The Vermonter\u27s Guide to the Farm Bill

The Farm Bill is a comprehensive set of laws and programs that dictates United States policies across the food system. While it may seem that a farm bill is only related to agriculture, this legislation, in reality, includes a broad set of policies on food production, nutrition assistance, rural community development, research, the environment, international trade, and more. Often known as a farm and food bill, the legislation impacts food systems stakeholders, including those who farm, live in a rural community, and even those who eat food—so that is everyone. Considering the widespread impacts of the Farm Bill, it is important for citizens to share their voice and opinions as our congressional representatives redraft the next version of food and agricultural policy. Congress creates a new Farm Bill approximately every five years. Before the bill is signed into law, Congress looks to the communities whom they represent across the country to express their thoughts on the current state of the food system. Federal policy has implications for every state. The federal Farm Bill has vast impacts in Vermont. Funding for various programs ranging from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known in state as 3Squares Vermont), rural broadband support, farm to school grants, sustainable agriculture research and extension, beginning farmer programs, and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP)—to name a few. The purpose of this guide is to help Vermonters understand the Farm Bill, what Farm Bill advocacy looks like in Vermont, and a synopsis of ways that Vermonters can get involved in the policy development process and have their voices heard. This guide is politically neutral, and does not seek to advise readers on specific issues for which they should advocate. With the input of various Vermont stakeholder organizations from across the state in addition to congressional staff members, this guide serves to support individuals throughout Vermont to get involved in Farm Bill policy discussions

Dynamic Modeling and Statistical Analysis of Event Times

This review article provides an overview of recent work in the modeling and analysis of recurrent events arising in engineering, reliability, public health, biomedicine and other areas. Recurrent event modeling possesses unique facets making it different and more difficult to handle than single event settings. For instance, the impact of an increasing number of event occurrences needs to be taken into account, the effects of covariates should be considered, potential association among the interevent times within a unit cannot be ignored, and the effects of performed interventions after each event occurrence need to be factored in. A recent general class of models for recurrent events which simultaneously accommodates these aspects is described. Statistical inference methods for this class of models are presented and illustrated through applications to real data sets. Some existing open research problems are described.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000349 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

ISO and Social Standardisation: Uncomfortable compromises in Global Policy-Making

This paper intends to explore the involvement of ISO, the world’s most iconic standard-setting institution, in the field of social responsibility, leading to the publication of the ISO26000 standard in November, 2010. Through several aspects of this experience, an almost decade-long process, I will show how ISO developed a new political structure aimed specifically at creating global policy, originating one the most sophisticated frameworks in existence to consensualise "universal" sociopolitical principles and infuse them with the legitimacy of a "global" technocracy and liberal institutions. Moreover, I will use the latest ISO26000 experience to argue that conceptual and institutional minimalism, which favours "soft" approaches towards global policy-making, paradoxically results from combining a technocratic aim for global compatibility with more participatory decision-making arrangements involving previously excluded socio-political actors. In that sense, ISO’s upgraded participatory mechanisms solved certain deadlocks suffered by previous initiatives only to affront and spark a new round of contradictions and consequences. Thus, I will conclude commenting on the intrinsic relationship between global standards, governance and complexity, and the difficulties of politically articulating programmes with dissimilar functional differentiation

The Bose polaron problem: effect of mass imbalance on binding energy

By means of Quantum Monte Carlo methods we calculate the binding energy of an impurity immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate at T = 0. The focus is on the attractive branch of the Bose polaron and on the role played by the mass imbalance between the impurity and the surrounding particles. For an impurity resonantly coupled to the bath, we investigate the dependence of the binding energy on the mass ratio and on the interaction strength within the medium. In particular, we determine the equation of state in the case of a static (infinite mass) impurity, where three-body correlations are irrelevant and the result is expected to be a universal function of the gas parameter. For the mass ratio corresponding to $^{40}$K impurities in a gas of $^{87}$Rb atoms we provide an explicit comparison with the experimental findings of a recent study carried out at JILA.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure