Towards a doubly green revolution : papers from the Seminar of 8th and 9th November 1995, Poitiers (France)

The Green Revolution has tried to fight against poverty and food shortages by selecting varieties and improved production systems, by the massive use of fertilizers and pesticides. Its impact was very important but only in countries with high production capacity, water surpluses and high population density. The aim of the Doubly-Green Revolution consists of changing the agricultural development rationale based on the control of the environment to another based on the harmony with the ecosystems : working with and not against the variability of systems and making agriculture profit from the knowledge acquired by the ecological sciences. It aims to increase production without depleating the environment nor affecting the bio-diversity for future generations. It also seeks to alleviate poverty and decrease food insecurity guaranting economic viability and social equity. Thus, Doubly-Green Revolution requires an interdisciplinary, intersectorial and spatial approach which was dis-cussed in the seminar. Organized by CIRAD and the Innovation et Prospective Foundation at Poitiers (France) with scientists and decision makers from developed and developing countries, it allowed a better understanding of the challenges related to food security and renewable resource management in the world

Local currencies in European History : an analytical framework

Although today's main organisation principle of monetary spaces is the nation-state's one, everyone can see it is not totally the case because of the existence and the development of local and social currencies and other sorts of parallel currencies. European history gives very useful lessons on this matter. One can distinguish, indeed, three historical periods : firstly, an “old regime” with a great diversity of money, including forms of local currencies ; secondly, the building of nation states and, consequently, what Benjamin Cohen (1998) calls a “westphalian model of geography of money”, centred on the principle of one nation, one money, excluding local currencies different from national currencies ; thirdly, the contesting of such a regime of monetary sovereignty. European history gives, then, evidences that the contemporary dynamics of local currencies is not a new one, but that it is undoubtedly the most important of the third period. European history leads however to make significant differences between forms of monetary localisms. Those differences are analyzed within the following framework. First, we have to make a distinction between the nature of issuers : public authorities, groups of citizens, businesses and banks. Monetary localisms before the Westphalian era were mainly organized by public authorities (lords) and religious orders, whereas today's monetary localisms mainly come from citizens and businesses (except from emergency issues and secessions logics). Second, we have to make a distinction between the rationales for monetary localisms : sovereignty, seignoriage and financing needs, protecting spaces, revitalizing spaces, transforming the nature of exchanges and money. Monetary localisms before the Westphalian era were mainly organized in order to capture money and dynamize spaces, whereas one can find the four rationales in today's monetary localisms. The paper, after presenting the analytical framework, concentrates on three sorts of local currencies : local currencies as a result of necessities, local currencies issued by banks and local currencies aiming to change money. It concludes on the differences between local currencies in European history and contemporary local currencies.Local currencies;monetary history;Europe;Owen;Gesell;Banks of issue

Adapted K-Nearest Neighbors for Detecting Anomalies on Spatio–Temporal Traffic Flow

Outlier detection is an extensive research area, which has been intensively studied in several domains such as biological sciences, medical diagnosis, surveillance, and traffic anomaly detection. This paper explores advances in the outlier detection area by finding anomalies in spatio-temporal urban traffic flow. It proposes a new approach by considering the distribution of the flows in a given time interval. The flow distribution probability (FDP) databases are first constructed from the traffic flows by considering both spatial and temporal information. The outlier detection mechanism is then applied to the coming flow distribution probabilities, the inliers are stored to enrich the FDP databases, while the outliers are excluded from the FDP databases. Moreover, a k-nearest neighbor for distance-based outlier detection is investigated and adopted for FDP outlier detection. To validate the proposed framework, real data from Odense traffic flow case are evaluated at ten locations. The results reveal that the proposed framework is able to detect the real distribution of flow outliers. Another experiment has been carried out on Beijing data, the results show that our approach outperforms the baseline algorithms for high-urban traffic flow

Chronicles of a deflation unforetold

Suppose the nominal money supply could be cut literally overnight by, say, 20%. What would happen to prices, wages, output? The answer can be found in 1720s France, where just such an experiment was carried out, repeatedly. Prices adjusted instantaneously and fully on one market only, that for foreign exchange. Prices on other markets (such as commodities) as well as prices of manufactured goods and industrial wages fell slowly, over many months, and not by the full amount of the nominal reduction. Coincidentally or not, the industrial sector (as represented by manufacturing of woolen cloths) experienced a contraction of 30%. When the government changed course and increased the nominal money supply overnight by 20%, prices responded much more, and the woolen industry rebounded.Deflation (Finance) ; Prices

A Comparative Study of Physicochemical, Dielectric and Thermal Properties of Pressboard Insulation Impregnated with Natural Ester and Mineral Oil

Natural ester is considered to be a substitute of mineral oil in the future. To apply natural ester in large transformers safely, natural ester impregnated solid insulation should be proved to have comparable dielectric strength and thermal stability to mineral oil impregnated solid insulation. This paper mainly focuses on a comparative study of physicochemical, ac breakdown strength and thermal stability behavior of BIOTEMP natural ester/pressboard insulation and Karamay 25# naphthenic mineral oil/pressboard insulation after long term thermal ageing. The physicochemical and dielectric parameters including moisture, acids and the ac breakdown strength of these two oil/pressboard insulation systems at different ageing status were compared. The permittivity and ac breakdown strength of these two oil/pressboard insulation systems at different temperatures were also investigated. And a comparative result of the thermal stability behavior of these two oil/pressboard insulation systems with different ageing status was provided at last. Results show that though natural ester has higher absolute humidity and acidity during the long ageing period, the lower relative humidity of natural ester helps to keep its ac breakdown strength higher than mineral oil. The pressboard aged in natural ester also has higher ac breakdown strength than that aged in mineral oil. The lower relative permittivity ratio of natural ester impregnated paper to natural ester is beneficial to its dielectric strength. Using natural ester in transformer, the resistance to thermal decomposition of the oil/pressboard insulation system could be also effectively improved

Increased genetic diversity improves crop yield stability under climate variability: a computational study on sunflower

A crop can be represented as a biotechnical system in which components are either chosen (cultivar, management) or given (soil, climate) and whose combination generates highly variable stress patterns and yield responses. Here, we used modeling and simulation to predict the crop phenotypic plasticity resulting from the interaction of plant traits (G), climatic variability (E) and management actions (M). We designed two in silico experiments that compared existing and virtual sunflower cultivars (Helianthus annuus L.) in a target population of cropping environments by simulating a range of indicators of crop performance. Optimization methods were then used to search for GEM combinations that matched desired crop specifications. Computational experiments showed that the fit of particular cultivars in specific environments is gradually increasing with the knowledge of pedo-climatic conditions. At the regional scale, tuning the choice of cultivar impacted crop performance the same magnitude as the effect of yearly genetic progress made by breeding. When considering virtual genetic material, designed by recombining plant traits, cultivar choice had a greater positive impact on crop performance and stability. Results suggested that breeding for key traits conferring plant plasticity improved cultivar global adaptation capacity whereas increasing genetic diversity allowed to choose cultivars with distinctive traits that were more adapted to specific conditions. Consequently, breeding genetic material that is both plastic and diverse may improve yield stability of agricultural systems exposed to climatic variability. We argue that process-based modeling could help enhancing spatial management of cultivated genetic diversity and could be integrated in functional breeding approaches

A study of the stress wave factor technique for nondestructive evaluation of composite materials

The acousto-ultrasonic method of nondestructive evaluation is an extremely sensitive means of assessing material response. Efforts continue to complete the understanding of this method. In order to achieve the full sensitivity of the technique, extreme care must be taken in its performance. This report provides an update of the efforts to advance the understanding of this method and to increase its application to the nondestructive evaluation of composite materials. Included are descriptions of a novel optical system that is capable of measuring in-plane and out-of-plane displacements, an IBM PC-based data acquisition system, an extensive data analysis software package, the azimuthal variation of acousto-ultrasonic behavior in graphite/epoxy laminates, and preliminary examination of processing variation in graphite-aluminum tubes

A case study in identifying acceptable bitrates for human face recognition tasks

Face recognition from images or video footage requires a certain level of recorded image quality. This paper derives acceptable bitrates (relating to levels of compression and consequently quality) of footage with human faces, using an industry implementation of the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and the Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recording systems on London buses. The London buses application is utilized as a case study for setting up a methodology and implementing suitable data analysis for face recognition from recorded footage, which has been degraded by compression. The majority of CCTV recorders on buses use a proprietary format based on the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard, exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy. Low bitrates are favored in the CCTV industry for saving storage and transmission bandwidth, but they compromise the image usefulness of the recorded imagery. In this context, usefulness is determined by the presence of enough facial information remaining in the compressed image to allow a specialist to recognize a person. The investigation includes four steps: (1) Development of a video dataset representative of typical CCTV bus scenarios. (2) Selection and grouping of video scenes based on local (facial) and global (entire scene) content properties. (3) Psychophysical investigations to identify the key scenes, which are most affected by compression, using an industry implementation of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. (4) Testing of CCTV recording systems on buses with the key scenes and further psychophysical investigations. The results showed a dependency upon scene content properties. Very dark scenes and scenes with high levels of spatial–temporal busyness were the most challenging to compress, requiring higher bitrates to maintain useful information

Nonlinear viscoelastic characterization of polycarbonate

Uniaxial tensile creep and recovery data from polycarbonate at six temperatures and six stress levels are analyzed for nonlinear viscoelastic constitutive modeling. A theory to account for combined effects of two or more accelerating factors is presented