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Réseaux sociaux & Agriculture 19 juin 2005 – PARIS Voir : http://www.informatique-agricole.org/preparation-du-prochain-colloque-afia-reseaux-sociaux-et-agriculture/ EFITA/WCCA/CIGR 2015 Conference 29 June - 2 July - POZNAŃ, Poland In program four Workshops dedicated current, important topics: > "ERANET ICT-AGRI Farming Management and Information Systems" by Iver Thysen, Ana Cuadrado Galván, Kees Lokhorst and Jack Verhoosel > "Semantics for precision livestock farming" by Jack Verhoosel, Dana Tomic, Kees Lokhorst and Daniel Martini > "Connecting the islands in agro-ICT: You can not go alone!" by Walter Mayer and Andrej Mertelj > "Online teaching and active learning: Flipping the classroom" by Remigio Berruto, Patrizia Busato and Fedro Zazueta prof. Jerzy WERES Chair of the EFITA/WCCA/CIGR 2015 Committee prof. Wojciech MUELLER POLSITA President dr. Janina RUDOWICZ-NAWROCKA Secretary of the EFITA/WCCA/CIGR 2015 Committee E-mail: jrn(a)up.poznan.pl
Insider with AgLeader's founder by Willie Vogt (Farm Industry News) Al Myers saw a need for an on-the-go yield monitor, but he had no idea what that would really mean 23 years later. See: http://farmindustrynews.com/precision-farming/insider-agleaders-founder 20 technologies changing agriculture See: http://farmindustrynews.com/precision-farming/20-technologies-changing-agriculture#slide-0-field_images-45641
The process of invention: Now and then In the 19th century, inventors were heroes. The likes of Stephenson, Morse and Goodyear were the shock troops of the Industrial Revolution. Their ideas helped drag humanity from agrarian poverty to manufactured plenty. These days, though, inventor-superstars, while not absent, are fewer and farther between. That may, in part, be because the process of invention has itself changed since the 19th century. There is no let-up in the growth of the number of patents issued each year, but the introduction of fundamentally new classes of technology seems rarer now than it was in the past. Information technology has certainly transformed the present day. But railways, the electric telegraph, photography, fixed-line telephony, the automobile and the chemical and steel industries each, separately, brought about transformations as big as anything IT has wrought so far. Perhaps the process of invention really was more heroic in Victorian times. Invention can come about in two ways. Thomas Edison’s light bulb, for example, was not so much the product of a metaphorical light-bulb moment of discovery as of the bringing together of pre-existing components—an electricity supply, a heated filament, a vacuum and a glass envelope. None of these things was novel in the 1870s, but in Edison’s hands the combination became a patentable invention. In contrast, William Shockley’s transistor, invented 70 years later, involved a lot of new physics that Shockley and his colleagues had to work out for themselves. Both devices changed the world, though (Shockley’s was the foundation on which IT was built). And together they exemplify the two sorts of novelty that exist, in differing proportions, in any successful invention: discovery and recombination. Dr Youn has looked at the balance between these things, and how it may have changed. She drew her data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)—not a perfect indicator of inventiveness, but probably a fair proxy for it. The authorities there sort patent documents into groups based on common subject matter. To do so, they classify the various technologies responsible for an invention’s novelty using an elaborate arrangement of codes. Each subject grouping in USPTO’s scheme includes a major component called a class and a minor one called a subclass. A class distinguishes one technology from another. Subclasses delineate processes, structural features and functional features of the technology in that particular class. A class-subclass pair—say, 136/206 for class 136 (batteries: thermoelectric and photoelectric) and subclass 206 (solar energy type)—is a unique code, and every patent is identified by at least one such code. The office has records of these codes going back to 1790. Overall, those records cover 474 classes and more than 160,000 codes. Only when a patent proposal arrives that cannot be slotted into the existing classification is a new one created. When Dr Youn and her colleagues examined the patent office’s files they found that nearly half the patents issued by the United States during the 19th century were for single-code inventions. These days, by contrast, nine-tenths are for inventions that combine at least two codes. The number of codes and the number of patents both grew exponentially, at the same rate, until the 1870s (about the time of Edison’s light bulb; see chart). After that, the growth rate of new codes fell off dramatically, and that of new patents slightly. The introduction of new combinations of codes has, however, continued to expand in step with the number of patents awarded. That suggests invention now proceeds mainly by recombining existing technologies and chimes with the idea that inventions were, in some sense, more fundamental in the past than they are today. This combinatorial explosion no doubt partly reflects the fact that the number of possible combinations grows faster than the number of codes they are based on. But that it has actually happened had not, previously, been demonstrated. What remains to be seen is whether biotechnology will change things. Most inventions up until now have been based on physics or chemistry. Today’s understanding of biology, though, is roughly where that of the physical sciences was in the 19th century. Biology is therefore ripe to yield a clutch of new patent classes—possibly for things (neurological computers? furniture grown from seed?) as unimaginable to present-day folk as the telephone would have been to a soldier at the battle of Waterloo. Then, perhaps, a new generation of heroic inventors will emerge. See: http://www.economist.com/category/print-sections/science-and-technology
One Hungry Little Mouse See: http://www.diamondrescue.org/cute-pictures/one-hungry-little-mouse Be nice to others because...Time WILL make a difference! See: http://trop.troy.edu/drsmall/Words%20of%20Wisdom/Big_Dog.pdf Enter your first name and your name! Click here Some scientists decided to do the following experiments on a dog For the first experiment, they cut one of the dog's legs off, then they told the dog to walk. The dog got up and walked, so they learned that a dog could walk with just three legs. For the second experiment, they cut off a second leg from the dog, then they told the dog once more to walk. The dog was still able to walk with only two legs. For the third experiment, they cut off yet another leg from the dog and once more they told the dog to walk. However, the dog wasn't able to walk with only one leg. As a result of these three experiments, the scientists wrote in their final report that the dog had lost it's hearing after having three legs cut off. The distribution of this efita newsletter is sponsored by vitisphere.com Please, contribute to the content of your efita newsletter, and advertise your events, new publications, new products and new project in this newsletter. Without your support, it will not survive! Contact: Guy WAKSMAN E-mail: guy.waksman(a)laposte.net To read this newsletter on our web site See: http://www.informatique-agricole.org/gazette/efita/efita_150518_695.htm
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