Market and Welfare Impacts of COOL on the U.S.-Mexican Tomato Trade

A two-country, comparative static partial equilibrium model is used to simulate the ex ante market and welfare outcomes of U.S. country-of-origin labeling for the U.S.-Mexico fresh tomato trade. In all scenarios where consumers show a relative preference for U.S. tomatoes, Mexican tomato exports decline and U.S. production increases. Mexican trade losses using low- to mid-range consumer preference assumptions are 14% to 32% of the value of Mexican tomato exports to the United States and 1% to 3% of the total value of agricultural produce exports, partially negating the market access gains of NAFTA. Consumer effects are small and sometimes negative. Producer impact is the big effect, with transfer from Mexican to U.S. tomato producers.country-of-origin labeling, food labeling, trade-related food regulations, welfare effects, Crop Production/Industries, International Relations/Trade,

Joint source-channel coding for a quantum multiple access channel

Suppose that two senders each obtain one share of the output of a classical, bivariate, correlated information source. They would like to transmit the correlated source to a receiver using a quantum multiple access channel. In prior work, Cover, El Gamal, and Salehi provided a combined source-channel coding strategy for a classical multiple access channel which outperforms the simpler "separation" strategy where separate codebooks are used for the source coding and the channel coding tasks. In the present paper, we prove that a coding strategy similar to the Cover-El Gamal-Salehi strategy and a corresponding quantum simultaneous decoder allow for the reliable transmission of a source over a quantum multiple access channel, as long as a set of information inequalities involving the Holevo quantity hold.Comment: 21 pages, v2: minor changes, accepted into Journal of Physics

The Provision of Music in Special Education (PROMISE) 2015

The paper reports the outcomes of a national survey of music in special schools in England that was conducted in the summer of 2015. The survey sought to uncover the current state of affairs in the sector, whilst also allowing a comparison to be made with the findings of a related study undertaken at the end of the last century. The survey outcomes also provide contextual data to inform the design of a current wider national initiative to improve the overall effectiveness of music education in the UK for all children (the inspire-music project). In total, fifty-seven special schools responded to the on-line survey. Findings suggest that music is taught at least weekly to 95% of children aged 2–13 years (noting that 5–13 are the statutory ages for music in mainstream schools), with slightly smaller proportions for 14–16 yearolds (83%), an age group for whom music becomes an optional subject in mainstream schools, and less for the oldest age group (66% of 16–19 year-olds). Eighty per cent of schools reported that they employed a specialist music teacher, which appears to be a much higher proportion of musically qualified staffing than almost two decades earlier. Where schools have a formal music curriculum, over half (59%) report that this is specially designed and adapted from existing models, such as the new Sounds of Intent framework. Music was also reported to be a common element in other lessons by 3:4 schools, and common at lunchtimes/break times (2:3). Regular and systematic input from outside music agencies was reported to be relatively common (3:4 schools). Four-fifths of schools had a dedicated music room, and music technology use was commonplace. Music therapy was reported to be available in 1:3 schools, a similar proportion to 1999–2000, but for relatively double the numbers of children (11%, compared to 5% earlier). In addition, virtually all schools (96%) reported children with a particular interest in music and almost all schools felt that music was important. The detailed data imply a clear positive shift since the late 1990s, with more musically qualified staffing, a broader range of resources for the music curriculum, more external organisations available to support music, increased use of music technology and improved music therapy provision. Nevertheless, given the small number of schools responding to the survey compared to those in total within the special schools sector, it is not yet possible to confirm that all children have access to an effective music education

The ethical challenge of Touraine's 'living together'

In Can We Live Together? Alain Touraine combines a consummate analysis of crucial social tensions in contemporary societies with a strong normative appeal for a new emancipatory 'Subject' capable of overcoming the twin threats of atomisation or authoritarianism. He calls for a move from 'politics to ethics' and then from ethics back to politics to enable the new Subject to make a reality out of the goals of democracy and solidarity. However, he has little to say about the nature of such an ethics. This article argues that this lacuna could usefully be filled by adopting a form of radical humanism found in the work of Erich Fromm. It defies convention in the social sciences by operating from an explicit view of the 'is' and the 'ought' of common human nature, specifying reason, love and productive work as the qualities to be realised if we are to move closer to human solidarity. Although there remain significant philosophical and political differences between the two positions, particularly on the role to be played by 'the nation', their juxtaposition opens new lines of inquiry in the field of cosmopolitan ethics

Protecting Quantum Information with Entanglement and Noisy Optical Modes

We incorporate active and passive quantum error-correcting techniques to protect a set of optical information modes of a continuous-variable quantum information system. Our method uses ancilla modes, entangled modes, and gauge modes (modes in a mixed state) to help correct errors on a set of information modes. A linear-optical encoding circuit consisting of offline squeezers, passive optical devices, feedforward control, conditional modulation, and homodyne measurements performs the encoding. The result is that we extend the entanglement-assisted operator stabilizer formalism for discrete variables to continuous-variable quantum information processing.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

A high-wavenumber boundary-element method for an acoustic scattering problem

In this paper we show stability and convergence for a novel Galerkin boundary element method approach to the impedance boundary value problem for the Helmholtz equation in a half-plane with piecewise constant boundary data. This problem models, for example, outdoor sound propagation over inhomogeneous flat terrain. To achieve a good approximation with a relatively low number of degrees of freedom we employ a graded mesh with smaller elements adjacent to discontinuities in impedance, and a special set of basis functions for the Galerkin method so that, on each element, the approximation space consists of polynomials (of degree $\nu$) multiplied by traces of plane waves on the boundary. In the case where the impedance is constant outside an interval $[a,b]$, which only requires the discretization of $[a,b]$, we show theoretically and experimentally that the $L_2$ error in computing the acoustic field on $[a,b]$ is ${\cal O}(\log^{\nu+3/2}|k(b-a)| M^{-(\nu+1)})$, where $M$ is the number of degrees of freedom and $k$ is the wavenumber. This indicates that the proposed method is especially commendable for large intervals or a high wavenumber. In a final section we sketch how the same methodology extends to more general scattering problems

Catalyst: Reimagining sustainability with and through fine art

© 2016 by the author(s). How might we begin to explore the concept of the “sustainable city” in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable