Inside the Corn Industry


Book Description

Some commodities command massive economic, social, and political influence. This title examines the business around corn, the most ubiquitous crop in the United States. It explores corn's many uses, complex supply chain, and attendant environmental debates. Features include essential facts, a glossary, selected bibliography, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.




Don't Worry (It's Safe to Eat)


Book Description

An investigation of science, politics and our food production system, this text exposes the bogus science, political interference and flawed policies that threaten our food supply. The author tells the story of BSE, revealing how top scientists have been muzzled and how the epidemic continues. Then, against a backdrop of burning cows, Andrew Rowell exposes how trade and macro-economic policies overruled good science in the foot and mouth catastrophe. He also opens the black box of the so-called GM revolution to expose the myth behind the marketing. In tracing how critics are silenced in the bottom-line climate of commercialized science and privatized knowledge, Rowell tells the true story of the widely publicized Pusztai GM potato scandal of the late 1990s and the ongoing Mexican maize GM contamination affair. Finally, the book offers radical solutions to make science work in the public interest and provide food that really is safe to eat.




An Unworthy Future


Book Description

It is difficult to find an area of public policy more plagued by misunderstanding than energy policy. Even worse, every time the subject is raised, we are obligated to get mired in pointless arguments about the weather. This book helps set the record straight. Not convinced? Consider some of these inconvenient truths: The cost of green energy climate remediation is anywhere from 10 to 1,000 times greater than the damage from the climate change it attempts to alleviate. Obama's carbon tax would cost Americans $1.2 trillion over just ten years, but would only reduce the midrange three-degree modeled twenty-second-century global temperature increase by 0.038 degrees Celsius. This is not another skeptical global warming polemic, but an economic evaluation of how and why green energy will fail. A thoroughly researched, heavily documented book by an expert in his field, it will demonstrate in meticulous detail how wasteful and economically inefficient Obama's green energy future will be compared to other worthy alternatives.




The CRB Commodity Yearbook 2007


Book Description

The Single Most Comprehensive Source of Commodity and Futures Market Information Available Since 1939, professional traders, commercial hedgers, portfolio managers, and speculators have come to regard The CRB Commodity Yearbook as the "bible" of the industry. Here is a wealth of authoritative data, gathered from government reports, private industry, and trade and industry associations, all compiled by the Commodity Research Bureau, the organization of record for the entire commodity industry. The Yearbook is absolutely essential for identifying changing trends in supply and demand and for projecting important price movements. It gives investors: Worldwide supply/demand and production/consumption data for all the basic commodities and futures markets-from A(luminum) to Z(inc), including all the major markets in interest rates, currencies, energy, and stock index futures Over 900 tables, graphs, and price charts of historical data, many of which show price history dating back to 1900 Fact-filled CD-ROM provides readers with valuable commodity information in an easy-to-use electronic format Concise introductory articles describe the salient features of each commodity and help put the quantitative information in perspective Articles on key markets and important issues concerning the commodity industry. The 2007 Yearbook features articles by CRB Chief Economist, Richard W. Asplund, including: Commodity Prices Extend 2001-06 Bull Market to New Highs Fed Engineers a Soft-Landing for the U.S. Economy in 2006 World Economic Expansion Continues Through 2006 U.S. Housing Bubble Bursts and Faces Long Recovery Road Strong Ethanol Demand Drives Corn Prices to 10-Year Highs For anyone dealing in commodities, The CRB Commodity Yearbook 2007 offers an abundance of valuable information and indispensable guidance for decision making.




Data Mining


Book Description

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Third Edition, offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. The book is targeted at information systems practitioners, programmers, consultants, developers, information technology managers, specification writers, data analysts, data modelers, database R&D professionals, data warehouse engineers, data mining professionals. The book will also be useful for professors and students of upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level data mining and machine learning courses who want to incorporate data mining as part of their data management knowledge base and expertise. - Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects - Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods - Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks—in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization




Feminisms and Ruralities


Book Description

Feminist concern with difference has rarely extended to rurality even if it is now widely recognized that experiences of inequality depend on intersections of several identities in each individual life. This lack of concern may reflect the urban background of the majority of feminist academics or at least their urban positionality once in the academy. It may equivalently be that feminists have been influenced by stereotypes of rural women as traditional and reactionary, and thus seen them as unlikely exponents of gender equality, and an unfruitful focus for scholarly energies. Perhaps the problem is a broader one, that is, reflective of the much documented, but still apparent unwillingness of many feminists to recognize and address difference in any of its manifestations. Regardless, even with the recent interest in intersectionality which has necessarily renewed and reenergized debates in feminism about diversity and inclusion, the question of how women are differently positioned because of their non-metropolitan location has remained largely overlooked.




Up, Down, and Sideways


Book Description

Using a “vertical slice” approach, anthropologists critically analyze the relationship between undemocratic uses and abuses of power and the survival of the human species. The contributors scrutinize modern institutions in a variety of regions—from Russia and Mexico to South Korea and the U.S. Up, Down, and Sideways is an ethnographic examination of such phenomena as debtculture, global financial crises, food insecurity, indigenous land and resource appropriation, the mismanagement of health care, andcorporate surrogacy within family life. With a preface by Laura Nader, this isessential reading for anyone seeking solid theories and concrete methods to inform activist scholarship.




The CRB Commodity Yearbook 2006


Book Description

Since 1939, traders, investors, analysts, portfolio managers, and speculators around the world have relied on the Commodity Research Bureau to help them navigate the uncertainties of the commodity markets. Covering everything from alcohol to zinc, The CRB Commodity Yearbook 2006 and The CRB Encyclopedia of Commodity and Financial Prices cover everything commodity market specialists need to know. Both of these exhaustive guides include companion CD-ROMs that provide valuable commodity information in an easy-to-use format. Packed with data, including charts, tables, and graphs, these two books are indispensable resources for every professional in the commodity markets. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.




Natural Language Processing with Python


Book Description

This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. With it, you'll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication. Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you: Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or identify "named entities" Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligence This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages -- or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works -- you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.




Foodopoly


Book Description

“A meticulously researched tour de force” on politics, big agriculture, and the need to go beyond farmers’ markets to find fixes (Publishers Weekly). Wenonah Hauter owns an organic family farm that provides healthy vegetables to hundreds of families as part of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement. Yet, as a leading healthy-food advocate, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America’s food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the control of food production by a handful of large corporations—backed by political clout—that prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices people can make in the grocery store. Blending history, reporting, and a deep understanding of farming and food production, Foodopoly is a shocking, revealing account of the business behind the meat, vegetables, grains, and milk most Americans eat every day, including some of our favorite and most respected organic and health-conscious brands. Hauter also pulls the curtain back from the little-understood but vital realm of agricultural policy, showing how it has been hijacked by lobbyists, driving out independent farmers and food processors in favor of the likes of Cargill, Tyson, Kraft, and ConAgra. Foodopoly shows how the impacts ripple far and wide, from economic stagnation in rural communities to famines overseas, and argues that solving this crisis will require a complete structural shift—a change that is about politics, not just personal choice.