Today, concert promotion giant Goldenvoice announced a new festival, Arroyo Seco Weekend, set to take place in Pasadena, California on June 24th and 25th. The festival will boast three stages stacked with performances by talented rock, soul, jazz, funk and blues acts including Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, The Meters, Mumford & Sons, Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires, Presercation Hall Jazz Band, Fitz & the Tantrums, Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, Galactic, The Revivalists, Lettuce, John Mayall, Alabama Shakes, The Shins, Weezer, and many more.Targeted toward older fans with families, Arroyo Seco Weekend will offer a kid-friendly area presented by Kidspace Children’s Museum, art installations and a roster of food and drink vendors that will include some of the city’s most respected chefs and craft breweries. The new event follows the trend the company began with Desert Trip last year, catering events to music fans with money to spend on more luxurious concert experiences.According to Goldenvoice CEO Paul Tollett in the Los Angeles Times, “Grown-ups can go to festivals, and it turns out there’s a market for it. We’ve all as promoters had to step up the game because the older you get, the luxuries become necessities, but Desert Trip proved that there’s definitely support out there.” He added: “[Arroyo Seco Weekend] is more like, ‘You’re a dad and you want to bring your kids to this.’ It’s not really for the 13-year-old kids who are begging their parents to go. It’s the opposite. It’s like, ‘Dude, you’ve gotta come to this with me. This is going to be our first festival together.’”For tickets and further information, head to the festival’s website.[via Los Angeles Times] read more

By Brad HaireUniversity of GeorgiaRadio Frequency Identification helps many retail super centers track their supplies. It can allow a prescription bottle to speak to a disabled patient and help pet owners find lost pets. George Vellidis says it can help a farmer water his crops better.RFID is a system that can wirelessly retrieve information from RFID tags, small devices that contain silicon chips with antennas, said Vellidis, an engineer with the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.The idea of using RFID came up several years ago in a meeting among engineers in Georgia. Vellidis figured it could be the key to a system farmers can use to precisely schedule irrigation.But he and research engineer Mike Tucker could find no published research on using it for irrigation. So they decided to develop a prototype system that uses RFID tags to wirelessly transmit soil moisture data from a field to a central location.”We wanted to make something workable, wireless, low-maintenance and relatively cheap,” Vellidis said, “and something that could relay information in real time.”Knowing the real-time soil condition in his field can improve a farmer’s yields, he said, by giving his crops water when and where they need it. This improves his bottom line and can save water, too.Research shows that cotton plants can lose as much as 200 to 300 pounds of cotton per acre if they become water stressed. The harm can be done before the plants show any signs of damage.But sometimes the price of knowing may outweigh the benefit, he said. Commercial irrigation-scheduling systems use nodes with sensors in the soil throughout a field. The sensors collect data like soil temperature and moisture. A farmer can manually check each sensor or have the data sent to a central place. The latter is more helpful.But commercial wireless systems can cost $700 or more per node, Vellidis said. Solar panels are often needed to supply the power. And systems with wires or cables can get in the way of farm work.Georgia farm fields can vary in soil type. Each soil type holds water differently. To know precisely when and where to water, farmers need many nodes throughout a field.The more nodes in a field, the more precise a system would be. About 20 per 80 acres, Vellidis said, would be ideal.With RFID, one node in the UGA system costs about $70. That includes two soil-moisture sensors and two thermocouples for soil temperatures. A 9-volt battery, he said, would supply enough power for one season for a watertight circuit board the size of a playing card.The circuit board reads the sensors’ data and writes it to an active RFID tag, made by WhereNet Corporation. The RFID tag has a flexible antenna a tractor can easily pass over.A central receiver could wirelessly retrieve the data. The farmer can use the data to decide when and how much to water.The system, still in the research mode, isn’t commercially available. But the projected cost for a 20-node system for an 80-acre field is about $2,700, Vellidis said, or about $35 per acre.The research was funded by Cotton Incorporated and the Georgia Peanut Commission, Georgia Cotton Commission and Georgia Research Alliance.Vellidis hopes the system can become commercially available through a startup agribusiness. Another product developed on the UGA Tifton, Ga., campus, called variable-rate irrigation, can now be bought through a startup company in Ashburn, Ga.This isn’t the first agricultural use of RFID. Canada uses it to identify cattle. It can trace a beef carcass at a packing plant back to its herd of origin. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is developing its own tracking system using RFID. read more

Wouter Koolmees, the Dutch minister for social affairs, has defended his decision to set stricter rules for collective cross-border pensions transfers, arguing that the IORP II directive makes a distinction between local and cross-border transactions.During a debate in parliament about the implementation of the directive in the Netherlands, he emphasised that stricter conditions were not at odds with European legislation.Koolmees’ remarks were in part a response to comments from Hans van Meerten, professor of European pensions law at Utrecht University, in an article in IPE’s sister publication Pensioen Pro. Van Meerten argued that the same rules must apply to all value transfers under EU law.Politicians for several Dutch political parties pushed Koolmees for a response. Erik Lutjens – professor of pensions law at Amsterdam’s Free University and a candidate for the senate for 50Plus, the party for older people – agreed that applying stricter conditions for approving a transfer to another EU state violated European law. Credit: CDAMP Pieter Omtzigt argued that Aon’s recent move to Belgium was ‘supervisory arbitrage’The amendment was tabled by Christian Democrat MP Pieter Omtzigt and Eppo Bruins, for the small religious party Christen Unie.A transfer within the Netherlands is already possible if a pension scheme’s funding ratio is at least 105%.The debate about cross-border transfers was triggered by Aon’s decision to move its Dutch pension fund to Belgium. The move improved the scheme’s funding due to a difference between the countries’ regulatory systems.Koolmees added the stricter conditions to the IORP II implementation bill after several MPs objected to what they saw as “supervisory arbitrage”. Raising barriers for transfers would make it more difficult for foreign pensions providers to implement cross-border arrangements, argued Lutjens. In his opinion, Koolmees’ policy was “an illegal distinction based on place of residence”. Wouter Koolmees, the Netherlands’ social affairs ministerHowever, the minister disputed this conclusion, contending that the crucial element was that the pensions directive itself made the distinction.He added that this point was extensively scrutinised by the Raad van State, the Netherlands’ highest legal college.The minister’s explanation, however, didn’t satisfy Martin van Rooijen and Steven van Weyenberg, MPs for the 50Plus and D66 parties, respectively. They said they wanted more clarity.During the debate, Koolmees advised against adopting an amendment requiring funds transfering out of the Netherlands to be fully funded by Dutch standards, which equated to a funding ratio of at least 125%. read more