Bioäpfel - besser und gesünder? Eine Vergleichsstudie mit Standard- und Alternativmethoden der Qualitätserfassung

Die am FiBL auf drei Jahre angelegte Vergleichsstudie für Äpfel aus integrierter und biologischer Produktion weist nach dem ersten Versuchsjahr signifikante anbaubedingte Unterschiede nach

Social orientation of banks

The influence of the bank's orientation on clients and the quality of the services provided on the financial efficiency of the commercial institution (sales volume, profitability, cost reduction) was studied. The development of online banking and Internet banking is considered. The relationship between the profitability of the bank and the level of customercentricity is proved. World experience has been compared and generalized, and country specificity has been singled out in different regions of the world. The dependence between the degree of customer satisfaction and their subsequent loyalty to the bank was studied. Prospective directions of expansion of the market of banking services are outlined, and also changes in the psychology of the client that took place due to scientific and technological progress are noted. The basic directions of increase of efficiency of work of the bank personnel are allocated

The high-rate data challenge: computing for the CBM experiment

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) is a next-generation heavy-ion experiment to be operated at the FAIR facility, currently under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. A key feature of CBM is very high interaction rate, exceeding those of contemporary nuclear collision experiments by several orders of magnitude. Such interaction rates forbid a conventional, hardware-triggered readout; instead, experiment data will be freely streaming from self-triggered front-end electronics. In order to reduce the huge raw data volume to a recordable rate, data will be selected exclusively on CPU, which necessitates partial event reconstruction in real-time. Consequently, the traditional segregation of online and offline software vanishes; an integrated on- and offline data processing concept is called for. In this paper, we will report on concepts and developments for computing for CBM as well as on the status of preparations for its first physics run

A precision device needs precise simulation: Software description of the CBM Silicon Tracking System

Precise modelling of detectors in simulations is the key to the understanding of their performance, which, in turn, is a prerequisite for the proper design choice and, later, for the achievement of valid physics results. In this report, we describe the implementation of the Silicon Tracking System (STS), the main tracking device of the CBM experiment, in the CBM software environment. The STS makes uses of double-sided silicon micro-strip sensors with double metal layers. We present a description of transport and detector response simulation, including all relevant physical effects like charge creation and drift, charge collection, cross-talk and digitization. Of particular importance and novelty is the description of the time behavior of the detector, since its readout will not be externally triggered but continuous. We also cover some aspects of local reconstruction, which in the CBM case has to be performed in real-time and thus requires high-speed algorithms

Costs of streamlined HIV care delivery in rural Ugandan and Kenyan clinics in the SEARCH Studys.

OBJECTIVES/DESIGN:As antiretroviral therapy (ART) rapidly expands in sub-Saharan Africa using new efficient care models, data on costs of these approaches are lacking. We examined costs of a streamlined HIV care delivery model within a large HIV test-and-treat study in Uganda and Kenya. METHODS:We calculated observed per-person-per-year (ppy) costs of streamlined care in 17 health facilities in SEARCH Study intervention communities (NCT: 01864603) via micro-costing techniques, time-and-motion studies, staff interviews, and administrative records. Cost categories included salaries, ART, viral load testing, recurring goods/services, and fixed capital/facility costs. We then modeled costs under three increasingly efficient scale-up scenarios: lowest-cost ART, centralized viral load testing, and governmental healthcare worker salaries. We assessed the relationship between community-specific ART delivery costs, retention in care, and viral suppression. RESULTS:Estimated streamlined HIV care delivery costs were $291/ppy. ART ($117/ppy for TDF/3TC/EFV [40%]) and viral load testing ($110/ppy for 2 tests/year [39$51/ppy), recurring costs ($5/ppy), and fixed costs ($7/ppy). Optimized ART scale-up with lowest-cost ART ($100/ppy), annual viral load testing ($24/ppy), and governmental healthcare salaries ($27/ppy), lowered streamlined care cost to$163/ppy. We found clinic-to-clinic heterogeneity in retention and viral suppression levels versus streamlined care delivery costs, but no correlation between cost and either retention or viral suppression. CONCLUSIONS:In the SEARCH Study, streamlined HIV care delivery costs were similar to or lower than prior estimates despite including viral load testing; further optimizations could substantially reduce costs further. These data can inform global strategies for financing ART expansion to achieve UNAIDS 90-90-90 targets

Performance for proton anisotropic flow measurement of the CBM experiment at FAIR

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) performance for proton anisotropic flow measurements is studied with Monte-Carlo simulations using collisions of gold ions at lab momentum of 12A GeV/c employing DCM-QGSM-SMM heavy-ion event generator. Realistic procedures are used for centrality estimation with the number of registered tracks and particle identification with information from Time-Of-Flight detector. Variation of directed flow estimates depending on various combinations of PSD modules is used to evaluate possible systematic biases due to collision symmetry plane estimation

Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis in critically ill patients: diagnostic reliability of HLH-2004 criteria and HScore

Background: Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) is a rare though often fatal hyperinflammatory syndrome mimicking sepsis in the critically ill. Diagnosis relies on the HLH-2004 criteria and HScore, both of which have been developed in pediatric or adult non-critically ill patients, respectively. Therefore, we aimed to determine the sensitivity and specificity of HLH-2004 criteria and HScore in a cohort of adult critically ill patients. Methods: In this further analysis of a retrospective observational study, patients ≥ 18 years admitted to at least one adult ICU at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin between January 2006 and August 2018 with hyperferritinemia of ≥ 500 μg/L were included. Patients' charts were reviewed for clinically diagnosed or suspected HLH. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis was performed to determine prediction accuracy. Results: In total, 2623 patients with hyperferritinemia were included, of whom 40 patients had HLH. We found the best prediction accuracy of HLH diagnosis for a cutoff of 4 fulfilled HLH-2004 criteria (95.0% sensitivity and 93.6% specificity) and HScore cutoff of 168 (100% sensitivity and 94.1% specificity). By adjusting HLH-2004 criteria cutoffs of both hyperferritinemia to 3000 μg/L and fever to 38.2 °C, sensitivity and specificity increased to 97.5% and 96.1%, respectively. Both a higher number of fulfilled HLH-2004 criteria [OR 1.513 (95% CI 1.372-1.667); p < 0.001] and a higher HScore [OR 1.011 (95% CI 1.009-1.013); p < 0.001] were significantly associated with in-hospital mortality. Conclusions: An HScore cutoff of 168 revealed a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 94.1%, thereby providing slightly superior diagnostic accuracy compared to HLH-2004 criteria. Both HLH-2004 criteria and HScore proved to be of good diagnostic accuracy and consequently might be used for HLH diagnosis in critically ill patients. Clinical trial registration: The study was registered with www.ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02854943) on August 1, 2016