'Agricultural engineering' is the discipline of engineering in agricultural, food, and biological systems. Agricultural engineers design agricultural machinery and equipment and agricultural structures. Some specialties include power system and machinery design; structures and environment; and food and bioprocess engineering. They develop way to conserve soil and water and to improve the processing of agricultural products. Agricultural engineers work in research and development, production, sales, or management.

*Biosystems engineering *Ergonomics, Safety and Health *Emerging Areas *Information and Electrical Technologies which includes Remote sensing *Food and Process Engineering *Forest Engineering *Power and Machinery, which includes Machine design *Soil and water, which includes Irrigation, Drainage, stormwater management and erosion control. *Structures and environment, which includes designing livestock housing as well as structures such as grain elevators and greenhouses

'Grain elevators' are buildings or complexes of buildings for storage and shipment of grain. The term became common in the late 19th century, at which time bucket elevators for lifting grain first came into use. Bucket elevators lift grain to a distribution point, where it can flow by gravity into one of a number of bins, which are then unloaded by gravity. The bins and their unloading chutes are often sited in such a way that rail cars or barges can be filled from them directly.

Prior to the advent of the grain elevator, grain was handled in bags rather than in bulk.

Grain elevators are a constant sight in the grain-growing areas of the world, such as the North American prairies. Larger terminal elevators are found at distribution centers, such as Chicago and Thunder Bay, Ontario, where grain is sent for processing, or loaded aboard trains or ships to go further afield.

Originally each small town had its own small grain elevator that would serve the local farmers. The classic grain elevator was made of wood and had 12 rectangular bins arranged in a 3x4 pattern. In more recent times with improved transportation, centralized and much larger elevators serve many farms. Two elevators in Kansas (one in Hutchinson and one in Wichita) are half a mile long. The loss of the grain elevators from small towns is often considered a great change in their identity and there are efforts to preserve them as heritage structures. At the same time, many larger grain farms have their own grain handling facilities for storage and loading onto trucks.

Grain elevator operators buy grain from farmers, either for cash or at a contracted price, and then sell futures contracts for the same quantity of grain, usually each day. They profit through the narrowing 'basis', that is, the difference between the local cash price, and the futures price, that occurs at certain times of the year.

Before economical truck transportation was available, grain elevator operators would sometimes use their purchasing power to control prices. This was especially easy since farmers often had only one elevator that was within a reasonable distance of their farm. This has led some governments to take over the administration of grain elevators. Many elevators were purchased by cooperatives.

'Fertilizers' or 'fertilisers' are compounds given to plants with the intention of promoting growth; they are usually applied either via the soil, for uptake by plant roots, or by foliar spraying, for uptake through leaves. They can be naturally-occurring compounds such as peat or mineral deposits, or manufactured through natural processes (such as composting) or chemical processes (such as the Haber process).

Fertilizers typically provide, in varying proportions, the three major plant nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium), the secondary plant nutrients (calcium, sulfur, magnesium), and sometimes trace elements (or micronutrients) with a role in plant nutrition: boron, manganese, iron, zinc, copper and molybdenum.

* Examples of naturally-occurring inorganic fertilizers include diatomaceous earth and limestone. * Examples of manufactured or chemically-synthesized inorganic fertilisers include ammonium nitrate, potassium sulfate, and superphosphate, or triple super phosphate.

Synthesized materials are also called 'artifical fertilizers', and may be described as 'straight', where the product predominantly contains the three primary ingredients of nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium/potash (K), often described as 'NPK fertilizers'. They are named or labelled according to the content of these three elements, thus a 5-10-5 fertilizer would have 10 percent phosphate in its ingredients. If nitrogen is the main element, they are often described as 'nitrogen fertilizers'.

Chemist Justus von Leibig (in the 19th century) contributed greatly to understanding the role of inorganic compounds in plant nutrition and devised the concept of 'Leibig's barrel' to illustrate the significance of inadequate concentrations of essential nutrients. This ammonia is applied directly to the soil or used to produce other compounds, notably ammonium nitrate, a dry, concentrated product.

Implicit in modern theories of organic agriculture is the idea that the pendulum has swung the other way to some extent in thinking about plant nutrition. Ammonia gas (NH<sub>3</sub&g t;) may be emitted following application of manure or slurry or due to inorganic fertilizers (to a lesser extent unless ammonia itself is used directly).

Fertilisers can be buried around a trees roots when it is planted, placed in bore holes near tree roots, spread on to soil, sprayed by hand, or one can stick a bag of fertilizer in the branches.

A card game is any game using playing cards, either traditional or game-specific.

This article will describe the general mechanics of card games: that is, those rules which are so widely known that they are often omitted in rules of card games, because the author assumes that "everyone" knows them.

The statements given here are general ones. There are countless exceptions to them. Indeed, it would be possible to suffix almost every statement in this section with the words "an exception is provided by the game of such-and-such". They should therefore not be taken as rules; rather they should be used as default rules if you are trying to play a game from an incomplete set of rules which omits the general mechanics.

The rules
A new card game starts in a small way, either as someone's invention, or as a modification of an existing game. Those playing it may agree to change the rules as they wish. The rules that they agree on become the "house rules" under which they play the game. A set of house rules may be accepted as valid by a group of players wherever they play. It may also be accepted as governing all play within a particular house, or café, or club.

When a game becomes sufficiently popular, so that people often play it with strangers, there is a need for a generally accepted set of rules. This is often met by a particular set of house rules becoming generally recognised. For example, when whist became popular in 18th-century England, players in the Portland Club agreed on a set of house rules for use on its premises. Players in some other clubs then agreed to follow the "Portland Club" rules, rather than go to the trouble of codifying and printing their own sets of rules. The Portland Club rules eventually became generally accepted throughout England.

There is nothing "official" about this process. If you decide to play whist seriously, it would be sensible to learn the Portland Club rules, so that you can play with other people who already know these rules. But if you only play whist with your family, you are likely to ignore these rules, and just use what rules you choose. And if you play whist seriously with a group of friends, you are still perfectly free to devise your own set of rules, should you want to.

It is sometimes said that the "official" or "correct" sets of rules governing a card game are those "in Hoyle". Edmond Hoyle was an 18th-century Englishman who published a number of books about card games. His books were popular, especially his treatise on how to become a good whist player. After (and even before) his death, many publishers have taken advantage of his popularity by placing his name on their books of rules. The presence of his name on a rule book has no significance at all. The rules given in the book may be no more than the opinion of the author.

If there is a sense in which a card game can have an "official" set of rules, it is when that card game has an "official" governing body. For example, the rules of tournament bridge are governed by the World Bridge Federation, and by local bodies in various countries such as the ACBL in the USA, and the EBU in England. The rules of skat in Germany are governed by the Deutsche Skatverband which publishes the Skatordnung. The rules of French tarot are governed by the Fédération Française de Tarot. But there is no compulsion to follow the rules put out by these organisations. If you and your friends decide to play a game by a set of rules unknown to the game's official body, you are doing nothing illegal.

Many widely-played card games have no official regulating body. An example is Canasta.

Rule infractions
An infraction is any action which is against the rules of the game, such as playing a card when it is not one's turn to play and the accidental exposure of a card.

In many official sets of rules for card games, the rules specifying the penalties for various infractions occupy more pages than the rules specifying how to play correctly. This is tedious, but necessary for games that are played seriously. Players who intend to play a card game at a high level generally ensure before beginning that all agree on the penalties to be used. When playing privately, this will normally be a question of agreeing house rules. In a tournament there will probably be a tournament director who will enforce the rules when required and arbitrate in cases of doubt.

If a player breaks the rules of a game deliberately, this is cheating. Most card players would refuse to play cards with a known cheat. The rest of this section is therefore about accidental infractions, caused by ignorance, clumsiness, inattention, etc.

As the same game is played repeatedly among a group of players, precedents build up about how a particular infraction of the rules should be handled. E.G. "Sheila just led a card when it wasn't her turn. Last week when Jo did that, we agreed ... etc.". Sets of such precedents tend to become established among groups of players, and to be regarded as part of the house rules. Sets of house rules become formalised, as described in the previous section. Therefore, for some games, there is a "proper" way of handling infractions of the rules. But for many games, without governing bodies, there is no standard way of handling infractions.

In many circumstances, there is no need for special rules dealing with what happens after an infraction. As a general principle, the person who broke a rule should not benefit by it, and the other players should not lose by it. An exception to this may be made in games with fixed partnerships, in which it may be felt that the partner(s) of the person who broke a rule should also not benefit. The penalty for an accidental infraction should be as mild as reasonable, consistent with there being no possible benefit to the person responsible.

Another key to success was the software: the Apple II was chosen by entrepreneurs Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world — the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. That created a phenomenal business market for the Apple II; and the corporate presence attracted many software and hardware developers to the machine.

The rise of Apple Computer is one of America's great success stories. Based on the business and technical savvy of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and the marketing expertise of Mike Markkula, Apple dominated the personal computer industry between 1977 and 1983.

More than 2 million Apple II's were shipped at a price of $970 for the 4KB model.

The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) – the first of several personal computers released in 1977 – came fully assembled and was straightforward to operate, with either 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, a built-in cassette drive, and a calculator "chiclet keyboard". It was followed by the VIC-20, which had a full typewriter keyboard, color and sound, 3.5K of user accessible memory, and a much lower price than Apple's offerings.

Ruth Handler had noted that her daughter Barbara preferred playing with paper dolls that looked like adults rather than like children. When in Europe, she noticed a German doll named Lilli and bought it for Barbara.

Lilli was a gold-digging character from a "racy" comic strip drawn by Reinhard Beuthin for die Bild Zeitung, and the Lilli doll began to be sold in Germany in 1955. It was marketed to adults, not children: M. G. Lord, in her Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, characterized the original doll as a "gag gift for men, a pornographic character."

Ruth Handler says that when she bought Lilli for her daughter, she was ignorant of its adult nature. Ruth Handler and Elliott Handler, the co-founders of Mattel, bought the rights to market Lilli: with a hair color change from blonde to brunette, and a name change to Barbie (after Ruth's daughter Barbara) she was sold in the United States starting in 1959 at New York's annual Toy Fair.

The first Barbie doll had a black-and-white striped swimsuit and signature ponytail. In the succeeding years, Mattel fashion designer Charlotte Johnson based Barbie doll fashion designs on the Paris fashions.

Ruth Handler had stated that she thought it "was important to a girl's esteem that she play with a doll with breasts," and Barbie was certainly qualified to be that doll. If the doll originally marketed were human-sized, her measurements would have been 39"-18"-33". These measurements were not based on actual human metrics, and the unrealistic size of Barbie has been controversial, with many suggesting that playing with Barbie decreases rather than enhances a girl's self-esteem. In response to criticism, Mattel adjusted the chest measurement down, and the waist measurement up, though the proportions are still uncharacteristic of most women.

Redesigned by Jack Ryan and manufactured by Mattel, this one doll is a $1.9 billion dollar a year industry, with two Barbies being bought every second.