Soybean Breeding Aiming at increasing Productivity and Root-Knot Nematode Resistance

In Brazil, the root-knot nematode (Pratylenchus brachyurus) has gained importance, whatever because of the damage caused to soybean crops or because of its broad dispersion and incidences in producing areas. Therefore, this invention aimed at developing a new cultivar resistant to the major soybean diseases as well as to the root-knot nematode. As a result, we developed a soybean cultivar designated UFUS 8301. Generations were advanced by the single seed descent method. Value for Cultivation and Use assays were carried out during a 3-year period (2010/13). Distinctness, uniformity, and stability experiments were carried out during a 2-year period (2011/13). We used the reproduction factor (RF) statistics to assess damage and reproductive potentials of P. Brachyurus; analysis of variance tested differences between means. We accepted the null hypothesis there was no difference between UFUS 8301 and the parameter of resistance Crotalaria spectabilis. UFUS 8301 was found distinct from any other cultivar, homogeneous to the descriptors that had identified it and stable through generations. UFUS 8301 presented 19% oil and 39% protein on the seeds, and yield (3687.5 kg ha-1) above Brazilian national average

The authority of pleasure

The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non-contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non-contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don’t advance conclusive arguments for the Affective View in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the Affective View is worth serious reconsideration