The Potential for Joint Farming Ventures in Irish Agriculture: A Sociological Review

peer-reviewedJoint farming ventures (JFVs) are promoted within Irish and EU policy discourses as strategies that can enhance the economic and social sustainability of family farming. Research has shown that JFVs, including arrangements such as farm partnerships, contract rearing and share farming, can potentially enable farmers to work cooperatively to improve farm productivity, reduce working hours, facilitate succession, develop skills and improve relationships within the farm household. In the context of increasing policy promotion of JFVs, there is a need to make some attempt at understanding the macro socio-cultural disposition of family farming to cooperation. Reviewing sociological studies of agricultural cooperation and taking a specific focus on the Irish contextual backdrop, this paper draws the reader’s attention to the importance of historical legacy, pragmatic economic and social concerns, communicative norms, inter-personal relationships, individualism and, policy and extension stimuli, all of which shape farmers’ dispositions to cooperation and to JFVs specifically.This work was funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Ireland under the Research Stimulus Fund (RSF), Project Number: 11/S/151

Brian Bocking and the defence of study of religions as an academic discipline in universities and schools

In this article we will explore the contribution made by Brian to establishing and defending study of religions as a discipline in its own right and argue for the importance of an holistic and polymethodic approach to studying religions as the most appropriate way forward for programmes for undergraduates at university and students in schools. We will include the major contributions made by Brian in the institutions in which he has taught, with particular attention to our own Bath Spa University. The title 'study of religions' - contributed by a student of Brian's - implies something about both content and methodology as well as his attitude towards students as co-participants and potential colleagues. The content is determinedly plural, acknowledging the diversity of religious (and perhaps non-religious) worldviews in the contemporary world. The approach is open and non-confessional, a study rather than endorsement or refutation of the claims of religions. The methods of study are multiple, prioritising neither textual and historical, nor philosophical or theological, nor social scientific approaches. Following in a tradition associated with the name of Ninian Smart among others, we argue that an understanding of religions can only be gained by seeing the relationship between theory and practice, text and context and official doctrines and vernacular custom. Hence Brian and Bath Spa continued to be committed to our students being exposed both to primary texts and direct encounters with living religious communities. Moreover, these polymethodic studies should be undertaken from a global rather than narrowly 'Western' perspective, building upon Brian's own specialism in Japanese Buddhism and entrepreneurial international links

Athermal colorless C-band optical transmitter system for passive optical networks

This paper reports an uncooled transmitter system using a digital super-mode (DS) distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) tunable laser, which is able to act as an athermal, wavelength agnostic transmitter suitable for wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) passive optical network (PON) applications. An open-loop laser current control algorithm is designed to compensate autonomously for wavelength drift, thus allowing constant operating wavelength to be achieved regardless of ambient temperature. An improved wavelength accuracy of ±3 GHz is achieved when using low bandwidth feedback from the central office using information from a centralized shared wavelength locker. The entire laser start-up, channel selection and subsequent wavelength control is autonomous and has been implemented on micro-controllers and field programmable gate arrays. We demonstrate a three channel WDM-PON system comprising an uncooled packaged DS-DBR laser in the presence of two neighboring interfering channels. Error free transmission over 40 km single mode fiber of 10 Gb/s externally modulated NRZ data, is achieved for each of 48 C-band channels on the 100 GHz ITU grid. Successful athermal operation is demonstrated by sweeping the ambient temperature of the laser from 15 to 70 °C with a maximum wavelength deviation for any channel of no more than 0.1 nm.This work has been supported by the Technology Strategy Board, UK and by the German ministry for education and research, through the EU ERA-NET+ projects PIANO+ IMPACT (BMBF grant: 13N11434) and TUCAN (BMBF grant: 13N11573). We also acknowledge the support of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council via the INTERNET project.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JLT.2014.235405

Will we trust AI to reduce Emergency Department overcrowding?

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Religion and religious education : comparing and contrasting pupils’ and teachers’ views in an English school

This publication builds on and develops the English findings of the qualitative study of European teenagers’ perspectives on religion and religious education (Knauth et al. 2008), part of ‘Religion in Education: A contribution to dialogue or a factor of conflict in transforming societies of European countries?’ (REDCo) project. It uses data gathered from 27 pupils, aged 15-16, from a school in a multicultural Northern town in England and compares those findings with data gathered from ten teachers in the humanities faculty of the same school, collected during research for the Warwick REDCo Community of Practice. Comparisons are drawn between the teachers’ and their pupils’ attitudes and values using the same structure as the European study: personal views and experiences of religion, the social dimension of religion, and religious education in school. The discussion offers an analysis of the similarities and differences in worldviews and beliefs which emerged. These include religious commitment/observance differences between the mainly Muslim-heritage pupils and their mainly non-practising Christian-heritage teachers. The research should inform the ways in which the statutory duties to promote community cohesion and equalities can be implemented in schools. It should also facilitate intercultural and interreligious understanding between teachers and the pupils from different ethnic and religious backgrounds

Poverty in the Third World: High Population Birth Rates

Poverty can be defined as the state of being extremely poor. Nearly one half of the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. Furthermore, more than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty, living on less than$1.25 a day. There have been numerous efforts from major Non-Governmental Organizations and International Governmental Organizations such as the United Nations, who attempted to implement The Millennium Development Goal in the 1990s, which was a goal that consisted of 8 large objectives. One goal was the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. The UN set a deadline to reach these goals by 2015. Despite their efforts to push this agenda, poverty still persists in our world today. Even though some instances of poverty occur within well-developed countries, poverty tends to be a trait associated with countries that are less developed commonly known as the Third World. This term was coined by a french demographer named Alfred Sauvy in 1925. He intended the term to refer to countries that were not as wealthy, capitalistic, or democratic. The Third World generally consists of countries within the southern region of the world, countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and most of Asia. As previously stated, poverty is a common trait among Third World countries. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between poverty and high birth rates specifically within the Third World. In an effort to uncover the factors of this epidemic, we will discuss a few major works done on poverty within the Third World. I will also perform an additional case study of an African country. As well as provide a logical analysis, all in effort to demonstrate that high birth rates are a contributing factor to poverty within the Third World