These regulatory trends have several implications for how food safety standards affect international trade in food products. Some new regulatory developments are likely to mitigate potential barriers to trade. For example, new kinds of regulation or public intervention that focus on voluntary provision of information (e.g., certification for certain kinds of production practices) can facilitate...

The manufacture of infant food is a highly complex process and needs an effective quality control beyond classical in-process parameters and a final microbiological analysis. To ensure a safe end -product, various tools, such as the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP), have been developed to facilitate the management of food safety. Every single infant formula ingredient must have a...

We study a rational expectation model of bubbles and crashes. The model has two components: (1) our key assumption is that a crash may be caused by local self-reinforcing imitation between noise traders. If the tendency for noise traders to imitate their nearest neighbors increases up to a certain point called the “critical” point, all noise traders may place the same order (sell) at the same t...

We consider manifolds M which admit smooth maps into a connected sum of S × S with only finitely many critical points, for n ∈ {2, 4, 8}, and compute the minimal number of critical points.

Groundstates of certain materials can support exotic excitations with a charge that’s a fraction of the fundamental electron charge. The condensation of these fractionalized particles has been predicted to drive novel quantum phase transitions, which haven’t yet been observed in realistic systems. Through numerical and theoretical analysis of a physical model of interacting lattice bosons, we e...

The theory of second-order phase transitions is one of the foundations of modern statistical mechanics and condensed-matter theory. A central concept is the observable order parameter, whose nonzero average value characterizes one or more phases. At large distances and long times, fluctuations of the order parameter(s) are described by a continuum field theory, and these dominate the physics ne...

BACKGROUND Interest in the role of food environments in shaping food consumption behaviours has grown in recent years. However, commonly used secondary food environment data sources have not yet been fully evaluated for completeness and systematic biases. This paper assessed the accuracy of UK Points of Interest (POI) data, compared to local council food outlet data for the county of Cambridges...

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) systems are a risk based preventive approach developed to increase levels of food safety assurance. This is part 1 of a pilot study on the development, implementation and evaluation of a HACCP-based approach for the control of good udder health in dairy cows. The paper describes the use of a novel approach based on a deconstruction of the infe...