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This paper seeks to investigate the impact of citrus tristeza virus (CTV) on the commercial value of fruit produced by navel orange trees.

Data are counts of fruit of various sizes and quality harvested from a tree in a year. The counted fruit are converted to a dollar value using a standardized pricing matrix and then normalized as a ratio of the tree value compared to trees in the same orchard and year that were free of virus. Statistical tests determine if trees at various stages of infection have different production values than virus‐free trees.

On average, trees infected with CTV have higher fruit production values than trees that did not contract the virus, after compensating for climate and location differences, even though the presence or absence of CTV explains only about 1 percent of the variation in production value.

Data are from commercially maintained orchards rather than a carefully controlled experiment in an isolated greenhouse environment.

Orange growers in the region should be reluctant to remove trees that have mild strains of CTV. The effects of a tree virus on production value should be a consideration in how to respond to the virus.

Development of a standardized pricing matrix to control for pricing fluctuations from year to year is a relatively novel concept. The applied concepts of tree status cohorts and relative crop values are original and provide valuable tools for combining data from different orchards and climate conditions.

Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

In the last few years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media have become increasingly relevant to politicians and political parties alike, often used to issue statements or campaigning, among others. At the same time, many citizens have become more involved in politics, partly due to the highly interactive and social environments that the social networking services (SNS) provide. Political events flow through these networks, influencing their users; such events, however, often start offline (outside the online platform) and are, therefore, hard to track. Event studies, a methodology often used in financial and economic studies, can be translated to social networks to help modeling the effect of external events in the network. In the present case, the event study methodology is applied to two sample cases: the tariff war between the United States and China, with multiple responses and retaliations from both sides, and the Brexit referendum. In both cases, the Twitter social networks that arise from users who discuss the respective subjects are analyzed to examine how political events shape and modify the network. Results show how event studies, combined with the possibilities offered by the ICTs both in data retrieval and analysis, can be applied to understand the effect of external political events, allowing researchers to quantitatively track, observe, and analyze the spread of political information over social network platforms. This is a first step toward obtaining a better understanding on how political messages are diffused over social networks and their effects in the network structures and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to relay and discuss the experiences of a teacher educator teaching critical literacy to preservice teacher candidates immediately following the US presidential election in 2016. In a time of increasing polarization in the USA, teachers and teacher educators have unique opportunities to create honest spaces for dialogue, but developing classrooms that can serve as these spaces is not an easy task.

This paper is a self-study practitioner narrative of a teacher educator teaching a secondary literacy course.

The paper discusses the importance of addressing critical literacy in the context of particular historical moments and as more sustained, engaged work that makes room for minority voices that may not be heard across particular settings. The findings prompt teachers and teacher educators to consider whose voices are present, absent and valued during difficult conversations.

Making room for uncomfortable dialogues in preservice teacher education classrooms can transform the ways in which teacher candidates (and their future students) engage with written and non-traditional texts in the world around them. Promoting spaces for critical, authentic and honest dialogue requires teacher educators to model the willingness to move beyond their own comfort zones and interrogate their own deeply help beliefs. This paper is evidence of engaged self-reflection, a necessary part of transformative practice related to critical literacy.

In February 1994, the senior management team at Continental Cablevision received the final joint-venture agreement from Fintelco, a potential partner in Argentina. The tasks for the student are to review the terms of the agreement, the outlook for the Argentine economy, and the corporate cultures at both companies to decide whether Continental should sign the agreement.

Seaweeds are gaining broader interest in Western societies through their use in product development and the health-food industry. High nutritional value, low carbon footprint and sustainability are key drivers for seaweed uptake in Europe; yet high iodine intake from seaweed remains a concern. This study seeks to identify seaweed food products available on the UK retail market between 2018 and 2021 and assess their safety in the context of iodine exposure.

Here, a market survey (n = 37–40 retailers) was conducted in three annual waves to evaluate seaweed food product availability in the UK. The iodine dose of products was estimated based on a comprehensive literature review of seaweed iodine content.

This study shows a young, dynamic market with 2.3-fold increase in seaweed food product availability since the last available published data (2015). Specific iodine content labelling remains uncommon, and median iodine doses in a single serving of food exceeded 400 µg in all years. Some products, especially seaweed supplements, provide iodine doses above the tolerable upper limit and upper level of tolerance.

This study presents the most contemporary and comprehensive overview of the market for seaweed food products in the UK. With increasing popularisation of seaweed as a food, this study highlights the need for improved dialogue amongst producers, retailers, legislators and public health specialists to address the risk of iodine excess, and the concurrent scope for processing methods to reduce the iodine content in seaweeds.