Analysis, Design and Implementation of Biodiesel Projects in Brazil

During the oil crisis of the seventies, Brazil has developed a successful program for gasoline substitution by ethanol (Proálcool). Nowadays the biomass accounts for 27% of total national energy consumed in Brazil and the ethanol participates with 40% of the total national fuel consumption of Otto cycle vehicles. In 2004, the National Program for the Production and Use of Biodiesel (Biodiesel Program) was launched. One priority of the Biodiesel Program is the inclusion of family agriculture and smallholders into the production chain. The Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) has developed a software for the analysis of biodiesel projects with the participation of family agriculture. Results of production chain analysis and economic indicators calculated by the Biosoft system have allowed identifying the regular supply of oil at competitive prices as the key point to the efficiency of biodiesel production chains. The use of oil cake as feedstock is the leverage point of chain performance. The meal sale can lead to a vegetal oil price reduction, without compromising farmers´ income, since they can be able to set up their own oil extraction plants. Coordination is then the critical element and has the potential to improve the performance of both the biodiesel industry and the animal production chain.Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Industrial Organization,

Multilingual Event Extraction from Historical Newspaper Adverts

NLP methods can aid historians in analyzing textual materials in greater volumes than manually feasible. Developing such methods poses substantial challenges though. First, acquiring large, annotated historical datasets is difficult, as only domain experts can reliably label them. Second, most available off-the-shelf NLP models are trained on modern language texts, rendering them significantly less effective when applied to historical corpora. This is particularly problematic for less well studied tasks, and for languages other than English. This paper addresses these challenges while focusing on the under-explored task of event extraction from a novel domain of historical texts. We introduce a new multilingual dataset in English, French, and Dutch composed of newspaper ads from the early modern colonial period reporting on enslaved people who liberated themselves from enslavement. We find that: 1) even with scarce annotated data, it is possible to achieve surprisingly good results by formulating the problem as an extractive QA task and leveraging existing datasets and models for modern languages; and 2) cross-lingual low-resource learning for historical languages is highly challenging, and machine translation of the historical datasets to the considered target languages is, in practice, often the best-performing solution

Produção de inóculo de estreptomiceto em arroz esterilizado

Os actinomicetos são importantes agentes de controle biológico de doenças e promoção de crescimento de plantas, tornando necessária a obtenção de grandes quantidades de inóculo para trabalhos em casa-de-vegetação e campo. No presente trabalho, avaliou-se o crescimento de diversas espécies de Streptomyces em arroz esterilizado para a produção de inoculo. O arroz foi inoculado com isolados de S. thermotolerans, S. griseus subsp. griseus, Streptomyces sp. N0035, S. purpurascens e Streptomyces sp. e incubado a 28 ± 2ºC. Cinco dias após a incubação, para todos os isolados de Streptomyces, o crescimento micelial e esporulação eram visíveis nos grãos de arroz. Doze dias após incubação, o arroz colonizado foi transferido para envelopes de papel pardo e colocado em estufa a 30ºC por três dias. Após secagem, adicionou-se 1 g do arroz em 200 mL de água e fez-se a contagem de esporos por grama de arroz, em câmara de Newbauer. A produção de esporos de Streptomyces sp. variou de 0,14 × 10(9) a 1,47 × 10(9) esporos por grama de arroz e variou entre as espécies de Streptomyces. O arroz esterilizado é um substrato viável para a produção massal, de baixo custo, de inóculo de estreptomicetos.Actinomycetes are important plant disease control and growth promotion agents, which makes it necessary to develop technology to produce large quantities of inoculum for green-house and field work. The present study had the objective of evaluating the growth of several isolates of Streptomyces in sterile rice for inoculum production. The sterile rice was inoculated with isolates of S. thermotolerans, S. griseus subsp. griseus, Streptomyces sp. N0035, S. purpurascens, and Streptomyces sp., and incubated at 28 ± 2ºC. Five days after its inoculation, mycelial growth and sporulation was observed for all Streptomyces isolates on the rice grains. Twelve days after incubation, the colonized rice was transferred to envelopes of dark brown paper and let to dry in an incubator at 30ºC for three days. After drying, 1g of colonized rice was added to 200 mL of sterile distilled water and the number of spores was counted under a microscope with a Newbauer counting chamber. Spore production varied from 0.14 × 10(9) to 1.47 × 10(9) spores per gram of rice and differed among the Streptomyces species. Sterile rice can be an alternative substrate for low cost mass production of Streptomyces inoculum