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This book reviews recent advances in optimising nitrogen-use efficiency in an era where farmers are required to reduce their on-farm environmental impacts, whilst also maximising crop productivity and yields.

Both reading and writing abstracts require specific language skills and conceptual capacities, which may challenge advanced learners. This paper draws explicitly upon the "Emergence" and "Scientext" research projects which focused on the lexis of scientific texts in French and English. The teaching objective of the project described here was to create a collection of text reconstruction tasks targeting the patterns of English that are uncommon in French. These tasks are to be integrated within the platform "Enigma Plus" (http://elang.ujf-grenoble.fr/enigma/). The current project is the conception of a new module based on data-driven materials collected from Scientext, a corpus of medical and biology abstracts in English (http://scientext.msh-alpes.fr/ scientext-site-en/spip.php?article9). This paper discusses the task focusing on the word "hypothesis," the first of a dozen tasks based on authentic examples and designed to help learners of English as a foreign language to better read and write science abstracts. The results revealed several similarities and contrasts with the French findings. These results were integrated into the text reconstruction task. Findings of user practices reported in previous studies were taken into account to optimize completion of the task by the widest range of user practices and errors. The following are appended: (1) Lexical verbs collocated with "hypoths̈e"; (2) Collocates of "hypothesis"; and (3) Reconstruction text. [The comparative research aspects of this study were financed by the Grenoble 1 Pl̥e SHS. The on-line computer assisted language learning aspects were funded by Pedagotice of Grenoble 1 and PRES of the Universities of Grenoble. For the complete volume, see ED574893.].

One of the problems encountered in supporting large payloads by a cable system exposed to longitudinal excitation simulating ocean wave motion is referred to as cable snap. This is due to a combination of wave amplitude and frequency that causes slack in the cable which subsequently becomes taut and experiences a severe impact load. This phenomenon has been modeled on an analog computer assuming elastic behavior of the cables and nonlinear damping of the payload and cable. A mathematical model which considers segmented viscoelastic cables is also considered in the present paper. Experiments were performed on 0.0625 inch and 0.09375 inch stranded steel cables of length up to 70 feet with a 27 pound spherical payload attached to the lower end. The cable system was suspended in a tank to a water depth of 65 feet and excited sinusoidally at the top at amplitudes of one to three inches and frequencies from zero up to 3Hz. The cable forces at the top and bottom of the cable were monitored by load cells. (Author).

The dynamic response of steel and nylon cables with a suspended payload in water was investigated analytically and experimentally. Ocean wave motion was simulated at the top of the cables by a sinusoidal displacement function. A generalized distributed mass analytical model including internal and external damping was used to predict cable tone. Experimental results on cables of the order of 70 feet in length and .25 inch diameter compared well with theoretical predictions. (Author).

This book focuses on three important elements in the development of cereal and legume crops in semi-arid West Africa. The first section examines socioeconomic factors that affect the food system for these crops and contains an overview of crop production and consumption in the region. It then proceeds to discuss important inputs that affect system productivity: preferences for new seed varieties, yield response to fertilizer, counterfeit herbicides, climate information and the way farmers develop expectations about the weather events shaping cropping outcomes. A final chapter is dedicated to understanding urban consumer preferences for processed food products derived from pearl millet. The second section addresses the state of the art in phenotyping and the modeling of crop adaptation to dryland farming systems. Chapters focus on the regional network for phenotyping, high throughput phenotyping in field situations and of root architectures and crop ideotypes. In addition, empirical evidence is presented on presented on root and soil interactions and the effectiveness of UAVs to assess sorghum physiology. The third section examines the genetic diversity and improvement of dryland crops. Chapters focus on biodiversity and agricultural system sustainability, orphan crops such as fonio and the utilization of regional germplasm collection in the improvement of cowpea, groundnut pearl millet and sorghum.

This study analyses the current state of national obstacles to free movement in the EU Single Market. It focuses on various aspects of obstacles related to free movement of goods and services, the right to establishment, the Digital Single Market, consumer protection and public procurement.