24 research outputs found
Review of \u3ci\u3eAmerican Farm Tools: From Hand-Power to Steam-Power\u3c/i\u3e By R. Douglas Hurt
No full textR. Douglas Hurt deals with the invention and development of American farm implements and machinery with a special emphasis on the nineteenth century. The material is organized around the functions of various agricultural machines used in the major grain-growing states. Ten chapters focus on the improvements made in plows, grain drills, corn planters, cultivators, reapers, binders, headers, corn binders, corn shellers, threshing machines, combined harvesters, mowing machines, hay stackers, feed mills, and steam traction engines.
The author decided to describe certain lines of farm equipment without trying to catalogue all agricultural tools, implements, and machines. Therefore the reader will not find descriptions of such items as cotton gins, saw mills, blacksmith tools, windmills, irrigation pumps, wagons, buggies, washing machines, and hardware materials. Also, during the period 1892 to 1914, no mention is made of the manufacture of the internal combustion engine and its uses in stationary gas engines, the early tractors, automobiles, trucks, and electric light plants.
The judicious use of 219 photographs and illustrations gives a visual presentation of the evolution of rural technology. The verbal descriptions of mechanical and technical matters can be readily understood by the general reader. The book includes a good bibliography and a helpful appendix to aid the reader in understanding the importance of metallurgy as an important factor in the manufacture of farm machinery. Better farm machinery had to wait until the making of steel had been perfected.
Some readers would welcome more analysis and interpretation of rural technology. For example, virtually all historians mention that our colonial forefathers used the wooden plow, the sickle, and the flail to grow crops, the same tools used thousands of years earlier in Biblical times. Why was this progress so slow? Why were no new machines invented in colonial America in the 170 years prior to the Revolutionary War? Why did it take two hundred years of experimentation before the first successful track-type Caterpillar engines were built in 1904? Combines were widely used in the Pacific Coast states in the 1880s, yet they were not adopted in the Midwest until the late 1920s, a lag of forty years. Perhaps historians should give more attention to the factors that deter progress and to the obstacles that prevent the adoption of new ideas, to try to explain the inability of people to adopt new methods.
Nevertheless, the narrative is informative and well written. American Farm Tools is a fine addition to the historical record
Captain Nathaniel Wyche Hunter and the Florida Indian Campaigns, 1837-1841
No full textIn January, 1837, Captain Nathaniel Wyche Hunter arrived at Fort Huleman, Florida, to engage in the military campaigns against the Seminole Indians. His letters and diaries during the next four years provide a vivid account of military life in the Peninsula State. Although his observations do not alter the history of the Seminole wars, they do reflect the thoughts of a perceptive officer facing the frustrations common to this theater of frontier warfare. They also present a soldier’s view of the United States government’s action in removing the Florida Indians to lands beyond the Mississippi river
Engines of Growth: Farm Tractors and Twentieth-Century U.S. Economic Welfare
No full textThe role of twentieth-century agricultural mechanization in changing the productivity, employment opportunities, and appearance of rural America has long been appreciated. Less attention has been paid to the impact made by farm tractors, combines, and associated equipment on the standard of living of the U.S. population as a whole. This paper demonstrates, through use of a detailed counterfactual analysis, that mechanization in the production of farm products increased GDP by more than 8.0 percent, using 1954 as a base year. This result suggests that studying individual innovations can significantly increase our understanding of the nature of economic growth.
A product-line architecture for web service-based visual composition of web applications
No full textA web service-based web application (WSbWA) is a collection of web services or reusable proven software parts that can be discovered and invoked using standard Internet protocols. The use of these web services in the development process of WSbWAs can help overcome many problems of software use, deployment and evolution. Although the cost-effective software engineering of WSbWAs is potentially a very rewarding area, not much work has been done to accomplish short time to market conditions by viewing and dealing with WSbWAs as software products that can be derived from a common infrastructure and assets with a captured specific abstraction in the domain. Both Product Line Engineering (PLE) and Agile Methods (AMs), albeit with different philosophies, are software engineering approaches that can significantly shorten the time to market and increase the quality of products. Using the PLE approach we built, at the domain engineering level, a WSbWA-specific lightweight product-line architecture and combined it, at the application engineering level, with an Agile Method that uses a domain-specific visual language with direct manipulation and extraction capabilities of web services to perform customization and calibration of a product or WSBWA for a specific customer. To assess the effectiveness of our approach we designed and implemented a tool that we used to investigate the return on investment of the activities related to PLE and AMs. Details of our proposed approach, the related tool developed, and the experimental study performed are presented in this article together with a discussion of planned directions of future work. © 2007.BALZERANI L, 2005, THESIS U DEGLI STUDI; Balzerani L., 2005, P 2005 ACM S APPL CO, P1689, DOI 10.1145-1066677.1067059; BOEHM B, 2004, BALANCING AGILITY DI; Capilla R., 2005, Proceedings. Eighth International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution; CAPILLA R, 2005, CHAPTER MANAGING COR, P255; Carbon R., 2006, P 1 INT WORKSH AG PR; Clements P, 2004, FRAMEWORK SOFTWARE P; FOWLER M, 2007, NEW METHODOLOGY; GINSBURG M, 2007, THESIS; *IBM, 2007, SPEC BUS PROC EX LAN; Ito K., 2003, P 14 ACM C HYP HYP, P184; ITO K, 2003, P WORKSH EM APPL WIR; JACYNTHO MD, 2002, J WEB ENG, V1, P37; *JAV SUN, 2007, DES PATT MOD VIEW CO; KARAM M, 2006, P IEEE ADV INT C TEL, P206; Leff A., 2001, Proceedings Fifth IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, DOI 10.1109-EDOC.2001.950428; Liu N., 2005, P 2005 ACM IEEE INT, P321, DOI 10.1145-1101908.1101960; Pautasso C., 2003, Proceedings. 2003 IEEE Symposium on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (IEEE Cat. No.03TH8722); Pohl K, 2005, SOFTWARE PRODUCT LIN; *RUB RAILS, 2007, WEB DEV DOESNT HURT; SILLITTI A, 2002, P 3 INT WORKSH SOFTW; SVETINOVIC D, 2003, P INT C SOFTW ENG PO, P14; THAKKAR S, 2002, P AAAI 2002 WORKSH I, P1; TURNER M, 2003, IEEE COMPUT, V36, P38; van Gurp J., 2001, Proceedings Working IEEE-IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, DOI 10.1109-WICSA.2001.948406; van Zyl J, 2002, P INT COMP SOFTW APP, P493, DOI 10.1109-CMPSAC.2002.1045053; VANZYL J, 2003, INT WORKSH PROD LIN, P43; W3C, 2001, WEB SERV DESCR LANG; *W3C, 2007, W3C DOC OBJ MOD DOM; *WIK, 2007, AG SOFTW DEV117
A Structural Solution to Roaming in Europe
No full textThis paper suggests that international roaming markets suffer from structural flaws in the way that roaming agreements are established in Europe. The initial roaming interventions by the European Commission in 2007 have been very welfare enhancing and the transfer of producer surplus to consumers has brought significant benefits to end users. Nevertheless, there are clear opportunity costs of maintaining and/or extending the current roaming Regulation. The price for wholesale roaming services in a given country is driven principally by the amount of traffic that an operator is willing to send back to the country requesting a price offer and not on the basis of the roaming services requested. The paper suggests that by breaking the link between the prices offered in one country and the volume of returned traffic will enable the wholesale market for international roaming to operate competitively. It is further suggested that retail price regulation is unwarranted when the wholesale market can operate competitively irrespective of the issue of the retail elasticity of demand for these services. Preliminary, suggestions are put forward as to how policy makers could transition from the current regime to a future market based regime by putting a number of required enablers in place.Roaming regulation, mobile telephony, European single market
The inclusive-AND (Equivalence, Exclusive-NOR (EXNOR, XNOR)) and Exclusive-OR (EXOR, XOR) gates in mixed logic
No full textMixed logic notation simplifies the analysis and design of digital circuits and supports self-documenting gate level circuits. Additionally, it provides alternative Implementations which could result in reducing the number of gates. The current symbol of the Equivalence gate as an Exclusive OR with the output ASSERTED LOW (Exclusive NOR) is troubling when we want to think of the output ASSERTED HIGH. This had impeded extending the mixed logic approach to Exclusive OR. We suggest introducing an alternative distinct symbol for the Equivalence (inclusive-AND) gate to facilitate the application of the mixed logic concepts to both the Exclusive-OR and the inclusive-AND gates.ALMAINI AEA, 1989, ELECT LOGIC SYSTEMS; AWSCHALORN D, 2002, SEMICONDUCTOR SPINTR; Balasubramanian P., 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Emerging Technologies (IEEE Cat. No. 05EX1106), DOI 10.1109-ICET.2005.1558896; BRAND D, 1993, IEEE T COMPUT, V42, P568, DOI 10.1109-12.223676; BREEDING K, 1999, DIGITAL DESIGN FUNDA; Brown S., 1992, FIELD PROGRAMMABLE G; Bui HT, 2002, IEEE T CIRCUITS-II, V49, P25; de Silva AP, 2004, CHEM-EUR J, V10, P574, DOI 10.1002-chem.200305054; FLETCHER WI, 1980, ENG APPROACH DIGITAL; Goel S, 2006, IEEE T CIRCUITS-I, V53, P867, DOI 10.1109-TCSI.2005.860119; Green DH, 1996, INT J ELECTRON, V81, P15, DOI 10.1080-002072196136904; GREEN DH, 1994, IEE P-COMPUT DIG T, V141, P184, DOI 10.1049-ip-cdt:19941097; HUDSON HB, 1995, IEEE T EDUC, V38, P266; KAMPEL I, 1985, PRACTICAL INTRO NEW; PALMER J, 1993, SCHAUMS OUTLINE SERI; Roth Jr C.H., 2004, FUNDAMENTALS LOGIC D; Sasao T, 1997, IEEE T COMPUT, V46, P709, DOI 10.1109-12.600830; Shannon C.E., 1938, Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, V57; SHE TC, 1994, IEEE PHOTONIC TECH L, V6, P712, DOI 10.1109-68.300171; Stankovic RS, 2001, IEEE T COMPUT AID D, V20, P1177, DOI 10.1109-43.945313; TINDER R, 1991, DIGITAL ENG DESIGN M; *WIK, LOG GAT0
External shocks, adjustment policies, and investment : illustrations from a forward-looking CGE model of the Philippines
No full textThis paper presents a model that integrates intertemporal and forward-looking behavior in investment and consumption decisions in a multisectoral general equilibrium framework applicable to developing countries. It formulates and uses an infinite-horizon growth model to examine the adjustment, growth, and debt problems of a middle-income country, which the author illustrates using data for the Philippines. The author concludes that the expectation is a key factor. Contrary to the common suggestion that an economy should adjust and contract in response to a permanent import price shock, the behavior suggested in a model with rational expectations in investment decisions is that the opposite can be true. Combined with other policies, tariff reform could rechannel investment and resources toward the more tradable sectors and exports can be emphasized and increased. If domestic resources are also mobilized through increased tax collection, the combined effect will be to reduce or slow the accumulation of foreign debt. In other words, middle-income countries like the Philippines missed a golden opportunity for policy reform in the 1970s and found it harder to implement adjustment policies under less favorable circumstances in the 1980s.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform
Multiwavelength Characterization of the High-mass X-Ray Binary Population of M33
No full text© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. cc-byWe present multiwavelength characterization of 65 high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) candidates in M33. We use the Chandra ACIS survey of M33 (ChASeM33) catalog to select hard X-ray point sources that are spatially coincident with UV-bright point-source optical counterparts in the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury: Triangulum Extended Region catalog, which covers the inner disk of M33 at near-IR, optical, and near-UV wavelengths. We perform spectral energy distribution fitting on multiband photometry for each point-source optical counterpart to measure its physical properties including mass, temperature, luminosity, and radius. We find that the majority of the HMXB companion star candidates are likely B-type main-sequence stars, suggesting that the HMXB population of M33 is dominated by Be X-ray binaries (Be-XRBs), as is seen in other Local Group galaxies. We use spatially resolved recent star formation history maps of M33 to measure the age distribution of the HMXB candidate sample and the HMXB production rate for M33. We find a bimodal distribution for the HMXB production rate over the last 80 Myr, with a peak at ∼10 and ∼40 Myr, which match theoretical formation timescales for the most massive HMXBs and Be-XRBs, respectively. We measure an HMXB production rate of 107-136 HMXBs/(M ⊙ yr−1) over the last 50 Myr and 150-199 HMXBs/(M ⊙ yr−1) over the last 80 Myr. For sources with compact object classifications from overlapping NuSTAR observations, we find a preference for giant/supergiant companion stars in black hole HMXBs and main-sequence companion stars in neutron star HMXBs
