefit from historical analysis of earlier collections of intertidal macroalgae. To this end, a method for analysis of historical photographs was developed

A Minimal Developmental Model Can Increase Evolvability in Soft Robots

Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over many generations (evolution). Much work has focused on instantiating learning or evolution in robots, but relatively little on development. Although many theories have been forwarded as to how development can aid evolution, it is difficult to isolate each such proposed mechanism. Thus, here we introduce a minimal yet embodied model of development: the body of the robot changes over its lifetime, yet growth is not influenced by the environment. We show that even this simple developmental model confers evolvability because it allows evolution to sweep over a larger range of body plans than an equivalent non-developmental system, and subsequent heterochronic mutations 'lock in' this body plan in more morphologically-static descendants. Future work will involve gradually complexifying the developmental model to determine when and how such added complexity increases evolvability