World soybean trade : growth and sustainability

Soybeans can be consumed directly as food, and in China hey are the major ingredient in food products such as tofu and soy milk, but direct consumption is small relative to their wider use in animal feed, and it is the requirement for livestock feed that drives international trade. Rapid growth of economies and population, especially in Asia, has led to increased demand for animal protein and cooking oil. This paper analyses the recent growth in supply of soybeans from North and South America to China, and considers the factors that may affect this trade in future; a contrast is made with supply from North and South America to Europe, which has not been increasing. The constraints preventing an increase in supply of soybeans to Europe are reviewed. The paper concludes with brief discussion of the factors which will affect world markets for soybeans and soybean products in future

Modeling and Formal Verification of a Passive Optical Network on Chip Behavior

Many of the modern Systems-on-Chip integrate a high density of heterogeneous components such as different processors, a wide range of hardware components, as well as complex interconnects that use different communication protocols. On-chip physical interconnections represent a limiting factor for the performance and energy consumption. Currently, the optical interconnects integrated on chip are a viable alternative for on chip interconnects. However, the access to physical prototyping of these interconnects is a major challenge because this systems require very recent technologies, still difficult to access. Thus, their high-level modeling and validation are mandatory. This paper proposes the modeling and the formal verification for the global validation of the behavior of a passive integrated photonic routing structure using models that are based on timed automata

Giving voice to equitable collaboration in participatory design

An AHRC funded research project titled Experimenting with the Co-experience Environment (June 2005 – June 2006) culminated in a physical environment designed in resonance with a small group of participants. The participants emerged from different disciplines coming together as a group to share their expertise and contribute their knowledge to design. They engaged in storytelling, individual and co-thinking, creating and co-creating, sharing ideas that did not require justification, proposed designs even though most were not designers …and played. The research questioned how a physical environment designed specifically for co-experiencing might contribute to new knowledge in design? Through play and by working in action together the participants demonstrated the potential of a physical co-experience environment to function as a scaffold for inter-disciplinary design thinking,saying, doing and making (Ivey & Sanders 2006). Ultimately the research questioned how this outcome might influence our approach to engaging participants in design research and experimentation

Complementary Communication Path for Energy Efficient On-Chip Optical Interconnects

International audienceOptical interconnects are considered to be one of the key solutions for future generation on-chip interconnects. However, energy efficiency is mainly limited by the losses incurred by the optical signals, which considerably reduces the optical power received by the photodetectors. In this paper we propose a differential transmission of the modulated signals, which contributes to improve the transmission of the optical signal power on the receiver side. With this approach, it is possible to reduce the input laser power and increase the energy efficiency of the optical communication. The approach is generic and can be applied to SWSR-, MWSR-, SWMR- and MWMR-like architectures

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Pre-bomb marine reservoir variability in the Kimberley region, Western Australia

New ΔR values are presented for 10 known-age shells from the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. Previous estimates of ΔR for the Kimberley region are based on only 6 individual shell specimens with dates of live collection known only to within 50 yr (Bowman 1985a). Here, we describe the results of our recent attempts to constrain ΔR variability for this region by dating a suite of known-age pre-AD 1950 shell samples from the Australian Museum and Museum Victoria. A regional ΔR of 58 ± 17 14C yr for open waters between Broome and Cape Leveque is recommended based on 7 of these specimens. The criteria used to select shells for dating and inclusion in the regional mean are discussed.Copyright Information: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0033-8222

Design Framework for Heterogeneous Hardware and Software in Wireless Sensor Networks

International audienceWireless Sensor Networks are composed of many autonomous resource-constrained sensor nodes. Constrains are low energy, memory and processing speed. Nowadays, several limitations exist for heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks: various hardware and software are hardly supported at design and simulation levels. Meanwhile, to optimize a self-organized network, it is essential to be able to update it with new nodes, to ensure interoperability, and to be able to exchange not only data but functionalities between nodes. Moreover, it is difficult to make design space exploration, as accurate hardware-level models and network-level simulations have very different (opposite) levels. We propose a simulator-based on SystemC language-that allows such design space explorations. It is composed of a library of hardware and software blocks. More and more sophisticated software support is implemented in our simulator. As trend is to deploy heterogeneous nodes, various software levels have to be considered. Our simulator is also thought to support many levels: from machine code to high level languages

Still moving toward automation of the systematic review process: a summary of discussions at the third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR)

The third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR) was held 17–18 October 2017 in London, England. ICASR is an interdisciplinary group whose goal is to maximize the use of technology for conducting rapid, accurate, and efficient systematic reviews of scientific evidence. The group seeks to facilitate the development and widespread acceptance of automated techniques for systematic reviews. The meeting’s conclusion was that the most pressing needs at present are to develop approaches for validating currently available tools and to provide increased access to curated corpora that can be used for validation. To that end, ICASR’s short-term goals in 2018–2019 are to propose and publish protocols for key tasks in systematic reviews and to develop an approach for sharing curated corpora for validating the automation of the key tasks