Outlier robust corner-preserving methods for reconstructing noisy images

The ability to remove a large amount of noise and the ability to preserve most structure are desirable properties of an image smoother. Unfortunately, they usually seem to be at odds with each other; one can only improve one property at the cost of the other. By combining M-smoothing and least-squares-trimming, the TM-smoother is introduced as a means to unify corner-preserving properties and outlier robustness. To identify edge- and corner-preserving properties, a new theory based on differential geometry is developed. Further, robustness concepts are transferred to image processing. In two examples, the TM-smoother outperforms other corner-preserving smoothers. A software package containing both the TM- and the M-smoother can be downloaded from the Internet.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000001109 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Environmental Impacts and Economic Differences in grassland based Organic Dairy Farms in Germany – Modelling the Extremes

Differences in environmental impact and economic returns between intensive and low-input organic dairy production are investigated using two simplified model farms with different amounts of concentrates being fed. In four scenarios, ecological and economic effects of restricting the more intensive farm management practice beyond the existing regulations of organic farming are analysed. In the initial situation, the intensive farm has a financial advantage of about 600.00 € per ha compared with the low-input farm, while the environmental risks caused by its production system are higher in several Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) categories. We showed for the model case that limiting livestock density and using regional grown concentrates bring about considerable improvements in LCA results, while restricting the amount of concentrates used does not. These three scenarios result in economic deterioration for the intensive farm. A fourth scenario increasing the share of pasture in daily dry matter intake (DMI) to a minimum of 50% during the grazing season has positive effects environmentally as well as economically

From Topics to Narrative Documents: Management and Personalization of Topic Collections

The paper proposes a document planning approach that structures topic-oriented materials into user-specific, narrative documents. This is achieved by introducing narrative flows into topic collections and by identifying variant relations between topics. Technically, topic collections are modeled as graphs, where nodes correspond to topics and edges denote semantic dependencies, narrative flows, and variant relations between the topics. These graphs are traversed to produce narrative documents. To personalise the traversal, user contexts are considered and define the users’ structure and content preferences. For illustration purposes the approach has been applied to a collection of learning resources

Between oral history and ICT: on the creation of knowledge societies

Vor dem Hintergrund eines Globalisierungsprozesses, der insbesondere durch die Weiterentwicklung von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien geprägt ist, befasst sich der Beitrag mit der oralen Wissensvermittlung am Beispiel von sozialen Organisationen in Ghana. Dabei verfolgt die Autorin eine vermittlungs- und prozessorientierte konzeptuelle und theoretische Herangehensweise, welche die soziale Organisation sowie die Wissensordnung betrachtet und in ihren Schlussfolgerungen die Aspekte der Politik, Geschichte, Identität und Machtverhältnisse integriert. Auf diese Weise wird Wissen hinsichtlich seiner sozialen, zeitlichen und räumlichen Dimensionen analysiert. Den Untersuchungsgegenstand bilden Frauengruppen bzw. Frauenorganisationen, die auf lokaler, regionaler und auch nationaler Ebene eine 'epistemische Kultur' geformt haben, die interaktiv sozial und elektronisch mit dem World Wide Women's Web verbunden sind. Innerhalb dieser Einrichtung bzw. Schnittstelle wird Wissen generiert, ausgetauscht, verbreitet und schließlich auf einem abstrakten Level in einen neuen Entwicklungsansatz über- und umgesetzt. Dabei handelt es sich um (1) die Integration von Geschichte und (2) wissenschaftlichem Wissen, (3) die Reflektion von Alltagswissen und -praktiken sowie (4) die kritische Untersuchung und aktive Transformation der sozialen bzw. symbolischen Ordnung. Das allgemeine Ziel besteht in diesem Zusammenhang darin, einen sozialen Wandel herbeizuführen. Der Anspruch der Studie ist es nun, die unterschiedlichen koexistierenden Kommunikationsformen aufzuzeigen. Denn anstatt der oft antizipierten Annahme eines eindimensionalen Wandels von oralen zu schriftlichen Kulturen wird hier auf der Basis von Pluralität und Komplementarität der Kommunikationsmedien argumentiert, was schließlich die Existenz von 'multiplen Modernitäten' innerhalb einer Region bedeutet. So sind die gegenwärtigen Dynamiken der Verflechtungen in den untersuchten Organisationen durch eine Struktur der Überlappung von sozialen und virtuellen Räumen geprägt. Die Individuen gehören zu verschiedenen Räumen, während sie gleichzeitig Kontakt zu unterschiedlichen Wissensquellen haben. Diese beidseitige Inklusion von unterschiedlichen Wissensinhalten etabliert sodann eine Metaebene des Wissens, basierend auf Wissen: eine zweite Wissensordnung. (ICG2

Social scents in hand-reared pronghorn (Antilocapra americana)

Three male and one female pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) were taken in the wild when a few hours to three days old and were hand-raised. The development of their behaviour was studied with particular emphasis on their olfactory communication. Fifty hours of field observations confirmed most of the findings in the captive animals.Four scents are important in the social life of the pronghorn: They originate with the paired subauricular and ischiadic glands, the single dorsal gland and the odour of urine. The subauricular and dorsal scents are produced by males only. Urine is an important component of the sniffing - pawing -urinating - defecation sequence of the males. The ontogeny of this sequence is described. An experiment with an artificial marking post demonstrated that the subauricular scent of a male one rank lower released the strongest response in other bucks. Preliminary gas chromatographic analysis of the subauricular scent has been carried out

Indirect interactions between invasive and native plants via pollinators

In generalised pollination systems, the presence of alien plant species may change the foraging behaviour of pollinators on native plant species, which could result in reduced reproductive success of native plant species. We tested this idea of indirect interactions on a small spatial and temporal scale in a field study in Mauritius, where the invasive strawberry guava, Psidium cattleianum, provides additional floral resources for insect pollinators. We predicted that the presence of flowering guava would indirectly and negatively affect the reproductive success of the endemic plant Bertiera zaluzania, which has similar flowers, by diverting shared pollinators. We removed P. cattleianum flowers within a 5-m radius from around half the B. zaluzania target plants (treatment) and left P. cattleianum flowers intact around the other half (control). By far, the most abundant and shared pollinator was the introduced honey bee, Apis mellifera, but its visitation rates to treatment and control plants were similar. Likewise, fruit and seed set and fruit size and weight of B. zaluzania were not influenced by the presence of P. cattleianum flowers. Although other studies have shown small-scale effects of alien plant species on neighbouring natives, we found no evidence for such negative indirect interactions in our system. The dominance of introduced, established A. mellifera indicates their replacement of native insect flower visitors and their function as pollinators of native plant species. However, the pollination effectiveness of A. mellifera in comparison to native pollinators is unknow

First ideas of user-adapted views of lexicographic data exemplified on OWID and elexiko

This paper is a project report of the lexicographic Internet portal OWID, an Online Vocabulary Information System of German which is being built at the Institute of German Language in Mannheim (IDS). Overall, the contents of the portal and its technical approaches will be presented. The lexical database is structured in a granular way which allows to extend possible search options for lexicographers. Against the background of current research on using electronic dictionaries, the project OWID is also working on first ideas of useradapted access and user-adapted views of the lexicographic data. Due to the fact that the portal OWID comprises dictionaries which are available online it is possible to change the design and functions of the website easily (in comparison to printed dictionaries). Ideas of implementing user-adapted views of the lexicographic data will be demonstrated by using an example taken from one of the dictionaries of the portal, namely elexiko

Music in the Body –The Body in Music

The body matters in the humanities and within social and cultural studies. It is variously understood as a knowledge store and transmitter, as a node of perception and cognition, as a site of discipline and power and as a locus of identity and agency. But how is the body integral to our concept of music? With increasing interest, Musicology is discovering the epistemological role of the body and its potential as analytical tool, pursuing avenues such as affect studies, performance studies, gender in music and musical perception and cognition. This volume of collected works draws on an international conference, held at the Department of Musicology at the University of Göttingen in 2019, that aimed to bring together various theoretical perspectives relating to the body and evaluating its present musicological relevance. It explores pathways into a fundamental debate on the body as a central musicological category and reflects on the relevance of this category in the application of diverse musical objects and practices. Composition and performance, aesthetic discourse and sociological analysis, perception and production are all discussed in relation to bodily knowledge, bodily practice and bodily norms. Historical, contemporary, analytical, ethnographic and artistic-experimental approaches reflect the richness of the musicological discipline and its forays into the musical body. The publication contains twelve different approaches to the body in music in German and English by Sylvain Brétéché, Max Ischebeck, Werner Jauk, Jasna Jovicevic, Moritz Kelber, Tobias Knickmann, Ina Knoth, Madeleine Le Bouteiller, Alastair White, Martin Winter, Stefanie Schroedter and Martin Zenck.:Abbreviations 7 Christine Hoppe, Sarah Avischag Müller: Musicological Pathways into the Body in Music 9 Moving Sounds, Moving Bodies Stephanie Schroedter: Körper und Klänge in Bewegung – Körperliche Dimensionen von Musik zwischen Embodiment und Enaction 29 Moritz Kelber: Mehr als nur berührend. Die Hand in der Musikpraxis der Frühen Neuzeit 57 Martin Zenck: Musik – eine taktile Kunst? Hand, Auge und Mund in den Dirigierlehren von Hermann Scherchen und Pierre Boulez 91 Body Discourses and Sociological Perspectives Martin Winter: Musik als Technologie der Körper. Eine Skizze der Ko-Produktionen von Klang, Körper und Subjekt 115 Max Ischebeck: Der musikalische Körper als Wunschmaschine: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder und die Bedeutung des Leibes für die gesellschafliche Wirksamkeit der Musik 133 Ina Knoth: Körpervorstellung und Musikwahrnehmung englischer Virtuosi um 1700 155 Musical Composition – Body Images – Musical Instruments Alastair White: Material Music: Reclaiming Freedom in Spatialised Time 175 Tobias Knickmann: As if “moving a mountain” – Te Auditive, Visual and Semantic Potential of Performing Chaya Czernowin’s String Quartet and Te last leaf 195 Performance – Body – Perception Madeleine Le Bouteiller: The Body as a Musical Instrument: Reconsidering Performances with Biosignals 215 Sylvain Brétéché: ‘Body Ways’: The Extra-ordinary Music of the Deaf 229 Jasna Jovicevic: Mapping the Performative Body in the Practice of Jazz Improvisation 255 Werner Jauk: Sound-gesture und ihre Mediatisierungen – musikalische als symbolische Formen von embodied cognitions aus der Natur sonisch performativen Erlebens 273 Appendix Conference programme 295 Authors 29

Optimal designs for inspection times of interval-censored data

We treat optimal equidistant and optimal non-equidistant inspection times for interval-censored data with exponential distribution.We provide in particular a recursive formula for calculating the optimal non-equidistant inspection times which is similar to a formula for optimal spacing of quantiles for asymptotically best linear estimates based on order statistics. This formula provides an upper bound for the standardized Fisher information which is reached for the optimal non-equidistant inspection times if the number of inspections is converging to infinity. The same upper bound is also shown for the optimal equidistant inspection times. Since optimal equidistant inspection times are easier to calculate and easier to handle in practice, we study the efficiency of optimal equidistant inspection times with respect to optimal nonequidistant inspection times. Moreover, since the optimal inspection times are only locally optimal, we provide also some results concerning maximin efficient designs

An overnational cereal circuit for developing locally adapted organic seeds of wheat

On several locations in Germany and Switzerland, new and local varieties of winter wheat were compared to the variety "Bussard" in trial plots with 2-4 replications. Among other parameters, baking quality and gluten content were analised and discussed