background preloader

U.S. Department of Agriculture

U.S. Department of Agriculture
Agencies and Offices A list of all Agencies and Offices within USDA Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services Commodity, credit, conservation, disaster, emergency assistance programs... Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Dietary guidance, nutrition policy coordination, nutrition education... Food Safety Meat, poultry, and egg inspection, food recalls, food labeling, packaging... Marketing and Regulatory Programs Organic program, animal and plant health, grain inspection... Natural Resources and Environment Forestry, conservation, damage prevention, land management, sustainable land management... Research, Education and Economics U.S. food and fibers system, library, statistics, research, analysis, education... Rural Development Financial programs, water and sewer systems, housing, health clinics, economic development, loans, lending pools...

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome

The Feminization of Poverty "Poverty is the worst form of violence." –Mahatma Gandhi What is the "feminization" of poverty? The feminization of poverty is the phenomenon in which women experience poverty at rates that are disproportionately high in comparison to men. Though in industrialized nations a great emphasis is placed on women shattering the glass ceiling and climbing the corporate ladder (and rightly so), the most unquestionably pressing and widespread socioeconomic issue faced by women around the world is poverty--and often extreme poverty at that.

Corn Production University research and extension are critical in equipping producers and agronomists with the information they need to continue advancing corn production in Iowa. Incorporating new scientific findings and recommendations into today's agricultural systems must be our priority to consistently produce a high quality crop that is also economically feasible. Corn growth and development Crecimiento y desarrollo del maíz Lori J. Abendroth, Roger W. SpaceX Craft Docks With Space Station; Commercial Era Begins : The Two-Way The historic first docking of a commercial spacecraft at the International Space Station orbiting above Earth happened without a hitch today, as SpaceX's Dragon capsule arrived with supplies for the crew orbiting high above Earth. Just before 10 a.m. ET, astronauts aboard the space station successfully grabbed the capsule with a robotic arm. A little after noon ET, the pulled the Dragon into its docking space. NASA was webcasting, and we have embedded its feed in this post (our apologies if you're on a device that doesn't support the player). Earlier this week on All Things Considered, NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reported about the historic mission.

What makes an entrepreneur – luck or skill? The grand vision and the great idea are overrated, it is the execution that counts here is a saying that it is better to be lucky than good, but is this true for entrepreneurs? I am interested in a related question: why do some entrepreneurs have only one big success and many failures while others succeed again and again? Massey Energy’s Negligence Led to Mine Blast, Study Finds The report, released on Thursday by an independent team appointed by former Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and led by J. Davitt McAteer, a former federal mine safety chief, echoed preliminary findings by federal officials that the blast could have been prevented if Massey had observed minimal safety standards. But it was more pointed in naming Massey as the culprit, using blunt language to describe what it said was a pattern of negligence that ultimately led to the deaths of 29 miners on April 5, 2010, in the worst American mining disaster in 40 years. “The story of Upper Big Branch is a cautionary tale of hubris,” the report concluded. “A company that was a towering presence in the Appalachian coal fields operated its mines in a profoundly reckless manner, and 29 coal miners paid with their lives for the corporate risk taking.”

Serious Smoke: Mezcal Cocktails in New York “Para celebrar, es condición jamás perder la fe, abrir el corazón y servir el mezcal.”* Living Earth Simulator will simulate the entire world Described as a “knowledge collider,” and now with a pledge of one billion euros from the European Union, the Living Earth Simulator is a new big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization. In the same way that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes together protons to see what happens, the Living Earth Simulator (LES) will gather knowledge from a Planetary Nervous System (PNS — yes, really) to try to predict societal fluctuations such as political unrest, economic bubbles, disease epidemics, and so on. The scale of the LES, when it’s complete, will be huge. It is hoped that supercomputing centers all over the world will chip in with CPU time, and data will be corralled from existing projects and a new Global Participatory Platform, which is basically open data on a worldwide scale.

Learn 48 Languages Online for Free How to learn languages for free? This collection features lessons in 48 languages, including Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Italian, Russian and more. Download audio lessons to your computer or mp3 player and you’re good to go.

White Collar Crime Prosecutions for March 2014 White Collar Crime Prosecutions for March 2014Table 1. Criminal White Collar Crime Prosecutions The latest available data from the Justice Department show that during March 2014 the government reported 565 new white collar crime prosecutions. According to the case-by-case information analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this number is down 6.9 percent over the previous month. The comparisons of the number of defendants charged with white collar crime-related offenses are based on case-by-case information obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys (see Table 1). When monthly 2014 prosecutions of this type are compared with those of the same period in the previous year, the number of filings was down (-6.9%). Prosecutions over the past year are still much lower than they were five years ago.

Standard error of the mean When you take a sample of observations from a population, the mean of the sample is an estimate of the parametric mean, or mean of all of the observations in the population. If your sample size is small, your estimate of the mean won't be as good as an estimate based on a larger sample size. Here are 10 random samples from a simulated data set with a true (parametric) mean of 5. The X's represent the individual observations, the red circles are the sample means, and the blue line is the parametric mean. As you can see, with a sample size of only 3, some of the sample means aren't very close to the parametric mean.

train-working-memory What is Working Memory? Can it Be Trained? By: Dr. Power crime Introduction Despite making strides in scrutinizing crimes committed by economically and politically powerful actors, organizations, and even states, the field of criminology remains disproportionately preoccupied with socially vulnerable offenders involved in street crime. This observation is more than just a vague impression.

Search a database of the Power Elite Welcome to the Power Elite portal on WhoRulesAmerica.net. Included here is a database of the "Power Elite" in the U.S. as of 2011-2012, defined as the intersection of the boards of directors of the corporate community, the extremely wealthy and well-connected, and the boards and trustees of the policy-planning network. Note that this definition does not include politicans; you will not find any current or former presidents in the database.

Related:  cfaulkner317