Processing of Wheat to Bread Control of Quality and Safety in Organic Production Chains

This leaflet provides a practical overview for millers, bakers and others involved in production of flour and bread, on what can be done at these steps to improve the quality and safety of organically produced bread, in addition to certification and general food safety requirements. A separate leaflet covers the wheat production and grain storage steps, and other leaflets cover other commodities or aim at consumers and retailers

A Simplification of Inclusion-Exclusion via Minimal Complexes

This poster discusses the discovery and use of previously unproved methods for solving counting problems using the fundamental ideas of the inclusion exclusion-principle and the Euler characteristic. While both methods use a weighted version of the Euler characteristic to determine the order of a union of finite sets, the first method can be used with contractible, planar graphs whereas the second method generalizes this idea to multi-dimensional complexes and their minimal complexes. These methods seem to be promising in their applications to subjects such as homology theory, Betti numbers, and abstract tubes

Bowing Behavior of Strings With Non-Uniform Mass Density

An investigation into the behavior of non-uniform strings when bowed while varying bowing position and force applied to map the minimum force curve on the Schelleng diagram. Strings investigated include uniform, cosinusoidal variation, and impedance discontinuity strings

Absolute value preconditioning for symmetric indefinite linear systems

We introduce a novel strategy for constructing symmetric positive definite (SPD) preconditioners for linear systems with symmetric indefinite matrices. The strategy, called absolute value preconditioning, is motivated by the observation that the preconditioned minimal residual method with the inverse of the absolute value of the matrix as a preconditioner converges to the exact solution of the system in at most two steps. Neither the exact absolute value of the matrix nor its exact inverse are computationally feasible to construct in general. However, we provide a practical example of an SPD preconditioner that is based on the suggested approach. In this example we consider a model problem with a shifted discrete negative Laplacian, and suggest a geometric multigrid (MG) preconditioner, where the inverse of the matrix absolute value appears only on the coarse grid, while operations on finer grids are based on the Laplacian. Our numerical tests demonstrate practical effectiveness of the new MG preconditioner, which leads to a robust iterative scheme with minimalist memory requirements

Analgesic prescribing trends in a national sample of older veterans with osteoarthritis: 2012-2017

Few investigations examine patterns of opioid and nonopioid analgesic prescribing and concurrent pain intensity ratings before and after institution of safer prescribing programs such as the October 2013 Veterans Health Administration system-wide Opioid Safety Initiative (OSI) implementation. We conducted a quasi-experimental pre–post observational study of all older U.S. veterans (≥50 years old) with osteoarthritis of the knee or hip. All associated outpatient analgesic prescriptions and outpatient pain intensity ratings from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2016, were analyzed with segmented regression of interrupted time series. Standardized monthly rates for each analgesic class (total, opioid, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, acetaminophen, and other study analgesics) were analyzed with segmented negative binomial regression models with overall slope, step, and slope change. Similarly, segmented linear regression was used to analyze pain intensity ratings and percentage of those reporting pain. All models were additionally adjusted for age, sex, and race. Before OSI implementation, total analgesic prescriptions showed a steady rise, abruptly decreasing to a flat trajectory after OSI implementation. This trend was primarily due to a decrease in opioid prescribing after OSI. Total prescribing after OSI implementation was partially compensated by continuing increased prescribing of other study analgesics as well as a significant rise in acetaminophen prescriptions (post-OSI). No changes in nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug prescribing were seen. A small rise in the percentage of those reporting pain but not mean pain intensity ratings continued over the study period with no changes associated with OSI. Changes in analgesic prescribing trends were not paralleled by changes in reported pain intensity for older veterans with osteoarthritis

Transformação de Trigo em Pão Controlo da Qualidade e Segurança em cadeias de Produção Biológica

Este desdobrável fornece uma visão prática do processamento de farinha e destina-se a moleiros, padeiros e outros agentes envolvidos na produção de farinha e pão, sobre o que pode ser feito nestas etapas de forma a melhorar a qualidade e a segurança do pão biológico, de acordo com os requisitos gerais da certificação da segurança alimentar. Foram também preparados desdobráveis para outros produtos, bem como desdobráveis dirigidos aos consumidores e retalhistas