Setting the Table for Feast or Famine: How Education will Play a Deciding Role in the Future of Precision Agriculture

Precision agriculture has many names including satellite farming, or site-specific crop management. Early forms of precision agriculture involved creating fertilizer maps, yield measurements, grid sampling, and soil pH content monitoring. Roughly 25 years ago, the advent of global positioning systems, commonly known as GPS, enabled farmers to make more informed decisions about where to plant seed and how much seed to plant. Precision agriculture technologies typically utilize sensors that are placed on tractors, combines, and other farm equipment, and which measure various conditions including seeding rates, soil conditions, and other indicators of production. Over time, this technology has been expanded to provide a wide range of services like field mapping, tractor guidance, and yield monitoring. These technologies also help farmers make the most efficient use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. As a result, farmers are no longer forced to treat fields uniformly or to make guesses about the best courses of action for their fields. Instead, precision agriculture enables farmers to micromanage their fields on a day-to day basis, or even minute-by-minute basis, while relying on highly accurate data

American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, Vol. 12

American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine was published monthly from 1829 through 1844

Three chapters in the history of femicide

This dissertation describes the genesis of the idea of femicide in a period of English and American Letters, the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, in which patriarchal values and constructions were entering a crisis which resulted in the revision of the idea of gender—in a way, that was the period in which the concept of gender was coded. In the first chapter, I look at the way the term femicide was first given currency in the English language in 1827 through Robert Macnish’s The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide, a fiction disguised as a true story, and how it spawned a short-lived literary sub-genre. In the second chapter, I examine Poe’s reworking of the femicide story, and to the ways in which he has drawn attention to its Gothic roots. Finally, in the third chapter, I offer a reading of Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,’ in which I argue that Godwin’s “sentimentalised” portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, and by extension of the female intellectual, constitutes an implicit refutation of her ideas, and therefore can be profitably compared to the portraits Poe’s femicide narrators make of Morella and Ligeia in the tales named after them.Esta dissertação descreve a génese da ideia de femicídio durante um período nas letras Anglo-saxónicas, entre a última década do séc. XVIII e meados do século seguinte, em que os valores e elaborações ideológicas patriarcais entravam numa crise que conduziria a uma revisão da ideia de género (de certo modo, poder-se-ia mesmo dizer que é nesse período que o conceito de género começa a ser codificado). No primeiro capítulo, descrevo como o termo femicídio ganhou pela primeira vez projecção na língua inglesa depois da publicação, em 1827, de The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide de Robert Macnish, uma ficção apresentada ostensivamente como relato verídico que deu origem a um efémero sub-género de ficção, a que chamo “história de femicídio.” No segundo capítulo examino a reinterpretação da história de femicídio por Edgar Allan Poe, e sobre o modo como este autor pôs em evidência as suas raízes góticas. Finalmente, no terceiro capítulo, apresento uma leitura de Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ em que argumento que o retrato “sentimentalizado” que Godwin aí faz de Mary Wollstonecraft, e por extensão da mulher intelectual, porquanto constitui uma refutação implícita das ideias dessa autora, ganha em ser comparado com os retratos que os narradores femicídas de Poe fazem das suas esposas em “Morella” e “Ligeia.