1.
Farmers' market
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A farmers market is a physical retail market featuring foods sold directly by farmers to consumers. Farmers markets typically consist of booths, tables or stands, outdoors or indoors, where farmers sell fruits, vegetables, meats, Farmers markets exist worldwide and reflect their local culture and economy. Their size ranges from a few stalls to several city blocks, the current concept of a farmers market is similar to past concepts, but different in relation to other forms – as aspects of consumer retailing, overall, continue to shift over time. Similar forms existed before the Industrial age, but often formed part of broader markets, trading posts began a shift toward retailers who sold others products more than their own. Modern industrial food productions advantages over prior methods depend largely on modern, cheap, fast transport, but transport costs and delays cannot be completely eliminated. So where distance strained industrial suppliers reach, where consumers had strong preference for local variety, starting in the mid-2000s, consumer demand for foods that are fresher and for foods with more variety—has led to growth of farmers markets as a food-retailing mechanism. It has been claimed that farmers markets can offer farmers increased profit over selling to wholesalers, food processors, by selling directly to consumers, produce often needs less transport, less handling, less refrigeration and less time in storage. By selling in a market, the cost of land, buildings. Farmers may also retain profit on produce not sold to consumers, by selling the excess to canneries, at the market, farmers can retain the full premium for part of their produce, instead of only a processors wholesale price for the entire lot. Some farmers may also prefer the simplicity, immediacy, transparency, with fewer intermediaries, the support of independent growers by local community members can enhance local economic opportunities and health & wellness in poor communities. Some consumers may favor farmers markets for the perceived, reduced overhead, driving, parking, etc. fresher foods seasonal foods healthier foods a better variety of foods, e. g. In some cases claimed to sell products from their own farm at first. In at least one case despite vendor claims to the contrary the farm in question was not growing any food, in many cases fraud is obvious because the type of food being sold does not grow locally or is out of season. Federal regulations in the United States require country of origin labelling for produce at supermarkets, in the United States, the FDA requires that the manufacturers name and address be listed on the food label, which can reveal this discrepancy. In New York City, there are 107 farmers markets in operation, in the Los Angeles area,88 farmers markets exist, many of which support Hispanic and Asian fare. Since the first farmers market was established in the UK in 1997, consumers were worried about the farming practices by which food is produced, processed and the health and safety aspects of certain foods. The emergence of books, magazine articles, and cookery and gardening programmes influence consumer concern of food preparation and consumption, the EU has formalized efforts to expand farmers markets to reduce food safety risks and poor nutrition through programs known as Farm to Fork. Some markets are strictly managed, with rules for pricing, quality, others are much more relaxed in their operations and vendor criteria
2.
Contract
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A contract is a voluntary arrangement between two or more parties that is enforceable by law as a binding legal agreement. Contract is a branch of the law of obligations in jurisdictions of the civil law tradition, Contract law concerns the rights and duties that arise from agreements. A contract arises when the parties agree that there is an agreement, formation of a contract generally requires an offer, acceptance, consideration, and a mutual intent to be bound. Each party to a contract must have capacity to enter the agreement, minors, intoxicated persons, and those under a mental affliction may have insufficient capacity to enter a contract. Some types of contracts may require formalities, such as a memorialization in writing, at common law, the elements of a contract are offer, acceptance, intention to create legal relations, and consideration. Not all agreements are necessarily contractual, as the parties generally must be deemed to have an intention to be legally bound, a so-called gentlemens agreement is one which is not intended to be legally enforceable, and which is binding in honour only. In order for a contract to be formed, the parties must reach mutual assent and this is typically reached through offer and an acceptance which does not vary the offers terms, which is known as the mirror image rule. An offer is a statement of the offerors willingness to be bound should certain conditions be met. If a purported acceptance does vary the terms of an offer, it is not an acceptance but a counteroffer and, therefore, the Uniform Commercial Code disposes of the mirror image rule in §2-207, although the UCC only governs transactions in goods in the USA. As a court cannot read minds, the intent of the parties is interpreted objectively from the perspective of a reasonable person and it is important to note that where an offer specifies a particular mode of acceptance, only an acceptance communicated via that method will be valid. Contracts may be bilateral or unilateral, a bilateral contract is an agreement in which each of the parties to the contract makes a promise or set of promises to each other. For example, in a contract for the sale of a home, less common are unilateral contracts in which one party makes a promise, but the other side does not promise anything. In these cases, those accepting the offer are not required to communicate their acceptance to the offeror, in a reward contract, for example, a person who has lost a dog could promise a reward if the dog is found, through publication or orally. The payment could be conditioned on the dog being returned alive. Those who learn of the reward are not required to search for the dog, but if someone finds the dog and delivers it, the High Court of Australia stated that the term unilateral contract is unscientific and misleading. In certain circumstances, a contract may be created. A contract is implied in fact if the circumstances imply that parties have reached an agreement even though they have not done so expressly, quantum meruit claims are an example. Carbolic, a firm, advertised a smoke ball marketed as a wonder drug that would, according to the instructions
3.
Communication
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Communication is the act of conveying intended meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs and semiotic rules. The main steps inherent to all communication are, The forming of communicative motivation or reason, transmission of the encoded message as a sequence of signals using a specific channel or medium. Noise sources such as forces and in some cases human activity begin influencing the quality of signals propagating from the sender to one or more receivers. Reception of signals and reassemblying of the message from a sequence of received signals. Decoding of the encoded message. Interpretation and making sense of the original message. The channel of communication can be visual, auditory, tactile and haptic, olfactory, electromagnetic, human communication is unique for its extensive use of abstract language. Development of civilization has been linked with progress in telecommunication. Nonverbal communication describes the process of conveying information in the form of non-linguistic representations, examples of nonverbal communication include haptic communication, chronemic communication, gestures, body language, facial expressions, eye contact, and how one dresses. Nonverbal communication also relates to intent of a message, examples of intent are voluntary, intentional movements like shaking a hand or winking, as well as involuntary, such as sweating. Speech also contains nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, e. g. rhythm, intonation, tempo and it affects communication most at the subconscious level and establishes trust. Likewise, written texts include nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, Nonverbal communication demonstrates one of Wazlawicks laws, you cannot not communicate. Once proximity has formed awareness, living creatures begin interpreting any signals received, Nonverbal cues are heavily relied on to express communication and to interpret others’ communication and can replace or substitute verbal messages. There are several reasons as to why non-verbal communication plays a role in communication. Written communication can also have non-verbal attributes, e-mails and web chats allow individual’s the option to change text font colours, stationary, emoticons, and capitalization in order to capture non-verbal cues into a verbal medium. Many different non-verbal channels are engaged at the time in communication acts. “Non-verbal behaviours may form a language system. ”Smiling, crying, pointing, caressing. Such non-verbal signals allow the most basic form of communication when verbal communication is not effective due to language barriers, Verbal communication is the spoken or written conveyance of a message
4.
Information
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In other words, it is the answer to a question of some kind. It is thus related to data and knowledge, as data represents values attributed to parameters, as it regards data, the informations existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer, while in the case of knowledge, the information requires a cognitive observer. At its most fundamental, information is any propagation of cause, Information can be encoded into various forms for transmission and interpretation. It can also be encrypted for safe storage and communication, the uncertainty of an event is measured by its probability of occurrence and is inversely proportional to that. The more uncertain an event, the information is required to resolve uncertainty of that event. The bit is a unit of information, but other units such as the nat may be used. Example, information in one fair coin flip, log2 =1 bit, the concept that information is the message has different meanings in different contexts. The English word was derived from the Latin stem of the nominative. Inform itself comes from the Latin verb informare, which means to give form, eidos can also be associated with thought, proposition, or even concept. The ancient Greek word for information is πληροφορία, which transliterates from πλήρης fully and it literally means fully bears or conveys fully. In modern Greek language the word Πληροφορία is still in use and has the same meaning as the word information in English. In addition to its meaning, the word Πληροφορία as a symbol has deep roots in Aristotles semiotic triangle. In this regard it can be interpreted to communicate information to the one decoding that specific type of sign, from the stance of information theory, information is taken as an ordered sequence of symbols from an alphabet, say an input alphabet χ, and an output alphabet ϒ. Information processing consists of a function that maps any input sequence from χ into an output sequence from ϒ. The mapping may be probabilistic or deterministic and it may have memory or be memoryless. Often information can be viewed as a type of input to an organism or system, inputs are of two kinds, some inputs are important to the function of the organism or system by themselves. In his book Sensory Ecology Dusenbery called these causal inputs, other inputs are important only because they are associated with causal inputs and can be used to predict the occurrence of a causal input at a later time. Some information is important because of association with information but eventually there must be a connection to a causal input
5.
History of money
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The history of money concerns the development of means of carrying out transactions involving a medium of exchange. Money is any clearly identifiable object of value that is accepted as payment for goods and services. Precious metals, from which early coins were made, fall into both categories, in modern times the broader concept of money includes other forms of money such as bank accounts. The history of money also includes such as credit cards. Numismatics is the study of money such as coins and paper money. In Politics Book 1,9 the Greek philosopher Aristotle contemplated on the nature of money, the capacity to carry out barter transactions is limited in that it depends on a coincidence of wants. The seller of food grain has to find the buyer who wants to buy grain, in his book Debt, The First 5000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber argues against the suggestion that money was invented to replace barter. The problem with this version of history, he suggests, is the lack of any supporting evidence and his research indicates that gift economies were common, at least at the beginnings of the first agrarian societies, when humans used elaborate credit systems. Graeber proposes that money as a unit of account was invented the moment when the unquantifiable obligation I owe you one transformed into the notion of I owe you one unit of something. In this view, money emerged first as credit and only acquired the functions of a medium of exchange. In a gift economy, valuable goods and services are given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community, there are various social theories concerning gift economies. Some consider the gifts to be a form of reciprocal altruism, another interpretation is that implicit I owe you debt and social status are awarded in return for the gifts. Consider for example, the sharing of food in some hunter-gatherer societies and this custom may reflect altruism, it may be a form of informal insurance, or may bring with it social status or other benefits. Anatolian obsidian as a raw material for tools was distributed as early as 15,000 BCE. In Sardinia, one of the four sites for sourcing the material deposits of obsidian within the Mediterranean. As early as 9000 BCE both grain and cattle were used as money or as barter. The worship of Moneta is recorded by Livy with the built in the time of Rome 413
6.
Gold
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Gold is a chemical element with symbol Au and atomic number 79. In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly yellow, dense, soft, malleable. Chemically, gold is a metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions, Gold often occurs in free elemental form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins, and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the element silver and also naturally alloyed with copper. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium, golds atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher numbered, naturally occurring elements. It is thought to have produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, from the collision of neutron stars. Because the Earth was molten when it was formed, almost all of the present in the early Earth probably sank into the planetary core. Gold is resistant to most acids, though it does dissolve in aqua regia, a mixture of acid and hydrochloric acid. Gold also dissolves in solutions of cyanide, which are used in mining and electroplating. Gold dissolves in mercury, forming amalgam alloys, but this is not a chemical reaction, as a precious metal, gold has been used for coinage, jewelry, and other arts throughout recorded history. A total of 186,700 tonnes of gold is in existence above ground, the world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry. Gold is also used in infrared shielding, colored-glass production, gold leafing, certain gold salts are still used as anti-inflammatories in medicine. As of 2014, the worlds largest gold producer by far was China with 450 tonnes, Gold is cognate with similar words in many Germanic languages, deriving via Proto-Germanic *gulþą from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃-. The symbol Au is from the Latin, aurum, the Latin word for gold, the Proto-Indo-European ancestor of aurum was *h₂é-h₂us-o-, meaning glow. This word is derived from the root as *h₂éu̯sōs, the ancestor of the Latin word Aurora. This etymological relationship is presumably behind the frequent claim in scientific publications that aurum meant shining dawn, Gold is the most malleable of all metals, a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of 1 square meter, and an avoirdupois ounce into 300 square feet. Gold leaf can be thin enough to become semi-transparent
7.
Silver
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Silver is a metallic element with symbol Ag and atomic number 47. The symbol Ag stems from Latin argentum, derived from the Greek ὰργὀς, a soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. The metal is found in the Earths crust in the pure, free form, as an alloy with gold and other metals. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead, Silver is more abundant than gold, but it is much less abundant as a native metal. Its purity is measured on a per mille basis, a 94%-pure alloy is described as 0.940 fine. As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had a role in most human cultures. Silver has long valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many premodern monetary systems in bullion coins, Silver is used in numerous applications other than currency, such as solar panels, water filtration, jewelry, ornaments, high-value tableware and utensils, and as an investment medium. Silver is used industrially in electrical contacts and conductors, in specialized mirrors, window coatings, Silver compounds are used in photographic film and X-rays. Dilute silver nitrate solutions and other compounds are used as disinfectants and microbiocides, added to bandages and wound-dressings, catheters. Silver is similar in its physical and chemical properties to its two neighbours in group 11 of the periodic table, copper and gold. This distinctive electron configuration, with an electron in the highest occupied s subshell over a filled d subshell. Silver is a soft, ductile and malleable transition metal. Silver crystallizes in a cubic lattice with bulk coordination number 12. Unlike metals with incomplete d-shells, metallic bonds in silver are lacking a covalent character and are relatively weak and this observation explains the low hardness and high ductility of single crystals of silver. Silver has a brilliant white metallic luster that can take a polish. Protected silver has greater optical reflectivity than aluminium at all wavelengths longer than ~450 nm, at wavelengths shorter than 450 nm, silvers reflectivity is inferior to that of aluminium and drops to zero near 310 nm. The electrical conductivity of silver is the greatest of all metals, greater even than copper, during World War II in the US,13540 tons of silver were used in electromagnets for enriching uranium, mainly because of the wartime shortage of copper
8.
Barter
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Barter is a system of exchange where goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money. It is distinguishable from gift economies in many ways, one of them is that the exchange is immediate. It is usually bilateral, but may be multilateral and, in most developed countries, usually only exists parallel to monetary systems to a very limited extent. Barter, as a replacement for money as the method of exchange, is used in times of monetary crisis, examples include the Owenite socialists, the Cincinnati Time store, and more recently Ithaca HOURS and the LETS system. Adam Smith, the father of economics, sought to demonstrate that markets pre-existed the state. He argued that money was not the creation of governments, markets emerged, in his view, out of the division of labour, by which individuals began to specialize in specific crafts and hence had to depend on others for subsistence goods. These goods were first exchanged by barter, specialization depended on trade, but was hindered by the double coincidence of wants which barter requires, i. e. for the exchange to occur, each participant must want what the other has. To complete this hypothetical history, craftsmen would stockpile one particular good, be it salt or metal and this is the origin of money according to Smith. Money, as a universally desired medium of exchange, allows each half of the transaction to be separated, Barter is characterized in Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations by a disparaging vocabulary, higgling, haggling, swapping, dickering. It has also characterized as negative reciprocity, or selfish profiteering. Anthropologists have argued, in contrast, that something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is almost always between strangers. Barter occurred between strangers, not fellow villagers, and hence cannot be used to explain the origin of money without the state. Since most people engaged in trade knew each other, exchange was fostered through the extension of credit, everyday exchange relations in such societies are characterized by generalized reciprocity, or a non-calculative familial communism where each takes according to their needs, and gives as they have. Barter is an option to those who cannot afford to store their small supply of wealth in money, the limitations of barter are often explained in terms of its inefficiencies in facilitating exchange in comparison to money. It is said that barter is inefficient because, There needs to be a coincidence of wants For barter to occur between two parties, both parties need to have what the other wants. Difficulty in storing wealth If a society relies exclusively on perishable goods, however, some barter economies rely on durable goods like pigs or cattle for this purpose. Other anthropologists have questioned whether barter is typically between total strangers, a form of known as silent trade. Silent trade, also called silent barter, dumb barter, or depot trade, is a method by which traders who cannot speak each language can trade without talking
9.
Computer network
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A computer network or data network is a telecommunications network which allows nodes to share resources. In computer networks, networked computing devices exchange data with other using a data link. The connections between nodes are established using either cable media or wireless media, the best-known computer network is the Internet. Network computer devices that originate, route and terminate the data are called network nodes, nodes can include hosts such as personal computers, phones, servers as well as networking hardware. Two such devices can be said to be networked together when one device is able to exchange information with the other device, Computer networks differ in the transmission medium used to carry their signals, communications protocols to organize network traffic, the networks size, topology and organizational intent. In most cases, application-specific communications protocols are layered over other more general communications protocols and this formidable collection of information technology requires skilled network management to keep it all running reliably. The chronology of significant computer-network developments includes, In the late 1950s, in 1960, the commercial airline reservation system semi-automatic business research environment went online with two connected mainframes. Licklider developed a group he called the Intergalactic Computer Network. In 1964, researchers at Dartmouth College developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System for distributed users of computer systems. The same year, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a group supported by General Electric and Bell Labs used a computer to route. Throughout the 1960s, Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies independently developed network systems that used packets to transfer information between computers over a network, in 1965, Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts created the first wide area network. This was an precursor to the ARPANET, of which Roberts became program manager. Also in 1965, Western Electric introduced the first widely used telephone switch that implemented true computer control, in 1972, commercial services using X.25 were deployed, and later used as an underlying infrastructure for expanding TCP/IP networks. In July 1976, Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs published their paper Ethernet, Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks, in 1979, Robert Metcalfe pursued making Ethernet an open standard. In 1976, John Murphy of Datapoint Corporation created ARCNET, a network first used to share storage devices. In 1995, the transmission speed capacity for Ethernet increased from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s, by 1998, Ethernet supported transmission speeds of a Gigabit. Subsequently, higher speeds of up to 100 Gbit/s were added, the ability of Ethernet to scale easily is a contributing factor to its continued use. Providing access to information on shared storage devices is an important feature of many networks, a network allows sharing of files, data, and other types of information giving authorized users the ability to access information stored on other computers on the network
10.
Usury
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Usury is, as defined today, the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. Originally, usury meant interest of any kind, a loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates or other factors. Historically in Christian societies, and still in many Islamic societies today, someone who practices usury can be called a usurer, but a more common term in contemporary English is loan shark. The term may be used in a moral sense—condemning, taking advantage of others misfortunes—or in a legal sense where interest rates may be regulated by law, historically, some cultures have regarded charging any interest for loans as sinful. Some of the earliest known condemnations of usury come from the Vedic texts of India, similar condemnations are found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At times, many nations from ancient China to ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawed loans with any interest, though the Roman Empire eventually allowed loans with carefully restricted interest rates, the Christian church in medieval Europe banned the charging of interest at any rate. Banking during Roman times was different from modern banking, during the Principate, most banking activities were conducted by private individuals, not by large banking firms like the ones that exist today. Since almost all moneylenders in the Empire were private individuals, anybody that had any additional capital and wished to lend it out could easily do so. The annual rates of interest on loans varied in the range of 4–12 percent, the apparent absence of intermediate rates suggests that the Romans may have had difficulty calculating the interest due on anything other than mathematically convenient rates. They quoted them on a basis, and the most common rates were multiples of twelve. Monthly rates tended to range from simple fractions to 3–4 percent, moneylending during this period was largely a matter of private loans advanced to persons short of cash, whether persistently in debt or temporarily until the next harvest. Mostly, it was undertaken by exceedingly rich men who were prepared to take on a risk if the profit looked good. Investment was always regarded as a matter of seeking personal profit, Banking was of the small, back-street variety, run by the urban lower-middle class of petty shopkeepers. By the 3rd century, acute currency problems in the Empire drove them into decline and it was evident that usury meant exploitation of the poor. The First Council of Nicaea, in 325, forbade clergy from engaging in usury, at the time, usury was interest of any kind, and the canon forbade the clergy to lend money at interest rates even as low as 1 percent per year. Later ecumenical councils applied this regulation to the laity, Lateran III decreed that persons who accepted interest on loans could receive neither the sacraments nor Christian burial. Pope Clement V made the belief in the right to usury a heresy in 1311, pope Sixtus V condemned the practice of charging interest as detestable to God and man, damned by the sacred canons and contrary to Christian charity. Theological historian John Noonan argues that the doctrine was enunciated by popes, certain negative historical renditions of usury carry with them social connotations of perceived unjust or discriminatory lending practices
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