Utilisation of Mobile Telephony as an EAS (Extension and Advisory Services ) Tool - A Study among Livestock based Women Self-Help Groups

Dairying provides self-employment opportunities to rural women in India. However, due to the lack of unique approaches to meet the information needs of women dairy farmers, dairying was not found profitable. Mobile phones as one of the communication channels can address the information and knowledge gap of rural women farmers. In this regard, a study was carried out about the mobile utility pattern of women farmers in livestock-based Womeh Self-Help Groups, their accessibility and affordability to mobile phones. The mobile utility pattern indicated that most of the respondents own mobile or had access through their family members and were using mobile for more than five years. SMS (Short Message Service) was the mostly used feature and were in the habit of checking SMS daily. Voice SMS was preferred over text SMS and evening time was the most preferred time for receiving SMS. Accessibility to mobile phone was observed by all the rural women in the study area, however, only a few were aware that scientific information can be received through mobiles. Most of them felt that it was good to pay for mobile extension advisory services which may improve the productivity of their farms an encouraging phenomenon towards the utilisation of digital tools for extension and advisory services

Searching for life with rovers: exploration methods and science results from the 2004 field campaign of the “Life in the Atacama” project and applications to future Mars Missions

LITA develops and field tests a long-range automated rover and a science payload to search for microbial life in the Atacama. The Atacama's evolution provides a unique training ground for designing and testing exploration strategies and life detection methods for the search for life on Mars

Optimal modelling of buildings through simultaneous automatic simplifications of point clouds obtained with a laser scanner

[EN] In recent years, the laser scanner has become the most used tool for modelling buildings in pure documentation and structural studies. Laser scanning provides large numbers of points in a minimum amount of time with great precision. The point clouds generated and the subsequent mosaics (data fusion of different clouds) contain millions of points with a heterogeneous density that define the 3D geometry of the buildings. Often, the number of points results in excessive information without offering a better definition. As a result, it is necessary to analyse which points can be eliminated and which ones cannot, based on precision criteria, to obtain a precise geometry with the smallest possible number of points for each part of the building. The algorithm developed in this work reduces the point clouds (in mosaics made up of clouds with over 10 million points) with precision criteria by as much as 99% while still accurately resolving the geometry of the object. The developed process is automatic such that different models with different resolutions can be obtained simultaneously. As a result, we obtain single clouds with homogenous distributions and densities throughout the model of the building (based on multiple overlapping clouds), with a computational cost of only a few seconds per cloud. The final result is a complete model of the entire building with the optimal resolution for each element of the structure. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.S2432519

Roadmap Tiefe Geothermie für Deutschland : Handlungsempfehlungen für Politik, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft für eine erfolgreiche Wärmewende

Strategiepapier von sechs Einrichtungen der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft und der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaf

A Photo-Realistic 3-D Mapping System for Extreme Nuclear Environments: Chornobyl

We present a novel stereoscopic mapping system for use in post-nuclear accident operations. First we discuss a radiation shielded sensor array designed to tolerate extended cumulative dose using 4x shielding. Next, we outline procedures to ensure timely, accurate range estimation using trinocular stereo. Finally, we review the implementation of a system for the integration of range information into a 3-D, textured, metrically accurate surface mesh