Attending the First Organic Agriculture Course: Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course at Koberwitz, 1924

Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course held at Koberwitz (now Kobierzyce, Poland) in 1924 was arguably the world’s first organic agriculture course - although the terms ‘biodynamic agriculture’ and ‘organic farming’ appeared in the decades that followed. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and others have stated that there were about 60 attendees at the course, while Rudolf Steiner and others have stated that there were about, or more than, 100 attendees. The present study examines the original attendance records to reveal that there were 111 attendees. There were 30 women and 81 men. They came from six countries: Germany (N=61); Poland (N=30); Austria (N=9); Switzerland (N=7); France (N=2); and Sweden (N=2). Of the 60% of enrolees who declared a profession, 38 could be described as ‘agricultural’ and of these 20 described themselves as farmers. There were additionally nine priests, four medical doctors, three teachers, two artists and two engineers. Four of the Keyserlingk host-family (Alex, Carl, Johanna and Wolfgang) attended the course, as did Dr. Lili Kolisko, Dr. Elisabeth Vreede, and Guenther Wachsmuth. Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and George Adams Kaufmann gained prominence later in biodynamics but were not at the course. The Agricultural Research Circle was an immediate outcome of the Course and this led to Pfeiffer’s book 'Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening' in 1938

The secrets of Koberwitz: The diffusion of Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course and the founding of Biodynamic Agriculture

Rudolf Steiner presented his Agriculture Course to a group of 111, farmers and others, at Koberwitz (Kobierzyce, Poland) in 1924. Steiner spoke of an agriculture to ‘heal the earth’ and he laid the philosophical and practical underpinnings for such a differentiated agriculture. Biodynamic agriculture is now practiced internationally as a specialist form of organic agriculture. The path from proposal to experimentation, to formalization, to implementation and promulgation played out over a decade and a half following the Course and in the absence of its progenitor. Archival material pertaining to the dissemination of the early printed editions of ‘The Agriculture Course’ reveals that within six years of the Course there was a team of more than 400 individuals of the Agricultural Experimental Circle (AEC), each signed a confidentiality agreement, and located throughout continental Europe, and also in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and USA. Membership expanded to over 1000 AEC members (with a lower bound estimate of 1144 members) who were committed to working collectively towards an evidence based, new and alternative agriculture, ‘for all farmers’, which was to be developed into a ‘suitable for publication’ form. That publication milestone was realized in 1938 with the release of Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s ‘Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening’ which was published simultaneously in at least five languages: Dutch, English, French, German and Italian

Code of Practice for Organic Food Processing. With contributions from Ursula Kretzschmar, Angelika Ploeger and Otto Schmid.

The consumers of “low input” and organic foods have specific expectations with respect to quality parameters of processed food. These may relate to the degree of processing, concern about specific additives, nutritional composition, integrity or whole food concepts, the degree of convenience, the level of energy use and transportation distances, but also to food safety. For many processors, fulfilling all of these expectations represents a tremendous challenge in understanding and implementing the standards requirements in daily practise. Therefore, it is necessary to have in this field a guidance document for processors as well as standard setting institutions and certification/inspection bodies. In the EU project on “Quality of low input food” (QLIF, No. 50635), which deals with food safety and quality issues related to food from low-input and organic food systems, it was possible to elaborate a specific code of practise for food processing as part of the Subproject 5 on processing. The starting point for this publication was a literature survey about underlying principles of organic and low-input food processing (Schmid, Beck, Kretzschmar, 2004) and a broad European-wide consultation in 2 rounds, which was also undertaken in the QLIF-project. The results of these studies showed that many companies have serious questions related to the implementation practice of the complex requirements for organic food. Some recent scandals in this sector have made clear that in several areas an improvement of the current practises are necessary, e.g. the separation practises between organic and conventional foods. The aim of this “Code of good practice for organic food processing” (COPOF) is to give companies a comprehensive introduction to the most important requirements of the organic food sector applicable for the daily practice. Additionally, the COPOF offers a number of tools that make it possible to: a) improve the production skills effectively, b) improve and maintain the quality of organic foods and c) guarantee the safety of organic products. The basic idea of this publication was that the responsible persons in companies producing and handling the products have a strongest influence on the final products characteristics themselves. Therefore, their knowledge, abilities and the structural conditions for their work are most important factors to ensure a high quality and safety of the produced food

Assessing the cost of global biodiversity and conservation knowledge

Knowledge products comprise assessments of authoritative information supported by stan-dards, governance, quality control, data, tools, and capacity building mechanisms. Considerable resources are dedicated to developing and maintaining knowledge productsfor biodiversity conservation, and they are widely used to inform policy and advise decisionmakers and practitioners. However, the financial cost of delivering this information is largelyundocumented. We evaluated the costs and funding sources for developing and maintain-ing four global biodiversity and conservation knowledge products: The IUCN Red List ofThreatened Species, the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Protected Planet, and the WorldDatabase of Key Biodiversity Areas. These are secondary data sets, built on primary datacollected by extensive networks of expert contributors worldwide. We estimate that US$160million (range: US$116–204 million), plus 293 person-years of volunteer time (range: 278–308 person-years) valued at US$14 million (range US$12–16 million), were invested inthese four knowledge products between 1979 and 2013. More than half of this financingwas provided through philanthropy, and nearly three-quarters was spent on personnelcosts. The estimated annual cost of maintaining data and platforms for three of these knowl-edge products (excluding the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems for which annual costs were notpossible to estimate for 2013) is US$6.5 million in total (range: US$6.2–6.7 million). We esti-mated that an additional US$114 million will be needed to reach pre-defined baselines ofdata coverage for all the four knowledge products, and that once achieved, annual mainte-nance costs will be approximately US$12 million. These costs are much lower than those tomaintain many other, similarly important, global knowledge products. Ensuring that biodi-versity and conservation knowledge products are sufficiently up to date, comprehensiveand accurate is fundamental to inform decision-making for biodiversity conservation andsustainable development. Thus, the development and implementation of plans for sustain-able long-term financing for them is critical

The geography of references in elite articles: What countries contribute to the archives of knowledge

This study is intended to find an answer for the question on which national "shoulders" the worldwide top-level research stands. Traditionally, national scientific standings are evaluated in terms of the number of citations to their papers. We raise a different question: instead of analyzing the citations to the countries' articles (the forward view), we examine referenced publications from specific countries cited in the most elite publications (the backward-citing-view). "Elite publications" are operationalized as the top-1% most-highly cited articles. Using the articles published during the years 2004 to 2013, we examine the research referenced in these works. Our results confirm the well-known fact that China has emerged to become a major player in science. However, China still belongs to the low contributors when countries are ranked as contributors to the cited references in top-1% articles. Using this perspective, the results do not point to a decreasing trend for the USA; in fact, the USA exceeds expectations (compared to its publication share) in terms of contributions to cited references in the top-1% articles. Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands also are shown at the top of the list. However, the results for Germany are lower than statistically expected

Should Top Universities Be Led By Top Researchers and Are They? A Citations Analysis

[Excerpt] This paper addresses the question: should the world’s top universities be led by top researchers, and are they? The lifetime citations are counted by hand of the leaders of the world’s top 100 universities identified in a global university ranking. These numbers are then normalized by adjusting for the different citation conventions across academic disciplines. Two statistical measures are used -- Pearson\u27s correlation coefficient and Spearman\u27s rho. This study documents a positive correlation between the lifetime citations of a University’s president and the position of that university in the global ranking. Better universities are run by better researchers. The results are not driven by outliers. That the top universities in the world -- who have the widest choice of candidates -- systematically appoint top researchers as their vice chancellors and presidents seems important to understand. This paper also shows that the pattern of presidents life-time citations follows a version of Lotka’s power law. There are two main areas of contribution. First, this paper attempts to use bibliometric data to address a performance- related question of a type not seen before (to the author’s knowledge). Second, despite the importance of research to research universities -- as described in many mission-statements -- no studies currently exist that ask whether it matters if the head of a research university is himself or herself a committed researcher. Given the importance of universities in the world, and the difficulty that many have in appointing leaders, this question seems pertinent

Development and evaluation of clustering techniques for finding people

Typically in a large organisation much expertise and knowledge is held informally within employees' own memories. When employees leave an organisation many documented links that go through that person are broken and no mechanism is usually available to overcome these broken links. This match making problem is related to the problem of finding potential work partners in a large and distributed organisation. This paper reports a comparative investigation into using standard information retrieval techniques to group employees together based on their webpages. This information can, hopefully, be subsequently used to redirect broken links to people who worked closely with a departed employee or used to highlight people, say indifferent departments, who work on similar topics. The paper reports the design and positive results of an experiment conducted at Risø National Laboratory comparing four different IR searching and clustering approaches using real users' web pages

Vzpostavitev socialnega svetovalnega dela v avstrijskih solah - od projekta do redne ponudbe

The contribution introduces the present situation and the basic challenges of school social work in Austria. Starting with the perception of a developing “knowledge society” (Höhne, 2004), school is seen as a life place at which social subjects and problems occur and are made manifest. The analyses are based in particular on empirical studies by the University of Klagenfurt (Sting & Leitner, 2011) and the University of Graz (Gspurning, Heimgartner, Pieber, & Sing, 2011), which were carried out in school social work facilities of Carinthia and Styria, but they also include Austrian-wide research projects. A methodical view is presented along the main target groups “pupils”, “teachers” and “parents”, and the basic orientations are discussed. The thematic analysis characterizes school social work as a multi-thematic service (e.g., conflicts, love, problems at school, problems of the family) that needs to oppose the reduction to single problem areas such as drug abuse or violence. The structural analyses render visible the meaning of spatial conditions, personnel competence and the social-spatial network. Finally, the possibilities of a lasting implementation of empirical research in school social work are discussed. (DIPF/Orig.

Channels of published research communication used by Malaysian authors in computer science and information technology

Analyse 389 records retrieved from Inspec (1990-1999), Compendex (1987-1999) and IEL (IEE/IEEE Electronic library)(1987-1999). The records comprised 159 journal articles, 229 conference papers and 1 monograph chapter. The subject coverage was computer science and information technology. The yearly output of Malaysian publications indicated a gentle upward trend. The highest contributions was 87 published in 1997. The channels used to publish differ slightly from the norm for scientists. Conference papers were preferred to journal articles. The spread of conference papers used to publish indicate three zonal distributions; the nucleus, moderate and low productivity in the ratio of 19 : 41 : 88, leading to a clustering index of 2.15. This shows that Malaysian conference contributions were concentrated in a few proceedings. No clear core journals can be identified for the journal articles and contributions were distributed in a wide variety of journal titles. Malaysian Journal of Computer Science published the highest number of journal articles. More than 83 of the articles were published in journals from the UK, USA, the Netherlands and Malaysia

The public sector's role in infertility management in India.

This objective of this paper is to explore the public sector's role in infertility management in India. It focuses on services available in the public sector, problems faced by and critiques of public sector providers. A postal survey was conducted with a sample of 6000 gynaecologists and in-depth interviews were conducted with 39 gynaecologists in four cities. The role of the public sector in infertility management is weak as even basic investigations and services were limited or incomplete. Inadequate infrastructure, inappropriate management including time management, lack of information and training, absence of clear protocols at all levels, private practice by public health doctors, pre-occupation with other health issues and lack of regulation were the main problems mentioned by providers. Amongst key recommendations are realistic and low-cost management, streamlining and regulating services, counselling of couples, providing information and raising awareness of patients, health personnel and policy makers