Wednesday, June 27, 2001
Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Monday, June 25, 2001
Facilities Requirements
Facilities required for the production of tilapia depend, to a large extent, on the size of the market. The smallest size which could be considered economically feasible for commercial production would be 63,000 pounds of fish (live weight) per year. Tilapia farms have existed which produced 2 million pounds (live weight) per year. Facility requirements for an indoor fish farm producing 80,000 pounds per year (live weight) are presented here. A facility of this size is big enough to be profitable, yet allows for future expansion should the market potential exist. It would require 4-to-5 hours per day of labor. An insulated pole shed measuring 75 feet by 90 feet in length with 14 foot sidewalls could efficiently house the facility. The building would have nine tanks 46 inches deep with diameters from 9 to 30 feet. The total cost for constructing and equipping a facility of this type would be $175,000.
The 80,000-pound facility would require about 46,000 gallons of water for the holding tanks. An additional 4,000 gallons would be needed for the biotreatment unit, sump tank, and pipe and waste treatment. With a projected water flow rate of 10 gallons per minute, a total of 82 hours would be required to fill the system. A constant supply of make up water running at 3 to 5 gallons per minute would be required. Make-up water is necessary to replace water loss because of evaporation and waste disposal.
Costs associated with building and operating the facility are shown below. Based on a projected sale price of $1.12 per pound live weight and a 2 percent growth rate, each year the enclosed tilapia production facility would contribute $4,571 to owner labor, management and equity capital.
Search for aquaculture on: All the Web - AltaVista - Deja -
Friday, June 22, 2001
OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. Cycorp, the builders of Cyc, have set up an independent organization, OpenCyc.org, to disseminate and administer OpenCyc, and have committed to a pipeline through which all current and future Cyc technology will flow into ResearchCyc (available for R&D in academia and industry) and then OpenCyc.
OpenCyc: The Platform
OpenCyc can be used as the basis of a wide variety of intelligent applications such as :
speech understanding
database integration
rapid development of an ontology in a vertical area
email prioritizing, routing, summarization, and annotating
to name just a few.
Release 1.0 of OpenCyc will include:
6,000 concepts: an upper ontology for all of human consensus reality.
60,000 assertions about the 6,000 concepts, interrelating them, constraining them, in effect (partially) defining them.
A compiled version of the Cyc Inference Engine and the Cyc Knowledge Base Browser.
A suite of “RKF” tools for rapidly extracting knowledge from a domain expert (e.g., a physician or oil drilling specialist), tools which operate by carrying on a clarification dialogue with that individual; hence: tools for answering questions via English dialogue.
Documentation and self-paced learning materials to help users achieve a basic- to intermediate-level understanding of the issues of knowledge representation and application development using Cyc.
A specification of CycL, the language in which Cyc (and hence OpenCyc) is written. There are CycL-to-Lisp, CycL-to-C, etc. translators.
A specification of the Cyc API, by calling which a programmer can build an OpenCyc application with very little familiarity with CycL or with the OpenCyc KB.
The ability to import and export CycML files.
A few sample programs that demonstrate use of the Cyc API for application development.
Thursday, June 21, 2001
Kaffe is a cleanroom, open source implementation of a Java virtual machine and class libraries. It is also a fun project that was started by Tim Wilkinson and was made successful by the contributions of numerous people from all over the world. But Kaffe is not finished yet! You can help by developing new and missing functionality, porting Kaffe to new platforms, and testing your Java applications under Kaffe.
What is Mojo Nation? Mojo Nation is a revolutionary new peer-driven content distribution technology. While simple data distribution architectures like Napster or Gnutella may be sufficient to allow users to trade mp3 files they are unable to scale up to deliver rich-media content while still taking advantages of the cost savings of peer-to-peer systems. Mojo Nation combines the flexibility of the marketplace with a secure "swarm distribution" mechanism to go far beyond any current filesharing system -- providing high-speed downloads that run from multiple peers in parallel. The Mojo Nation technology is an efficient, massively scalable and secure toolkit for distributors and consumers of digital content.
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
Monday, June 18, 2001
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Spindletop System Dynamics LLC
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Blackbird X3 (AMD)
Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) System
$1999 USD
- Signed, hand-numbered Blackbird Case
- 460w Power Supply
- Tyan S2642 AMD MP motherboard
- 256MB PC2100 DDR RAM
- AMD AthlonMP 1.0Ghz
- AMD AthlonMP 1.0Ghz
- ThermoEngine Heatsink
- ThermoEngine Heatsink
- IBM 30 GB UDMA 100 7200 RPM
- Sony Floppy black face bezel
- Sony 52x CD-ROM drive black face bezel
- NetGear NIC 10/100BaseT
- ATI Radeon VE 32MB AGP
- SoundBlaster 128 PCI
- Operating System: Clean (None), Mandrake-Linux, Red Hat Linux, or Debian GNU/Linux.
Friday, June 15, 2001
Search for Permaculture on: All the Web - AltaVista - Deja -
Introduction to Permaculture: Concepts and Resources - Alternative Farming Systems
See outake below:
Introduction
The word "permaculture" was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison, an Australian ecologist, and one of his students, David Holmgren. It is a contraction of "permanent agriculture" or "permanent culture."
Permaculture is about designing ecological human habitats and food production systems. It is a land use and community building movement which strives for the harmonious integration of human dwellings, microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils, and water into stable, productive communities. The focus is not on these elements themselves, but rather on the relationships created among them by the way we place them in the landscape. This synergy is further enhanced by mimicking patterns found in nature.
A central theme in permaculture is the design of ecological landscapes that produce food. Emphasis is placed on multi-use plants, cultural practices such as sheet mulching and trellising, and the integration of animals to recycle nutrients and graze weeds.
However, permaculture entails much more than just food production. Energy-efficient buildings, waste water treatment, recycling, and land stewardship in general are other important components of permaculture. More recently, permaculture has expanded its purview to include economic and social structures that support the evolution and development of more permanent communities, such as co-housing projects and eco-villages. As such, permaculture design concepts are applicable to urban as well as rural settings, and are appropriate for single households as well as whole farms and villages.
"Integrated farming" and "ecological engineering" are terms sometimes used to describe perma-culture, with "cultivated ecology" perhaps coming the closest. Though helpful, these terms alone do not capture the holistic nature of permaculture; thus, the following definitions are included here to provide additional insight.
Permaculture Resources at CSF
Cross Timbers Permaculture Guild
Volunteer Program
Animal Farm Permaculture Center
Seeds of Texas Introduction
"Permaculture Magazine, solutions for sustainable living."
The Permaculture Activist, index.html
Thursday, June 14, 2001
Wednesday, June 13, 2001
Monday, June 11, 2001
Friday, June 08, 2001
Thursday, June 07, 2001
Tuesday, June 05, 2001
Monday, June 04, 2001
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