如何选择核级流体系统元件供应商

随着核电行业的重新振兴,世界各地开始兴建许多新的大型核电项目,导致有核级资质的元件产品供应商短缺。在20世纪后30年,核工业的衰退使得供应商锐减,一些元件供应商破产倒闭,其它的则放弃了维护成本昂贵的核电认证项目。今天,随着核电行业的复兴,公用事业公司、工程公司、建设公司和大型设备供应商发现在寻找具有广泛产品线及有能力在合理时间内交付产品的合格元件供应商方面有很大困难。     

Hepatocellular carcinoma and hepatitis B e antigen

Hepatitis B e antigen serum persistence in an individual chronically infected with the Hepatitis B virus may be associated with a greatly increased risk of developing cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. This article presents an overview of the Hepatitis B e antigen and discusses the findings of a recent study evaluating its associated risk of hepatocellular carcinoma. A gross photographic image of hepatocellular carcinoma is provided.     

How Offshore Financial Competition Disciplines Exit Resistance by Incentive-Conflicted Bank Regulators

This paper studies the impact of technological change and regulatory competition on governmental efforts to generate rents for banks in two stylized regulatory environments. In the first environment, incentive-conflicted regulators attempt to create rents by restricting the size and scope of individual banking organizations. In the second, rents come from efforts to supply deposit guarantees to troubled banks. In both cases, innovations in financial technology and in competing domestic and offshore regulatory arrangements make the costs of delivering rents to banks more transparent to taxpayers and encourage customers to push rent-dependent banking systems into crisis. This analysis portrays the banking crises that have roiled world markets in recent years as information-producing events that identify and discredit inefficient strategies of regulating banking markets.     

Housing Finance GSEs: Who Gets the Subsidy?

Taxpayer subsidies that flow toward housing-finance GSEs are implicit in nature. This makes the size and distribution of subsidy values hard to measure directly. An array of indirect analyses indicates that incentive-conflicted GSE managers can and do extract substantial annual subsidies for GSE stockholders. Currently, stockholders are allowed to encourage managers to exploit taxpayers by tying incentive compensation implicitly to increases in the discounted present value of expected future subsidies. To counteract this inappropriate incentive, managers should be made accountable to taxpayers for returning all compensation that can be fairly attributed to increases in subsidies captured by GSE stockholders.     

Unpacking a crop diversity hotspot: farmer practice and preferences in Northern Malawi

Crop diversity is a key principle of sustainable food production systems. Yet, inter and intra specific diversification is declining in many regions of the world. In Northern Malawi, a participatory action research project (Soils Food and Healthy Communities) has conducted agroecological co-learning with farmers for over a decade, providing an opportunity to explore farmer management, crop choice and variety selection practices. Farmers who participate receive seed for 0.10 ha of on-farm testing for one growing season and then decide whether to continue to grow the crop. Cropping system diversity, management practices and traits associated with crops grown and lost were assessed through interviews with 198 farm households (757 fields). We found an average of 1.3 species per field and 4.0 crops per farm. This is almost twice the level of diversity in other reports from Malawi smallholder farms. Farmers cited a wide range of preferred groundnut variety traits, as well as concerns (namely, high labour requirements). Both modern and local maize varieties are being grown and those retained were often associated with early maturity or preferred grain quality traits such as storability. Overall, farmers at this Northern Malawi agroecology education site are growing diverse crop mixtures that include traditional as well as modern varieties of maize and groundnut.     

Public–private partnerships and collective action in high value fruit and vegetable supply chains

Accessing developed country food markets entails meeting stringent food safety requirements. Food retailers impose protocols relating to pesticide residues, field and pack house operations, and traceability. To enable smallholders to remain competitive in such a system, new institutional arrangements are required. In particular, public–private partnerships can play a key role in creating farm to fork linkages that can satisfy market demands for food safety, while retaining smallholders in the supply chain. Furthermore, organized producer groups monitoring their own food safety standards through collective action often become attractive to buyers who are looking for ways to ensure traceability and reduce transaction costs. This paper compares the ways in which small producers of fruits and vegetables in Kenya and India have coped with increased demands for food safety from their main export markets.