Work to create a network of food hubs, which aim to bring different parts of the supply chain together, is set to start early next year.
The 17 UK government-backed Food Enterprise Zones (FEZs) will be established in regions across England, with a share of £830,000 funding to help fast-track the expansion of food and farming businesses in the regions.
The aim is for the hubs to create greater collaboration between rural businesses, kick-start local food economies and help people develop new skills.
They will also create more than 10,000 new jobs, support tourism and inject investment into rural communities across the country, said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
“Food Enterprise Zones will unleash food entrepreneurs, bringing together researchers, farmers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers so they can improve productivity and spark new ideas off each other all the way along the supply chain from farm to fork, from lab to lunch,” she said.
The food hubs will include an 'artisanal food village' in Cornwall, an agri-food park near Malton in North Yorkshire, and a cluster of local artisan food producers around the River Orwell in Suffolk.
Defra said food and farming was the biggest manufacturing sector in Britain, with exports of UK food and drink around the world totalling almost £19 billion.
The government has awarded £750,000 to companies to develop technologies to decommission old nuclear sites.
The funding is part of a competition run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to develop innovative ways to safely and quickly clear nuclear sites. The initial money will be given to 15 shortlisted teams, with a total of £3m being made available to the final winners.
Winning entries had to be able to assess nuclear facilities and their content, clear them and package highly radioactive waste for safe storage with minimal human exposure. Technologies being developed are said to include artificial intelligence, virtual reality, drones, lasers and specialist sensors.
“The NDA is continually seeking the best way to encourage new ideas from the supply chain and ensure everyone has an opportunity to get involved,” said Melanie Brownridge, head of technology at the NDA.
Brownridge added she was encouraged by the level of interest from organisations outside the nuclear sector, including those in the oil and gas, defence and space exploration industries.
To encourage innovation the NDA said it had modelled its competition on BBC show Dragon’s Den, where firms are asked to develop and pitch their technologies and business cases.
A shortlist of 15 consortia has been drawn up, each of which will receive part of the funding to develop their initial ideas. The winning teams will receive additional funding, up to £1.5m each, to make their projects a reality.
The NDA wants the teams to develop technology that can be used for real-life decommissioning at Sellafield.
Decommissioning nuclear facilities is a slow and dangerous job that involves dismantling complex networks of contaminated pipes, vessels and miles of steelwork.
The UK has numerous nuclear facilities that are coming to the end of their operational life and will need to be made safe. The Sellafield reprocessing site has 170 individual facilities alone. The government estimates it will cost £85bn to decommission.
The decommission of old nuclear power plants has been an on-going challenge for the UK. In March the NDA agreed to pay out a total of £97.5m to two firms after the high court found it had wrongly awarded contracts to UK’s first generation nuclear power plants. It also cancelled the contract with the winning consortium early.
At the time, former energy secretary Chris Huhne estimated the cost of decommissioning old nuclear sites would total £161bn, and said the problem was that many early sites were made bespoke and with little consideration of how they would be dismantled.
It seems it is not only in politics the thought of uneasy coalitions are exercising the mind. The relationship between buyers, marketers and their suppliers is once again under scrutiny. The current issue of PR Week has five pages dedicated to the topic in its latest publication. Advertising Age in the US has interviews with buyers at Intel and Pfizer to defend the profession’s role. Firmvoice, the blog of the US Council of Public Relations Firms, has also waded into the debate on how to build bridges between the two camps. And finally (for this week at least, I hope) Marketing magazine is asking the question “Is procurement killing marketing creativity?” There is a weary familiarity to many of these pieces, raking over the same issues I thought had been dealt with by most firms two or three years ago - although the volume of articles is making me think otherwise. In fairness, most of the reports have avoided the shrieking hysteria that used to punctuate this discussion, with sensible and constructive advice on building collaboration, relationships and mutual understanding. Although, as we reported toward the end of last year, the agitation has not vanished completely. A ludicrous assumption persists that low-cost and creativity is mutually exclusive. Why can’t you have creative work at a reasonable price? A compromise between the two can be found in every other commoditised service. There is a temptation to argue that marketers and agencies should just stop moaning and get over it. If value cannot be demonstrated and worth proven, clients should find somebody else who can do both – and let’s face it, it is not a shallow marketplace. Procurement should not be made to feel like an apologetic interloper, trespassing on some sacred ground and having to justify its presence at every step. If buyers can demonstrate their value to the process, it should be up to the other participants to justify theirs.
This chapter provides an overview of how to use the Cisco Internet Streamer Content Delivery System (CDS) software command-line interface (CLI), including an explanation of CLI command modes, CDS devices modes, and tables that summarize the purpose of the commands in each mode. The chapter includes the following sections:
In the Cisco Internet Streamer CDS software, the device mode determines whether the CDS device is functioning as a Service Engine (SE), CDS Manager (CDSM), or Service Router (SR). The commands available from a specific CLI mode are determined by the CDS device mode that us in effect. Use the device mode Global configuration command to change the current device mode to another configuration. Use the show device-mode command to display the current device configuration.
Cisco Internet Streamer CDS software commands are not case sensitive. You can abbreviate commands and parameters as long as they contain enough letters to be different from any other currently available commands or parameters.
You can scroll through the last 20 commands stored in the history buffer and enter or edit the command at the prompt (see Table 1-1 ).
The CLI for Cisco Internet Streamer CDS Release 2.5 software is similar to the CLI for the Cisco IOS software. Both the Cisco IOS software and the CDS CLI are organized into different commands and configuration modes. Each mode provides access to a specific set of commands. This section describes the command modes provided by Cisco Internet Streamer CDS Release 2.5 software CLI, and includes the following topics:
Use the EXEC mode for setting, viewing, and testing system operations. The EXEC mode is divided into two access levels, user and privileged. Use the enable and disable commands to switch between the two levels.
Access to the user-level EXEC command line requires a valid password. The user-level EXEC commands are a subset of the privileged-level EXEC commands. The user-level EXEC prompt is the host name followed by a right-angle bracket (>). The prompt for the privileged-level EXEC command line is the pound sign (#). To execute an EXEC command, enter the command at the EXEC system prompt and press the Return key. In the following example, a user accesses the privileged-level EXEC command line from the user level:
Use the Delete or Backspace key sequences to edit commands when you enter commands at the EXEC prompt.
As a shortcut, you can abbreviate commands to the fewest letters that make them unique. For example, the letters sho can be entered for the show command.
Certain EXEC commands display multiple screens with the following prompt at the bottom of the screen:
The CLI provides several other configuration modes that make it easier to configure specific features, including the configuration modes described in Table 1-2 .
For further information about these configuration modes and the commands permitted in each one, see Chapter3, “Cisco Internet Streamer CDS Release 2.5 Software Commands”
The ^ symbol appears at the point in the command string where you have entered an incorrect command, keyword, or argument.
The system indicates that you need to provide additional arguments to complete the command. Press the Up Arrow to automatically repeat the previous command entry. Then add a space and question mark (?) to display the additional arguments:
The caret symbol (^) and help response indicate an error with the 00 entry. To display the correct syntax, press Ctrl-P or the Up Arrow. You can also re-enter the command string, and then enter a space character, a question mark, and press Enter :
To obtain a list of commands that start with a particular character set, enter an abbreviated command immediately followed by a question mark (?):
To avoid losing new configurations, save them to NVRAM using the copy or write commands, as shown in the following examples: