TB103: Factors Determining Potato Chipping Quality

The purpose of this investigation was (1) to investigate the relationship of four potato varieties, the sucrose content at harvest, storage temperatures, and the length of storage time to the color of chips from potatoes grown in central Maine and (2) to develop an equation that will help forecast the potential chipping qualit y of potatoes grown in central Mainehttps://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_techbulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp

Exclusionary employment in Britain’s broken labour market

There is growing evidence of the problematic nature of the UK’s ‘flexible labour market’ with rising levels of in-work poverty and insecurity. Yet successive Governments have stressed that paid work is the route to inclusion, focussing attention on the divide between employed and unemployed. Past efforts to measure social exclusion have tended to make the same distinction. The aim of this paper is to apply Levitas et al’s (2007) framework to assess levels of exclusionary employment, i.e. exclusion arising directly from an individual’s labour market situation. Using data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion UK survey, results show that one in three adults in paid work is in poverty, or in insecure or poor quality employment. One third of this group have not seen any progression in their labour market situation in the last five years. The policy focus needs to shift from ‘Broken Britain’ to Britain’s broken labour market

The domestic and gendered context for retirement

Against a global backdrop of population and workforce ageing, successive UK governments have encouraged people to work longer and delay retirement. Debates focus mainly on factors affecting individuals’ decisions on when and how to retire. We argue that a fuller understanding of retirement can be achieved by recognizing the ways in which individuals’ expectations and behaviours reflect a complicated, dynamic set of interactions between domestic environments and gender roles, often established over a long time period, and more temporally proximate factors. Using a qualitative data set, we explore how the timing, nature and meaning of retirement and retirement planning are played out in specific domestic contexts. We conclude that future research and policies surrounding retirement need to: focus on the household, not the individual; consider retirement as an often messy and disrupted process and not a discrete event; and understand that retirement may mean very different things for women and for men

The Essential Interactions in Oxides and Spectral Weight Transfer in Doped Manganites

We calculate the value of the Fr\"ohlich electron-phonon interaction in manganites, cuprates, and some other charge-transfer insulators and show that this interaction is much stronger than any relevant magnetic interaction. A polaron shift due to the Fr\"ohlich interaction, which is about 1 eV, suggests that carriers in those systems are small (bi)polarons at all temperatures and doping levels, in agreement with the oxygen isotope effect and other data. An opposite conclusion, recently suggested in the literature, is shown to be incorrect. The frequency and temperature dependence of the optical conductivity of ferromagnetic manganites is explained within the framework of the bipolaron theory.Comment: 6 pages, REVTeX 3.1 with 3 eps-figures. Journal versio

Probation, credibility and justice

This paper explores the difficulties that arise for probation agencies or those that deliver community sanctions in developing and maintaining their credibility in prevailing ‘late-modern’ social conditions. It begins by questioning the limits of the pursuit and promise of ‘public protection’ as a source of credibility, and then proceeds to examine the emergence of an alternative strategy – based principally on reparation and ‘payback’ – in Scotland, arguing that these Scottish developments have much to say to the emerging debates in England and Wales (and elsewhere) about the ‘rehabilitation revolution’ and the proper use of imprisonment. The paper provides a critical account of the development and meaning of the Scottish version of ‘payback’, linking it to some important philosophical and empirical studies that may help to steer the development of payback away from a ‘merely punitive’ drift. In the conclusion, I argue that probation agencies and services need to engage much more deeply and urgently with their roles as justice services, rather than as ‘mere’ crime reduction agencies

Prevalence of childhood disability and the characteristics and circumstances of disabled children in the UK : secondary analysis of the Family Resources Survey

Background: Robust data on the prevalence of childhood disability and the circumstances and characteristics of disabled children is crucial to understanding the relationship between impairment and social disadvantage. It is also crucial for public policy development aimed at reducing the prevalence of childhood disability and providing appropriate and timely service provision. This paper reports prevalence rates for childhood disability in the United Kingdom (UK) and describes the social and household circumstances of disabled children, comparing these where appropriate to those of non-disabled children. Methods: Data were generated from secondary analysis of the Family Resources Survey, a national UK cross-sectional survey, (2004/5) which had data on 16,012 children aged 0-18 years. Children were defined as disabled if they met the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) definition (1995 and 2005). Frequency distributions and cross-tabulations were run to establish prevalence estimates, and describe the circumstances of disabled children. To establish the association between individual social and material factors and childhood disability when other factors were controlled for, logistic regression models were fitted on the dependent variable 'DDA defined disability'. Results: 7.3% (CI 6.9, 7.7) of UK children were reported by as disabled according to the DDA definition. Patterns of disability differed between sexes with boys having a higher rate overall and more likely than girls to experience difficulties with physical coordination; memory, concentration and learning; communication. Disabled children lived in different personal situations from their non-disabled counterparts, and were more likely to live with low-income, deprivation, debt and poor housing. This was particularly the case for disabled children from black/minority ethnic/ mixed parentage groups and lone-parent households. Childhood disability was associated with lone parenthood and parental disability and these associations persisted when social disadvantage was controlled for. Conclusion: These analyses suggest that UK disabled children experience higher levels of poverty and personal and social disadvantage than other children. Further research is required to establish accurate prevalence estimates of childhood disability among different black and minority ethnic groups and to understand the associations between childhood disability and lone parenthood and the higher rates of sibling and parental disability in households with disabled children

Non-tachyonic Scherk-Schwarz compactifications, cosmology and moduli stabilization

It is well-known that Scherk-Schwarz compactifications in string theory have a tachyon in the closed string spectrum appearing for a critical value of a compact radius. The tachyon can be removed by an appropriate orientifold projection in type II strings, giving rise to tachyon-free compactifications. We present explicit examples of this type in various dimensions, including six and four-dimensional chiral examples, with softly broken supersymmetry in the closed sector and non-BPS configurations in the open sector. These vacua are interesting frameworks for studying various cosmological issues. We discuss four-dimensional cosmological solutions and moduli stabilization triggered by nonperturbative effects like gaugino condensation on D-branes and fluxes.Comment: 36 pages, LaTeX; added reference

Quantum Zeno Effect and Light-Dark Periods for a Single Atom

The quantum Zeno effect (QZE) predicts a slow-down of the time development of a system under rapidly repeated ideal measurements, and experimentally this was tested for an ensemble of atoms using short laser pulses for non-selective state measurements. Here we consider such pulses for selective measurements on a single system. Each probe pulse will cause a burst of fluorescence or no fluorescence. If the probe pulses were strictly ideal measurements, the QZE would predict periods of fluorescence bursts alternating with periods of no fluorescence (light and dark periods) which would become longer and longer with increasing frequency of the measurements. The non-ideal character of the measurements is taken into account by incorporating the laser pulses in the interaction, and this is used to determine the corrections to the ideal case. In the limit, when the time between the laser pulses goes to zero, no freezing occurs but instead we show convergence to the familiar macroscopic light and dark periods of the continuously driven Dehmelt system. An experiment of this type should be feasible for a single atom or ion in a trapComment: 16 pages, LaTeX, a4.sty; to appear in J. Phys.

Coherent States for Black Holes

We determine coherent states peaked at classical space-time of the Schwarzschild black hole in the frame-work of canonical quantisation of general relativity. The information about the horizon is naturally encoded in the phase space variables, and the perturbative quantum fluctuations around the classical geometry depend on the distance from the horizon. For small black holes, space near the vicinity of the singularity appears discrete with the singular point excluded from the spectrum.Comment: 48 pages, 18+1 figures, some modifications, references adde