Agriculture was the primary target of moves to deregulate the New Zealand economy in 1984. Within twelve-months all production
subsidies had been removed, including those for fertiliser and other inputs, as well as funding for drought relief, floods
and other natural weather disasters. Whereas at the start of 1984, subsidies were estimated to represent as much as 33% of
farm income, by 2003 this had fallen to less than 2% with most of this spent on agricultural research. The anticipated shift
of thousands of people off the land did not appear to occur, and by conventional measures at least New Zealand agriculture
in 2003 is a major success story. At the core of the changes imposed on agriculture was a commitment to remove all state or
government distortions from the system and to fully expose the agricultural sector to market forces. This included wide-ranging
and fundamental changes in the broad institutional context within which agriculture must operate. All this was achieved at
great social cost and with a significant impact on the environment. In many respects New Zealand agriculture is now very different
from that in 1984. Some sectors, such as dairying, have grown and become increasingly industrialised. On the other hand, sheep
farming, particularly for wool has struggled to maintain its market share, while other enterprises have emerged as significant
sources of income, including horticulture, viticulture and fruit. It is argued here that the trends evident in New Zealand
agriculture since 1984 pre-existed the reform period and that the apparent success of the reforms evident at a national scale
have not addressed or removed the fundamental problems which face New Zealand agriculture, just as they do modern agricultural
systems elsewhere.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. 相似文献
Rock mass classification is analogous to multi-feature pattern recognition problem. The objective is to assign a rock mass to one of the pre-defined classes using a given set of criteria. This process involves a number of subjective uncertainties stemming from: (a) qualitative (linguistic) criteria; (b) sharp class boundaries; (c) fixed rating (or weight) scales; and (d) variable input reliability. Fuzzy set theory enables a soft approach to account for these uncertainties by allowing the expert to participate in this process in several ways. Hence, this study was designed to investigate the earlier fuzzy rock mass classification attempts and to devise improved methodologies to utilize the theory more accurately and efficiently. As in the earlier studies, the Rock Mass Rating (RMR) system was adopted as a reference conventional classification system because of its simple linear aggregation.
The proposed classification approach is based on the concept of partial fuzzy sets representing the variable importance or recognition power of each criterion in the universal domain of rock mass quality. The method enables one to evaluate rock mass quality using any set of criteria, and it is easy to implement. To reduce uncertainties due to project- and lithology-dependent variations, partial membership functions were formulated considering shallow (<200 m) tunneling in granitic rock masses. This facilitated a detailed expression of the variations in the classification power of each criterion along the corresponding universal domains. The binary relationship tables generated using these functions were processed not to derive a single class but rather to plot criterion contribution trends (stacked area graphs) and belief surface contours, which proved to be very satisfactory in difficult decision situations. Four input scenarios were selected to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach in different situations and with reference to the earlier approaches. 相似文献
The shear viscosities and 1 bar heat capacities of glasses and melts along the 67mol% silica isopleth in the system SiO2-Al2O3-Na2O-TiO2 have been determined in the temperature ranges 780-1140 K and 305-1090 K respectively. Anomalous behaviour of both these properties is observed for compositions rich in TiO2 and/or Al2O3, an observation attributed to liquid-liquid phase separation followed by anatase crystallization. For samples which do not show anomalous behaviour, it is found that the partial molar heat capacity of the TiO2 component previously determined in Al-free compositions reproduces our heat capacities to within 1.3%. Viscosity data show that addition of TiO2 tends to increase viscosity and melt fragility at constant temperature. Furthermore, heat capacity and viscosity data may be combined within the framework of the Adam-Gibbs theory to extract values of the configurational entropy of the liquids and qualitative estimates of the variation of the average energy barrier to viscous flow. Configurational entropy at 900K is inferred to decrease upon addition of TiO2, in contrast to previous results from Al-free systems. The compositional limit separating normal from anomalous behaviour, as well as the data for homogenous melts have been used to constrain the structural role of Ti in these samples. Our data are consistent with a majority of Ti in five-fold coordination associated with a titanyl bond, in agreement with previous spectroscopic studies. Furthermore, we find no evidence for a Ti-Al interaction in our samples, and we are led to the conclusion that Al and Ti are incompletely mixed, a hypothesis consistent with the observed reduction of configurational entropy upon addition of TiO2, suggesting an important role of medium range order in controlling the variations in thermodynamic properties. 相似文献
This paper looks at how the term 'sustainable development' has been used in the process of regional plan making over the past decade. It emphasizes the differing geographies of these debates within England, in terms of how sustainable development has been used to justify different types of approach in different parts of the country. Both drawing on and challenging recent work on state theory, the paper argues the need to see regional planning as a part of a multi-scalar governance system, whose importance should not be underestimated. 相似文献