Recent Developments in Alcoholic Beverage Labeling Regulation

In light of the ubiquitous “Nutrition Facts” labels that appear on food products and non-alcoholic beverages, it is surprising to some people that there is not a standard label on alcoholic beverages containing information about alcohol and nutritional content. In 2007, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (“TTB”)—the federal agency within the Department of the Treasury tasked with regulating alcoholic beverages—issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to require alcohol and nutritional content to appear on alcoholic beverage labels. Extensive public comments were submitted on the proposed rule, and more than three years have passed, but it is unclear if and when the TTB will issue a final rule. This note describes the recent history of TTB’s efforts to close this “regulatory gap” with respect alcoholic beverage labeling. Additionally, this note explores the unique balance of state and federal authority with respect to alcoholic beverage labeling, and how a more detailed federal label mandate may affect this balance. Special attention is paid to whether a federal label would “pre-empt” state label regulations

Discriminating small wooded elements in rural landscape from aerial photography: a hybrid pixel/object-based analysis approach

While small, fragmented wooded elements do not represent a large surface area in agricultural landscape, their role in the sustainability of ecological processes is recognized widely. Unfortunately, landscape ecology studies suffer from the lack of methods for automatic detection of these elements. We propose a hybrid approach using both aerial photographs and ancillary data of coarser resolution to automatically discriminate small wooded elements. First, a spectral and textural analysis is performed to identify all the planted-tree areas in the digital photograph. Secondly, an object-orientated spatial analysis using the two data sources and including a multi-resolution segmentation is applied to distinguish between large and small woods, copses, hedgerows and scattered trees. The results show the usefulness of the hybrid approach and the prospects for future ecological applications

Spatial uncertainty effects on a species-landscape relationship model in ecology

In this study, we explore the effects of geometrical uncertainty in an existing species-landscape relationship model in the hoverfly communities. We also investigate how geometrical uncertainties affect a more complex model including both current forest patch features and past forest features. Because of a possible time-lag in biological responses to forest changes such as fragmentation, the historical dimension is added to the first model. The proposed approach relies on three spatial sources enabling to get forest fragments at different times: historical map (~1850), aerial black and white photographs (1954) and orthorectified photographs (2010). Firstly, we analyze the effect of the spatial data production method (manual versus automatic) on models using current forest patches only. Then, we build a more complex model including past changes in forest size. As previously, the effect of production-based uncertainty was assessed by comparing the models based on forests extracted manually and automatically. We address finally the impact of positional accuracy on the historical map by using a Monte Carlo simulation approach. Global results show that responses of the statistical models are strongly affected by spatial uncertainty in inputs

François Provenzano, Vies et mort de la francophonie. Une politique française de la langue et de la littérature

Prolongement d’une thèse de doctorat, l’ouvrage émane d’un jeune chercheur à l’Université de Liège, ancien étudiant de Jean-Marie Klinkenberg aujourd’hui spécialisé dans le domaine de la rhétorique des discours théoriques, de la sémiologie et de l’histoire sociale des discours. Divisé en six chapitres, ce volume s’ouvre sur un avant-propos susceptible d’ébranler d’emblée certaines convictions ancrées chez le lecteur, qui se voit affirmer que «la francophonie n’a pas d’histoire». En effet, l’h..

Estimating taxonomic diversity and functional types of perennial forage grasses in mountain meadows: potentialities of Pléiades imagery

Estimating taxonomic diversity and functional types of perennial forage grasses in mountain meadows: potentialities of Pléiades imagery

Portraits of rural schooling : what does it mean to be a teacher in a rural school?

Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.This research presents an understanding of being a teacher and of teacher's work in schools which are defined as 'rural'. In asking the question, "What does it mean to be a teacher in a rural school?" I produced data of their daily practices and social realities that constitute the lived experiences of teachers within the context of rural education. Employing a critical, emancipatory framework, I documented the multiple identities and meanings that emerged, and drew attention to the teachers' need for change. The need to change what rural means, what rural schooling is, becomes the space to challenge and question oppressive practices and for opportunities of freedom. Using a narrative inquiry approach, I produced data of the lives of four teachers who work in two high schools in the Vulindlela District. The data sources used to produce the data included four life history interviews, which were conducted as the main methodological strategy, critical conversations and collages. Through narrative analysis, four reconstructed teachers' stories were produced. The storied narratives are reconstructions of lives told by two groupings of teachers: constructed by teachers that commute to the rural school from one rural area to another, and those that live in the same area as the school. Through the reconstructed teacher stories, the study makes visible how gender identities read against the history and traditional coding of rural settings. It also shows how these identities narrate these individual lives in particular ways, and how the teachers threaten these spaces to rework their meanings and practices for different ways of thinking, living and working as teachers in schools in rural settings. The study contributes towards an understanding of the relationship between 'school life' and 'whole life' . The study concludes that these teachers' personal and professional identities are negotiated on a daily basis, shaping and being shaped by particular social spaces in which they live and work, and make sense of the kind of the teachers they are and want to be. The teaching and learning choices and judgments they made in their classroom are intertwined with other variables other than just teaching. Being a teacher in a school within this particular schooling context, they are challenged with conditions, and have to constantly confront them. Alongside this, teachers enacted certain practices to disrupt, and challenge stereotypical understandings and meanings that we have come to adopt about rural schooling. This study shows that these four teachers in rural schools enacted certain practices 'within the school' and 'beyond the school'. They were able to cultivate commitment, connectedness and care. We see how the notion of "Engaged Pedagogy" (Hooks, 1994) plays itself out in rural schools by teachers who work there. They cultivate this type of pedagogy through constant reflection and by engaging in practices within the formal teaching time, during lunch breaks and beyond the formal teaching time. Through ongoing reflection in how they teach and what they teach they challenge traditional oppressive practices and establish better innovative ways of thinking and working as teachers. By making the change, rurality is transforming and, therefore, rural schooling too is being transformed. The desire expressed by the four teachers to support, care and to express love for learners as a way of improving the life for the learners in the school opened up opportunities for them to excel. By learners feeling good about themselves, they were able to perform better and in this way changed the experience of rural schooling. So to answer my research question, what does it mean to be a teacher in a rural school? It meant to work 'within the school' and 'beyond the school'

Prédiction des services écosystémiques dans les bois agricoles à partir d’images hyperspectrales

Les services écosystémiques sont devenus un enjeu social, écologique et économique majeur dans le monde. Les forêts des paysages agricoles offrent des services précieux bien qu'ils soient souvent sous-estimés et mal utilisés. Cependant, une cartographie précise de ces services à grande échelle reste difficile. Des données de télédétection permettent aujourd’hui d’envisager cette cartographie. Nous avons évalué la contribution des indices de végétation calculés à partir d'images hyperspectrales à haute résolution spatiale pour la prévision de services écosystémiques par rapport aux résultats fondées sur la couverture terrestre. 28 parcelles forestières ont été échantillonnées et des images hyperspectrales aéroportées ont été acquises pour la zone d'étude, à une résolution de 2 m. Habituellement, les indices de végétation dérivés de l'hyperspectral à l’échelle du paysage (buffer spatial autour de l’objet considéré) sont réduits en utilisant des statistiques descriptives (moyenne, écart-type, valeurs minimales et maximales). Cependant, cette approche peut perdre beaucoup d'informations, en particulier à l'échelle des paysages, où plusieurs objets avec différentes signatures spectrales sont présents. Nous proposons une description du paysage hyperspectral basée sur la répartition complète des indices de végétation à travers les paysages. Nous avons utilisé les modèles de mélange gaussien (GMM) pour modéliser la distribution des pixels dans chaque paysage et introduit une distance L2 entre ces mélanges. Cette distance est utilisée dans l’algorithme des plus proches voisins pour prédire les niveaux de services. La qualité des prédictions a été comparée entre trois représentations de paysage: occupation des sols, statistiques descriptives de données hyperspectrales et description de données hyperspectrales basées sur GMM

Pili multigemini of the eye: unusual and rare presentation

Pili Multigemini (PM) is an uncommon, pilar dysplasia characterized by clusters of hair shafts emerging from a single follicle. We present a rare and unique case of PM involving the eye. A 43 year old Caucasian male, presented with a prolonged history of a recurrent lesion at the right upper eyelid, present for two years. Clinical examination revealed a subcutaneous cyst with a prominent follicular pore with a differential diagnosis of epidermoid cyst, nevus and pili bifurcati. Excisional biopsy was performed and microscopy showed a benign malformed hair follicle containing multiple different hair shafts enclosed in a common outer root sheath; consistent with the diagnosis of Pilli Multigemini. Pili Multigemini was first described by Flemming in 1883 and is frequently found in the beard of adults and scalp of children. To our knowledge, this is the first case of Pilli Multigemini involving the eye. its noteworthy to consider during diagnostic workup; as well as to exclude other follicular and inflammatory abnormalities involving the eye

Object-based classification of grasslands from high resolution satellite image time series using gaussian mean map kernels

This paper deals with the classification of grasslands using high resolution satellite image time series. Grasslands considered in this work are semi-natural elements in fragmented landscapes, i.e., they are heterogeneous and small elements. The first contribution of this study is to account for grassland heterogeneity while working at the object level by modeling its pixels distributions by a Gaussian distribution. To measure the similarity between two grasslands, a new kernel is proposed as a second contribution: the a-Gaussian mean kernel. It allows one to weight the influence of the covariance matrix when comparing two Gaussian distributions. This kernel is introduced in support vector machines for the supervised classification of grasslands from southwest France. A dense intra-annual multispectral time series of the Formosat-2 satellite is used for the classification of grasslands’ management practices, while an inter-annual NDVI time series of Formosat-2 is used for old and young grasslands’ discrimination. Results are compared to other existing pixel- and object-based approaches in terms of classification accuracy and processing time. The proposed method is shown to be a good compromise between processing speed and classification accuracy. It can adapt to the classification constraints, and it encompasses several similarity measures known in the literature. It is appropriate for the classification of small and heterogeneous objects such as grasslands

Trichostasis Spinulosa of the Heel: Unique Presentation with Characteristic Morphology

Trichostasis Spinulosa is a peculiar lesion of the hair follicle that typically presents on the face. We present a case of a 59 years old Middle Eastern male who presented with a dark lesion on his heel. Examination revealed a 1.7 cm well-circumscribed black necrotic plaque with surrounding overhanging border with a differential diagnosis of melanoma. Histologically, the lesion was formed by inflamed clusters of numerous small hair shafts, consistent with Trichostasis Spinulosa of the heel. We report this case because of its unusual location and unique presentation