Quality or volume? An economic evaluation of coffee development strategies for Uganda

The article identifies challenges and opportunities for the Ugandan robusta coffee industry in the context of the global coffee crisis. It presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of development strategies through which Uganda might promote its largest export commodity. It is suggested that Uganda would benefit from moderately increasing robusta production, while a further decline in output could undermine its current price premium in the market. There may also be important benefits associated with increasing the value of Ugandan robusta through improvements in quality.     

Contract, Employment and the Contract of Employment

Many of the rights and duties of the parties in an employmentrelationship arise out of the characterisation of the contractof employment as such. Employment also occurs by virtue of thefact that a contract of employment has been entered into. Inconsequence, it is natural to think of the contract of employmentand the employment relationship as co-existent. It is thus ofsome importance, both in legal theory and in practice, to establisha logical account of the rights and obligations between theparties that exist because of the contract of employment otherthan during the period of employment, both after and possiblybefore that relationship exists. Various possible accounts areexplored, and the conclusion is reached that the theoreticalnexus between employment and contracts of employment shouldbe broken in order to provide a more logical conceptual framework.     

Sub-surface characterisation of latest-generation identification documents using optical coherence tomography

The identification of individuals, particularly at international border crossings, coupled with the evolving sophistication of identity documents are issues that authorities must contend with. Particularly, the ability to distinguish legitimate from counterfeit documents, with high throughput, sensitivity, and selectivity is an ever-evolving challenge.Over the last decade, an increasing number of security features have been introduced by authorities in identification documents. The latest generation of travel documents (such as passports and national ID cards) forego paper substrates for several layers of polycarbonate, allowing security features to be embedded within the documents. These security features may contain information at either the superficial and sub-surface levels, thus increasing the document’s resilience to counterfeiting.As the documents become harder to forge, so does the sophistication of forgery detection. There appears to be an unmet and evolving need to identify such sophisticated forgeries, in a non-destructive, high throughput manner.In this publication, we report on the application of optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging on assessing security features in specimen passports and national ID cards. OCT allows sub-surface imaging of translucent structures, non-destructively enabling quantitative visualisation of embedded security features.