No-till can reduce the risk of heat stress in wheat

Non-Peer ReviewedNo-till farming (NT) is increasing in the Canadian Prairies in recent years because of the economic and environment benefits and its potential to sequester atmospheric carbon into the soil. Because surface residue and stubble act as insulation and impedes the exchange rate of thermal energy between the soil and the atmosphere, lower root-zone temperatures in the NT fields compared with that in the conventionally tilled (CT) fields were widely observed in the spring. Some studies found that low temperatures under NT persisted to the mid-season or throughout the whole growing season. Little attention, however, has been paid to the impact of the cooling effect of NT on the grain yield of wheat. The objective of this study was to investigate if NT could alleviate heat stress and benefit yield

Ecosystem modeling: supermodel or coupling approach?

Non-Peer Reviewe

Can we predict the time of seedling emergence of spring wheat?

Non-Peer Reviewe

Foreign Policy and the Ideology of Post-ideology: The Case of Matteo Renzi’s Partito Democratico

The post-communist Italian Left has experienced a long phase of ideational misalignment between ideas placed at different levels, as a qualified discursive institutionalist approach demonstrates. Background public philosophies have often clashed with post-communist political ideology, while foreign policy programmes have often contradicted specific policies. Under the leadership of Matteo Renzi, however, the PD is now experiencing a moment of remarkable ideational consistency. Rather than being founded on entirely new premises, this new consensus folds old elements into new ones and shows all the defining traits of post-ideology. Yet, by espousing post-ideology, Renzi is making an ultimately ideological move whose limitations may soon start to show

Foreign policy and globalization theory: The case of Israel

Since the early 1990s, international relations has witnessed a stimulating debate on globalization. This debate laid the foundations for globalization theory (GT), providing the tools for an empirical examination of the globalization of multiple activities: from politics and organized violence, to finance, trade and production, through culture and environmental degradation. However, examination of what appear to be the best-known works on globalization reveals that foreign policy has been virtually excluded from GT. In this context, based on what is described here as a synergistic transformationalist approach (STA) to globalization, I provide a critique of GT. The critique is geared towards examining why foreign policy hitherto has been overlooked by contemporary GT. I expose the problems this generates and address them by exploring how STA enables GT to incorporate foreign policy. I use the case of Israel heuristically to elicit how incorporating foreign policy into GT may provide a better understanding of the relationship between foreign policy and globalization. Three themes are highlighted: the role of foreign policy in inducing and reproducing globalization; determining the mutually constitutive relationship between globalization and the state; and shaping the interfacing between international politics and globalization