Organic-industrial complex or herbal remedy? A case near Seattle and Vancouver

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Organic conversion can help maintain property and lifestyle. But organic is not always local. Based on long-term contacts this poster notes market, global and policy implications of an American family farm which converted to organic herbs with a multinational partner. Is the family’s affiliation with corporate macro-actors the happy human face of globalisation? Or does it support Pollan’s (2001) warning that an ‘organic-industrial complex’ will dominate organic movements in the US, UK and world-wide

Q^2-Dependence of the Drell-Hearn-Gerasimov integral

The energy and four-momentum (Q^2) dependence of the photo-absorption cross section on the proton is calculated for helicity -1/2 and -3/2 states. An effective Lagrangian model is used, formulated in terms of meson and baryon degrees of freedom, which obeys crossing symmetry, unitarity, Lorentz and gauge invariance. The difference in the cross sections for the two helicity states, the Drell-Hearn-Gerasimov integral $I_{DHG}(Q^2)$, is evaluated at different $Q^2$. We find that at small momentum transfer the absolute value of $I_{DHG}(Q^2)$ first increases to reach a maximum at $Q^2 \approx 0.05 GeV^2$ before decreasing at higher $Q^2$.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, revte

Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research

Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures

Breeding for improved responsiveness to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in onion

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) play an important role in the uptake of nutrients and water from soil. Onions, Allium cepa L., are plants with a shallow root system. As a result, onion plants need a lot of fertiziler for their growth. Furthermore, onion plants are sensitive to drought. The aim of the current research project is to study the beneficial effect of mycorrhizal fungi on the growth and development of Allium species and to determine whether it is possible to improve onions for mycorrhizal responsiveness by means of breeding. Variation among Allium species and segregation observed in a interspecific tri-hybrid population indicate that selection and thus breeding for high responsiveness to AMF is possible