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Food Value Chain Coordination in Practice: European and Australian Case Studies of the Creation of Chain Good Innovations
No full textFood value chain businesses form alliances with horizontal and/or vertical partners to take collective action to either overcome or ameliorate chain failure, or to take advantage of new opportunities available due to innovations in products or processes. The desired outcomes from the collective action would not be possible to achieve if these businesses acted independently. While such alliances may take many forms, depending on degree of commitment and infrastructure linkages, they can often be considered to be clubs. Four such types of clubs can be identified (1) horizontal clubs comprising businesses that take collective action across a single cross-section or an aggregate of multiple cross-sections in the value chain; (2) vertical clubs, which consist of businesses that form a strategic alliance for collective action along a single value chain within a network of chains; (3) clubs that specialise in a single product or multiple products in the value chain; or (4) clubs focusing on a single input/activity or multiple inputs/activities. Thus the path to collective action chosen by clubs may vary according to existing capabilities and the scope for collaboration, particularly in relation to the potential for value-creating innovation. The result of the collective action is the provision of a chain good or service which usually leads to greater and more valuable chain coordination. By collectively identifying, funding and acting to capture positive externalities associated with innovation, businesses in many parts of a food value chain can widen opportunities to increase whole-of-chain surplus as well as increase private profits. In this paper four mini-case studies are presented which demonstrate the breadth of past collective actions that have been undertaken by a substantial proportion of businesses in food value chains, two in Europe and two in Australia. These are (1) the Euro Pool System, (2) Global Standards certification in Europe and globally, (3) Meat Standards Australia, and (4) the OBE Beef organic producer alliance in Australia. Each case study yields insights into the rationale of how businesses in different food value chains in different countries have acted as a club to use their joint resources to internalise positive innovation and coordination externalities that would not have been possible to achieve were these businesses to act independently
Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Post Colonialism by Ratna Kapur r, London, Glass House Press, 2005, 219pp, ISBN 1 90438 524 9
No full textRatna Kapur’s Erotic Justice is yet another recent addition to the vast and heterogeneous field of postcolonial discourse. Firmly placing her theoretical trajectories within postcolonial legal feminism, Professor Kapur examines the theme of the subaltern subject. Although her text focuses primarily on the issue of women, she also considers other subjects at the margins of traditional legal discourse, such as transnational migrants, sexual minorities, and Muslims. In her work, she reconceptualises law as a system of domination and resistance, where the role and place of the world’s peripheral subjects and cultural Others have been (and continue to be) constructed (and reconstructed). Kapur uses her sexual subaltern subject to trace the hegemonic operations of the law, where the Other is culturally configured (continually) in hierarchical structures of difference. In this text, she explores how the law has been implicated in recent debates on sexuality, culture, and subalternity, and significantly, how it is ‘used not only as a site of empowerment, but also as a device for excluding the world’s Others, or including them on terms that are quite problematic, both historically as well as in the contemporary context’ (p2)
Taylor Swift now owns all the music she has ever made: a copyright expert breaks it down
No full textOn Friday, Taylor Swift announced she now owns all the music she has ever made. This reported US$360 million acquisition includes all the master recordings to her first six albums, music videos, concert films, album art, photos and unreleased material. The purchase of this catalogue from private equity firm Shamrock Capital is a profoundly happy event for Swift. She has expressed how personal and difficult it was not to own these works. In her announcement, Swift acknowledged that it was due to her fans purchasing her rerecorded music (known as “Taylor’s Version”) and the financial success of the record-breaking Eras Tour which enabled this purchase. The story behind “Taylor’s Version” and why she didn’t own the catalogue to her original six albums is due to copyright, music industry practices and contractual terms. Let’s break it down
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the relationship between economic growth and health expenditure
No full textThis study examines the relationship between health spending and economic growth across 158 countries from 1990 to 2022, with a focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly from 2020 to 2022. The gross domestic product per capita (GDPC) growth rates increased across all income groups during 2020–2022, with rising health expenditure as a driver in middle- and low-income countries. Health expenditure positively impacts GDP per capita in middle- and low-income countries. However, health expenditure has a significantly rising trend in high-income countries (HIC), underscoring the importance of steady health investment for economic resilience. Upper middle-income countries (UMIC) benefit considerably over the long term, but pandemic-related effects are not significant and inconsistent, highlighting the need for adaptive spending and structural reforms in demographics, insurance systems, and poverty. Health spending supports growth in lower-middle-income (LMIC) and low-income countries (LIC) despite the COVID-19 disruptions. Economic growth also boosts health investment in HIC and UMIC during 2020–2022,2020, and 2022 in LMIC, suggesting mutual reinforcement, and does not find such effects in LIC. Adaptive spending and structural reforms are also required for demographics, insurance, and foreign direct investment in LMIC and LIC
Social Security: a conceptual view
No full textThe concept of social security has received new attention in the South African legal system with the inclusion of section 27 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act 108 of 1996. Section 27( 1 )(c) grants to everyone the right to access to social security including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependents, appropriate social assistance . Section 27(2) says that the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures. within its available resources. to achieve the progres sive realisation of each of these rights
Dynamic Texture Comparison Using Derivative Sparse Representation: Application to Video-Based Face Recognition
No full textVideo-based face, expression, and scene recognition are fundamental problems in human-machine interaction, especially when there is a short-length video. In this paper, we present a new derivative sparse representation approach for face and texture recognition using short-length videos. First, it builds local linear subspaces of dynamic texture segments by computing spatiotemporal directional derivatives in a cylinder neighborhood within dynamic textures. Unlike traditional methods, a nonbinary texture coding technique is proposed to extract high-order derivatives using continuous circular and cylinder regions to avoid aliasing effects. Then, these local linear subspaces of texture segments are mapped onto a Grassmann manifold via sparse representation. A new joint sparse representation algorithm is developed to establish the correspondences of subspace points on the manifold for measuring the similarity between two dynamic textures. Extensive experiments on the Honda/UCSD, the CMU motion of body, the YouTube, and the DynTex datasets show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in dynamic texture recognition, and achieved the encouraging highest accuracy reported to date on the challenging YouTube face dataset. The encouraging experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in video-based face recognition in human-machine system applications
Pedestrian Collision Avoidance Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
No full textThe use of intelligent systems to prevent accidents and safety enhancement in vehicles is becoming a requirement. Besides, the development of autonomous cars is progressing every day. One of the main challenges in transportation is the high mortality rate of vehicles colliding with pedestrians. This issue becomes severe due to various and abnormal situations. This paper proposes a new intelligent algorithm for pedestrian collision avoidance based on deep reinforcement learning. A deep Q-network (DQN) is designed to discover an optimal driving policy for pedestrian collision avoidance in diverse environments and conditions. The algorithm interacts with the vehicle and the pedestrian agents and uses a specific reward function to train the model. We have used Car Learning to Act (CARLA), an open-source autonomous driving simulator, for training and verifying the model in various conditions. Applying the proposed algorithm to a simulated environment reduces vehicles and pedestrians’ collision by about 64 %, depending on the environment. Our findings offer an early-warning solution to mitigate the risk of a crash of vehicles and pedestrians in the real world
Effects of feeding sheep rations containing hemp stubble on nutrient digestibility, rumen parameters and animal performance
No full textThe residue (stubble) following the harvest of a hemp crop for seed could be a useful feed for sheep (and cattle). However, the feeding value of this residue is unknown. Fifteen Merino wethers were maintained in individual pens and fed one of three pelletised experimental inclusion diets, as a 0% (Control), 28% (Hemp 1), and 56% (Hemp 2) pellet, which delivered a diet meeting the nutrient requirements of the animals. Over the 42-day feeding period (following a 14-day adaptation period), inclusion of hemp stubble had no adverse effects on either intake or live weight gain of the sheep. Including the hemp stubble in the diets resulted in improved nutrient digestibility and it changed the profile of volatile fatty acids in the rumen, increasing the molar proportions of iso-butyric, iso-valeric, hexanoic and heptanoic acids. Volatile fatty acids are the key source of energy for sheep and cattle. Tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (THCA) was the only cannabinoid found in the plasma of the sheep fed the hemp-containing diets, and it was found at low concentrations (9-THC) was detected in the kidney fat and subcutaneous fat of all sheep fed hemp stubble while THCA was also detected in the subcutaneous fat of one of the sheep fed the Hemp 1 pellets. Four of the five sheep fed the Hemp 1 pellet and one of the five sheep fed Hemp 2 pellet had low levels (52-72 µg/kg DM) of Δ9-THC in their meat (loin). No other cannabinoids were detected in the meat. Current food standards regulations in Australia prohibit presence of any cannabinoid residues in commercial meat products; thus, either review of these food standards or determination of a withholding period (WHP) is required to enable the safe feeding of hemp-stubble to sheep
A time to change? The supply of climate mitigation products from land-use change in northern NSW
No full textWith the impending introduction of an Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, farmers and landholders in rural Australia have increased opportunities to participate in the market. This includes the adoption of land-use change to sequester additional carbon in exchange for carbon credits and the production of a renewable energy source (biofuels). However, these land-use changes compete with existing farm enterprises and may contain significant transaction costs. Therefore it is necessary for the institutional arrangements to provide adequate incentives for landholders to adopt these land-use changes. This paper examines the potential supply of these land-use changes for climate mitigation from landholders in a northern NSW catchment. These results will allow further investigation of how incentive structures and policy instruments may be developed to increase the supply of these goods from landholders