Coronavirus and the End of Resilience

Resilience appears to be the key policy buzzword of our times. International organizations, as diverse as the United Nations and the European Union, have now adopted resilience strategies across various policy areas – highlighted by the UN’s risk and resilience framework for its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2017), the EU Action Plan for Resilience (European Commission, 2013), the European Union Global Strategy (EU, 2016) and other policy documents. This short piece argues that global responses to the Coronavirus appear to demonstrate that policy discourses of resilience may be one (so far, unremarked) casualty of the Coronavirus outbreak. ‘Keeping Calm and Carrying On’ is not an option. Acting normally, not panicking, not overreacting, is seen as dangerous and hubristic (Taleb et al, 2020). Being resilient will make the problems worse. Being resilient will make the virus spread. Better to close, to cancel, to restrict now, rather than to regret later

The Coronavirus: Biopolitics and the Rise of ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’

If the lesson of the global response to the Coronavirus is that humanity itself is the problem, then Anthropocene Authoritarianism looks set to pose a larger long-term challenge to our ways of life than the virus itself. With politics suspended, societies under lockdown, parliaments closed and States of Emergency in force globally (Runciman, 2020), many commentators have turned to Foucauldian-inspired understandings of biopolitics and population control to analyze contemporary events (Horvat, 2020; Agamben, 2020a; Demetri, 2020; Singh, 2020; Sotiris, 2020). Biopolitics has become a key concept in critical discourses of security governance in the last two decades (Rose, 2007; Esposito, 2008; Dillon, 2015). Deriving from the work of Foucault, at the heart of biopolitical thought is the relationship of politics to life as both the basis of governance and as an object to be secured (Foucault, 2007; 2008). For Foucault, ‘life’ was a way of articulating an ‘outside’ to the human world of politics, an outside that appeared natural but was, in fact, a malleable construct (Lemke, 2011)

PHYSICIAN ASSISTED DYING: DEFINING THE ETHICALLY AMBIGUOUS

In states where Physician Assisted Dying (PAD) is legal, physicians occasionally receive requests for this form of end-of-life care. Here, I describe the ethically ambiguous sphere and why PAD falls into it. I argue that, given the ethical ambiguity of PAD, physicians should consider patient autonomy as the highest value in the four principles approach and act as informers and educators

Russia's 'Little Slav Brother'?

Dubois Patrick. CHÉRON (Adolphe). In: , . Le dictionnaire de pédagogie et d'instruction primaire de Ferdinand Buisson : répertoire biographique des auteurs. Paris : Institut national de recherche pédagogique, 2002. p. 54. (Bibliothèque de l'Histoire de l'Education, 17

Biological control of leatherjackets using insect pathogens OF0116T

Leatherjackets (Tipula spp.; larvae of crane flies) are significant pests affecting the organic farming sector. Effective non-chemical methods of protecting organic crops from leatherjackets have not yet been developed, although insect pathogens are a promising method for biological control of these pests. This study will aim to identify and evaluate fungi, nematodes and the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis for their effectiveness as control agents. The pathogens will be sourced from the HRI resource collection. Selected isolates of pathogens with known activity to dipteran pests will be screened in bioassays against laboratory-reared leatherjackets. Virulent isolates will be examined in detail both in laboratory experiments and glasshouse trials on a cereal and a field vegetable. Feeding behaviour of the pests will be studied in order to develop a rational strategy for application of the microbial control agents, and the effect of temperature on the virulence of control microbes (including cold-tolerant nematodes) will be examined. The incidence of insect pathogenic nematodes and fungi in a population of leatherjackets from an organic farm will be recorded. Replicated field experiments with microbial control agents will be conducted at HDRA under appropriate organic crop production systems using relevant methods developed in other, related MAFF-funded projects. Findings of the study will be published in refereed journals and grower-related information made available at HRI and HDRA and open days, and through the trade press

Improved phase-shift-keyed detector

Improved phase-shift-keyed detector contains an active filter circuit which uses an operational amplifier and resistor-capacitor network. The detector is used in the Saturn space vehicle and Apollo telescope mount command systems to translate an analog signal from the command receiver into digital information for the command decoder