Wedges and frames, two much-studied strategies of American political combat, are generally thought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor the political actor wielding them. My inquiry here explores whether there exists anything comparably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by American politicians not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to extremes but moderate them. Despite the seeming paucity of such efforts in American public discourse, there is one such common and as-yet untheorized scheme, which uses the two issue positions involved in wedges to overcome the ill effects of reframing and the two value dimensions involved in reframing to overcome the ill effects of wedges. I elaborate this discursive structure by examining its presence in a number of American political debates, showing how it differs from other contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in American politics.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the use of bolus tube feeding is increasing in the long-term home enteral tube feed (HETF) patients. A cross-sectional survey to assess the prevalence of bolus tube feeding and to characterise these patients was undertaken. Dietitians from ten centres across the UK collected data on all adult HETF patients on the dietetic caseload receiving bolus tube feeding (n 604, 60 % male, age 58 years). Demographic data, reasons for tube and bolus feeding, tube and equipment types, feeding method and patients’ complete tube feeding regimens were recorded. Over a third of patients receiving HETF used bolus feeding (37 %). Patients were long-term tube fed (4·1 years tube feeding, 3·5 years bolus tube feeding), living at home (71 %) and sedentary (70 %). The majority were head and neck cancer patients (22 %) who were significantly more active (79 %) and lived at home (97 %), while those with cerebral palsy (12 %) were typically younger (age 31 years) but sedentary (94 %). Most patients used bolus feeding as their sole feeding method (46 %), because it was quick and easy to use, as a top-up to oral diet or to mimic mealtimes. Importantly, oral nutritional supplements (ONS) were used for bolus feeding in 85 % of patients, with 51 % of these being compact-style ONS (2·4 kcal (10·0 kJ)/ml, 125 ml). This survey shows that bolus tube feeding is common among UK HETF patients, is used by a wide variety of patient groups and can be adapted to meet the needs of a variety of patients, clinical conditions, nutritional requirements and lifestyles.

Response of ‘Dixie’, ‘Lemondrop’, ‘Multipik’, ‘Superpik’, and ‘Seneca Prolific’ summer squash to halosulfuron PRE or POST at 0.036, 0.053, and 0.072 kg ai/ha, or halosulfuron PRE fb halosulfuron POST at 0.018 fb 0.018, 0.027 fb 0.027, and 0.036 fb 0.036 kg/ha was field evaluated in 1997 and 1998. All halosulfuron treatments and rates reduced the height of cultivars 17–19% at 6 WAP (weeks after planting) and summer-squash injury (chlorosis and necrosis of crop foliage) was 6, 14, and 11% from halosulfuron PRE, POST, and PRE fb POST, respectively. Early summer-squash flowering was reduced 32–82% by halosulfuron, resulting in reduced early yields. Dixie was the cultivar most tolerant to halosulfuron. Early flowering of Dixie was reduced 32–36% compared to 32–82% for the other cultivars. Marketable yield of summer squash was reduced 20–30% by all rates of halosulfuron when averaged over all application timings. Marketable yield of Seneca Prolific, Superpik, Dixie, Multipik, and Lemondrop was reduced 0–17% by halosulfuron PRE. Halosulfuron POST or PRE fb POST reduced marketable yield of all summer-squash cultivars by 25–46%. Thus, summer squash was not tolerant of POST halosulfuron; however, Dixie, Multipik, Seneca Prolific, and Superpik exhibited tolerance to halosulfuron PRE.

Thomas Donaldson’s framework for dealing with value-conflicts between a manager’s home and host country distinguishes between a “conflict of relative [economic] development”—conflicting norms that arise because home and host are at two different stages of economic development—and a “conflict of culture,” which arises because the home and host’s different cultures generate conflicting norms on the issue the manager faces. My question here is a thought experiment. What different insights might emerge if we flipped Donaldson’s framework around? Specifically: What if we viewed the kinds of conflicts that fall under Donaldson’s “conflicts of culture” as arising not because the home and host exhibit a “fundamental” conflict in cultural norms, but because they are at two different stages of cultural development? And what if we viewed “conflicts of relative economic development” as conflicts that occur not because home and host are at two different stages of economic development but, simply, because their economies contemporaneously interact with each other in ways that generate normative conflict: call them “conflicts of economy”?

Recently, students of public policy making in North America have added the analysis of “political discourse” to the tools of their trade. According to the “political discourse” school, the extent to which policy ideas gain acceptability cannot always be explained rationally in terms of their logical or empirical validity, nor instrumentally in terms of the interests they serve. Often, their careers must be accounted for, at least in part, by a detailed exploration of their ideological assumptions and appeal, and their rhetorical structure and persuasiveness. Despite its many plausible and promising features, this type of analysis has, to date, rarely been performed in specific instances of policy discourse. The author presents a “political-discourse” analysis of the 1985–1988 debate over Canada's Bill C-82, “An Act Respecting the Registration of Lobbyists.” That debate brought together some of Canada's most factually informed and instrumentally motivated policy actors. Nevertheless, the participants uniformly based their arguments on broad assumptions unsubstantiated by empirical analysis, and advanced those arguments in the rhetoric of the public good and democratic theory. The author concludes that underlying the two basic positions taken in debate over C-82—support for a regime of substantial disclosure of lobbying activity on the one hand, and opposition to disclosure on the other—were two competing sets of assumptions concerning the nature and workings of the faculties of reason and perception in politics.

A central strand in philosophical debate over the just distribution of resources attempts to juggle three competing imperatives: helping those who are worst off, helping those who will benefit the most, and then – beyond this – determining when to aggregate such ‘worst off’ and ‘benefit’ claims, and when instead to treat no such claim as greater than that which any individual by herself can exert. Yet as various philosophers have observed, ‘we have no satisfactory theoretical characterization’ as to how to weigh each of the three imperatives against one another, we find it ‘difficult to state . . . precise or comprehensive conclusions’, and we do not yet have a ‘metric for integrating the three measures’. In what follows, I offer an approach to weighing the three criteria against one another that yields resolutions – in Hard Cases of the ‘saving one infant's life versus replacing ten elderly people's hips’ sort – that are cardinally definitive, intuitively satisfactory and theoretically justified.

We discuss the selection of star-forming galaxies at z≃6 through the Lyman-break technique. Spitzer imaging implies many of these contain older stellar populations (>200Myr) which produce detectable Balmer breaks. The ages and stellar masses (∼1010M⊙) imply that the star formation rate density at earlier epochs may have been significantly higher than at z≃6, and might have played a key role in re-ionizing the universe.

Recent progress in measuring the optical depth of neutral hydrogen in distant quasars and that of electron scattering of microwave background photons suggests that most of the sources responsible for cosmic re-ionisation probably lie in the redshift interval 6 to 10. We present two new observational results which, together, provide valuable constraints on the contribution from star-forming sources in this redshift interval. First, using a large sample of v-band dropouts with unconfused Spitzer-IRAC detections, we determine the integrated stellar mass density at z = 5. This provides a valuable ‘integral constraint’ on past star formation. It seems difficult to reconcile the observed stellar mass at z = 5 with the low abundance of luminous i-z- and J-band dropouts in deep Hubble Space Telescope data. Accordingly, we explore whether less luminous star-forming sources in the redshift interval 6 to 10 might be the dominant cause of cosmic re-ionization. In the second component of our research, we report on the results of two surveys for weak Lymanα emitters and z- and J-band dropouts highly-magnified by foreground lensing clusters. Although some promising z = 8–9 candidates are found, it seems unlikely that low luminosity sources in this redshift interval can dominate cosmic reionization. If our work is substantiated by more extensive and precise surveys, the bulk of the re-ionizing photons may come from yet earlier sources lying at redshifts z>10.