Producing red clover seeds for organic agriculture

This tool is a data sheet that can be used by French farmers who produce or want to produce red clover seeds in organic conditions. It provides advice starting from the contract signing to the seed drying, going through the specificities of the crop, the sowing, irrigation, specific pests and their management, and the harvest

The Black Messiah: Revising the Color Symbolism of Western Christology

In An Introduction To African Civilizations, Willis N. Huggins writes that “one of the earliest flares of the race and color question” is recorded in hieroglyphics on a hugh granite stele erected about 2,000 B.C. by the Egyptian Pharoah of the Twelfth Dynasty, Usertesan III. In India, race prejudice may be as much as 5000 years old. Here we see blackness, as a contemptible color, being rejected by Indra, the God of Aryas. During the Middle Ages Talmudic and Midrashic sources sought to explain Blackness with such suggestions as “Ham was smitten in his skin” or that Noah told Ham “your seed will be ugly and dark-skinned,” or that Canaan was “the notorious world-darkener.”3 These and other evidences of color prejudice from very ancient times seem to cast doubt upon the allegation of some Western historians that prejudice against black skin color and African ancestry is of recent origin

Black Religion: Strategies of Survival, Elevation, and Liberation

In a classic essay on Black religion W. E. B. DuBois wrote: “Three things characterized this religion of the slave—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.”  Although this classic description captures the dynamic of the Africans’ earliest appropriation of evangelical Protestantism on both sides of the Atlantic, contemporary historical studies reveal a more complex and comprehensive pattern of religious development. From a perspective that includes not only what DuBois called “an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites . . . roughly designated as Voodooism,” but also the institutionalization of incipient slave worship in Black American churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, three dominant themes or motifs stand out as foundational from the Jamestown handing to the present. They are survival, elevation, and liberation

Pastoral Ministry in the Origin and Development of Black Theology

W. E. B. DuBois made the famous statement that the problem of the 20th century is the color line.1What did he mean? He was making the point that race and color have ontological significance in the ethos and worldview of white Western societies. He was saying that the mystique of race and color, particularly of Blackness and Whiteness, would present an inescapable problem to our thinking, feeling, politics and economics, culture and religion, for at least a hundred years

Le cas des marmites modelées e type M4.1. Nouvelles données archéologiques et archéometriques

Póster presentado en XI Congrès AIECM3 sur la céramique médiévale et moderne en Méditerranée, Antalya, Turquía, 19-23 octubre 2015Parmi les mobiliers présents en Méditerranée occidentale durant le haut Moyen Âge, la marmite modelée, à base plane et préhensions en languettes, correspondant au type M4.1 a été mise en évidence par S. Gutiérrez Lloret dans le sud-est de la péninsule Ibérique. Elle semble constituer un marqueur chronologique caractéristique des contextes archéologiques des VIIIe, IXe et Xe s. (Gutiérrez Lloret 1996, 2015). Ce type d’ustensile culinaire, assez générique, est présent sur les deux rives de la Méditerranée occidentale. En Espagne, ces marmites présentes dans de nombreux contextes précoces de la période islamique semble toutefois procéder de formes M.1 et M.2, issues de la tradition tardo antique et wisigothique. Dans le nord de l’Afrique, ce type s’inscrit vraisemblablement dans le prolongement des modèles de la Calcitic Ware de l’Antiquité tardive

Toward a Common Expression of Faith: A Black North American Perspective

A special consultation on one common expression of the Apostolic faith from the perspective of Black Christians in the U.S. brought together representatives of several Black denominations at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, December 14-15, 1984. The consultation included representatives of the Black constituencies of several predominantly White denominations. In some cases the participants were delegated by denominational administrative headquarters; others were representatives of their communions without official appointment. The context of this document, therefore, stands upon the authority of the consultation alone and does not purport to convey the agreements of an ecclesiastical council of Black churches. This document, moreover, does not pretend to be an exhaustive response to the Apostolic Faith Study or a formal statement of the major themes of the Black theology movement that has evolved in North America in recent years. The Richmond Consultation, sponsored by the Commission on Faith and Order of the National Council of Churches in the U.S.A., attempted to convey to the World Council of Churches and to other interested organizations what we, a group of Black theologians and church leaders from across the United States, perceive as a general consensus among us concerning a common expression of the faith of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. In the several working papers we discussed and in this report we seek to add to the worldwide ecumenical study of a common expression of apostolic Faith the distinctive perceptions and insights that come out of the historic experience of Black Christians in North America

Design of a decision support system for combined cycle schemes

The growing desire for sponsors of power generation projects to share risk with the lenders has promoted the use of computational tools, simulating and evaluating from a techno-economic viewpoint long-term, high-risk projects. Such models need to include reliable engine diagnostics, life cycle costing and risk analysis technique. This work consisted in designing a Decision Support System (DSS) for the assessment of power generation projects using industrial gas turbines in combined cycle. The software, programmed in Visual Basic in Excel in a windows-frame, runs an external application named Pythia, which has been developed by the Department of Propulsion, Power; Energy and Automotive Engineering at Cranfield University. It can perform gas turbine performance simulations, including off-design conditions, with or without degradation effects providing thus reliable engine diagnostics. Steam cycle models including different heat recovery steam generator configurations have been developed to simulate steam turbine design and off-design performance. Plant performance simulation takes into account off-design conditions, part-load governing strategies and degradation effects. Besides a robust economic mode and a life cycle costing model including maintenance planning assessments offer a wide range of possible operating and economic scenarios. The degree of uncertainty relating to technical and economic factors is assessed using normal distributions, and the level of risk is then evaluated using a risk analysis, technique based upon the Monte Carlo method. The DSS provides all sorts of charts and techno-economic figures in order to support the decision making through an effective user-friendly window-oriented interface.MPhi

Terminal-repeat retrotransposons with GAG domain in plant genomes : a new testimony on the complex world of transposable elements

A novel structure of nonautonomous long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons called terminal repeat with GAG domain (TR-GAG) has been described in plants, both in monocotyledonous, dicotyledonous and basal angiosperm genomes. TR-GAGs are relatively short elements in length (<4 kb) showing the typical features of LTR-retrotransposons. However, they carry only one open reading frame coding for the GAG precursor protein involved for instance in transposition, the assembly, and the packaging of the element into the virus-like particle. GAG precursors show similarities with both Copia and Gypsy GAG proteins, suggesting evolutionary relationships of TR-GAG elements with both families. Despite the lack of the enzymatic machinery required for their mobility, strong evidences suggest that TR-GAGs are still active. TR-GAGs represent ubiquitous nonautonomous structures that could be involved in the molecular diversities of plant genomes

Fine sediment reduces vertical migrations of Gammarus pulex (Crustacea: Amphipoda) in response to surface water loss

Surface and subsurface sediments in river ecosystems are recognized as refuges that may promote invertebrate survival during disturbances such as floods and streambed drying. Refuge use is spatiotemporally variable, with environmental factors including substrate composition, in particular the proportion of fine sediment (FS), affecting the ability of organisms to move through interstitial spaces. We conducted a laboratory experiment to examine the effects of FS on the movement of Gammarus pulex Linnaeus (Crustacea: Amphipoda) into subsurface sediments in response to surface water loss. We hypothesized that increasing volumes of FS would impede and ultimately prevent individuals from migrating into the sediments. To test this hypothesis, the proportion of FS (1–2 mm diameter) present within an open gravel matrix (4–16 mm diameter) was varied from 10 to 20% by volume in 2.5% increments. Under control conditions (0% FS), 93% of individuals moved into subsurface sediments as the water level was reduced. The proportion of individuals moving into the subsurface decreased to 74% at 10% FS, and at 20% FS no individuals entered the sediments, supporting our hypothesis. These results demonstrate the importance of reducing FS inputs into river ecosystems and restoring FS-clogged riverbeds, to promote refuge use during increasingly common instream disturbances

Benthic and Hyporheic Macroinvertebrate Distribution Within the Heads and Tails of Riffles During Baseflow Conditions

The distribution of lotic fauna is widely acknowledged to be patchy reflecting the interaction between biotic and abiotic factors. In an in-situ field study, the distribution of benthic and hyporheic invertebrates in the heads (downwelling) and tails (upwelling) of riffles were examined during stable baseflow conditions. Riffle heads were found to contain a greater proportion of interstitial fine sediment than riffle tails. Significant differences in the composition of benthic communities were associated with the amount of fine sediment. Riffle tail habitats supported a greater abundance and diversity of invertebrates sensitive to fine sediment such as EPT taxa. Shredder feeding taxa were more abundant in riffle heads suggesting greater availability of organic matter. In contrast, no significant differences in the hyporheic community were recorded between riffle heads and tails. We hypothesise that clogging of hyporheic interstices with fine sediments may have resulted in the homogenization of the invertebrate community by limiting faunal movement into the hyporheic zone at both the riffle head and tail. The results suggest that vertical hydrological exchange significantly influences the distribution of fine sediment and macroinvertebrate communities at the riffle scale