Root exudates as potentially preventive agent against harmful organisms in organic production.

Koreninski eksudaciji rastline namenjajo dobršen del svojih asimilatov. Njihovo pomembnost za rastline še vedno odkrivamo, kažejo pa se učinki eksudatov na rizosferne organizme (tudi parazitske), na sosednje rastline (alelopatija), na boljši privzem hranil in drugo. Koreninski eksudati se lahko tako delijo v grobem na snovi z majhno in snovi z veliko molekulsko maso, vsaka pa ima različne načine delovanja. Diploma se osredotoči na možnosti uporabe koreninskih eksudatov za omilitev škod na kmetijskih rastlinah, ki jih povzročajo talni škodljivci in bolezni. Poiskati je treba nove, okoljsko sprejemljivejše možnosti zatiranja zaradi naraščanja pridelave ekološke hrane in omejitve uporabe fitofarmacevtskih sredstev, kar je posledica strožje zakonodaje. Potencialnih rastlin za pridobivanje koreninskih eksudatov je precej, podrobneje sem opisal grah, križnice in koruzo. Pridobivanje samih koreninskih eksudatov pa je še v povojih, večina načinov pridobivanja je zaenkrat primerna le za laboratorijske poskuse. Največji potencial za pridobivanje eksudatov v pridelavi ima tehnika z kontinuiranim spiranjem. Sama aplikacija koreninskih eksudatov lahko poteka s kolobarjenjem, medsetvijo, biofumigacijo, škropljenjem ekstraktov in drugače. Potencial uporabe koreninskih eksudatov kot preventivnega sredstva v ekološki pridelavi je na podlagi pregledanih člankov znaten.Plants spend a good portion of their assimilates for root exudation. The importance of this process for plants is still being discovered. The effects on rhizospheric organisms (also parasitic), on adjacent plants (allelopathy), on larger nutrient uptake and more are rather well kown. Root exudates can be roughly divided into low molecular weight and high molecular weight substances, each having different modes of action. The diploma thesis focuses on possibilities of using root exudates against soil pests. New, environmentally friendly control options against pests are being investigated in order to increase the production of organic food and restrict the use of synthetic pesticides as a result of stricter legislation. There are many potential plants for root exudate productionhere I put the emphasis on pea, Cruciferae and corn. However, the larger-scale extraction of root exudates is still in its infancy, and most of the extraction methods are only suitable for laboratory experiments. The greatest potential for producing exudates in cultivation is the technique of continuous rinsing. The application of root exudates, however, can be executed through crop rotation, interplanting, biofumigation, extract spraying, and more. The potential of using root exudates as a preventive agent in organic production is very promising based on the articles reviewed here

Mednarodno znanstveno srečanje Vpetost turizma na kmetiji v lokalno in mednarodno okolje

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Telephone interpersonal counseling treatment for frequent attenders to primary care: Development and piloting

Background: Frequent attenders in primary care (FAs) consume a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources and often have depression, anxiety, chronic health issues, and interpersonal problems. Despite extensive medical care, they remain dissatisfied with the care and report no improvement in quality of life. Objective: To pilot a Telephone-based Interpersonal Counseling intervention for Frequent Attenders (TIPC-FA) and assess its feasibility and efficacy in reducing symptoms and healthcare utilization. Method: Top 10% of primary care visitors were randomly assigned to TIPC-FA, Telephone Supportive Contact (Support), or Treatment as Usual (TAU). TIPC-FA and Support groups received six telephone sessions over twelve weeks, while the TAU group was interviewed twice. Multilevel regression tested for changes over time, considering patient and counselor variance. Results: TIPC-FA and Support groups demonstrated reduced depressive symptoms, and the TIPC-FA group showed decreased somatization and anxiety. The TIPC-FA group demonstrated a trend towards less healthcare utilization than the TAU group. Conclusion: This pilot study suggests that IPC via telephone outreach is a feasible approach to treating FAs, achieving a reduction in symptoms not seen in other groups. Promising reduction in healthcare utilization in the TIPC-FA group warrants further exploration in larger-scale trials

Towards extending the SWITCH platform for time-critical, cloud-based CUDA applications: Job scheduling parameters influencing performance

SWITCH (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive cloud applications) allows for the development and deployment of real-time applications in the cloud, but it does not yet support instances backed by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Wanting to explore how SWITCH might support CUDA (a GPU architecture) in the future, we have undertaken a review of time-critical CUDA applications, discovering that run-time requirements (which we call ‘wall time’) are in many cases regarded as the most important. We have performed experiments to investigate which parameters have the greatest impact on wall time when running multiple Amazon Web Services GPU-backed instances. Although a maximum of 8 single-GPU instances can be launched in a single Amazon Region, launching just 2 instances rather than 1 gives a 42% decrease in wall time. Also, instances are often wasted doing nothing, and there is a moderately-strong relationship between how problems are distributed across instances and wall time. These findings can be used to enhance the SWITCH provision for specifying Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs); in the future, GPU-backed instances could be supported. These findings can also be used more generally, to optimise the balance between the computational resources needed and the resulting wall time to obtain results

A Patient-specific Knee Joint Computer Model Using MRI Data and \u27in vivo\u27 Compressive Load from the Optical Force Measuring System

Modelling of patient knee joint from the MRI data and simulating its kinematics is presented. A flexion of the femur with respect to the tibia from $\\rm{0^o}$ to around $\\rm{40^o}$ is simulated. The finite element knee model is driven by compressive load measured \\u27in vivo\\u27 during MRI process by using specially developed optical force measurement system. Predicted kinematics is evaluated against the high-quality model obtained by registration from experimentally gathered low-quality MRI at fixed flexions. Validation pointed out that the mean square error (MSE) for the Euler rotation angles are bellow $\\rm{1.73^o}$, while the MSE for Euler translation is smaller than 5.93 mm

Application-infrastructure co-programming: managing the entire complex application lifecycle

With an estimated 20 billion connected devices by 2020 generating enormous amounts of data, more data-centric ways of working are needed to cope with the dynamic load and reconfigurability of on-demand computing. There is a growing range of complex, specialised means by which this flexibility can be achieved, e.g. Software-defined networking (SDN). Specification of Quality of Service (QoS) constraints for time-critical characteristics, such as network availability and bandwidth, will be needed, in the same way that compute requirements can be specified in today's infrastructures. This is the motivation for SWITCH -- an EU-funded H2020 project addressing the entire lifecycle of time-critical, self-adaptive cloud applications by developing new middleware and tools for interactive specification of such applications. This paper presents a user-facing perspective on SWITCH by discussing the SWITCH Interactive Development Environment (SIDE) Workbench. SIDE provides a programmable and dynamic graphical modeling environment for cloud applications that ensures efficient use of compute and network resources while satisfying time-critical QoS requirements. SIDE enables a user to specify the software components, properties and requirements, QoS parameters, machine requirements and their composition into a fully operational, multi-tier cloud application. In order to enable SIDE to represent the software and infrastructure constraints and to communicate them to other SWITCH components, we have defined a co-programming model using TOSCA that is capable of representing the application's state during the entire lifecycle of the application. We show how the SIDE Web GUI, along with TOSCA and the other subsystems, can support three use cases and provide a walk-through of one of these use cases to illustrate the power of such an approach

Towards a methodology for creating time-critical, cloud-based CUDA applications

CUDA has been used in many different application domains, not all of which are specifically image processing related. There is the opportunity to use multiple and/or distributed CUDA resources in cloud facilities such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), in order to obtain enhanced processing power and to satisfy time-critical requirements which cannot be satisfied using a single CUDA resource. In particular, this would provide enhanced ability for processing Big Data, especially in conjunction with distributed file systems (for example). In this paper, we present a survey of time-critical CUDA applications, identifying requirements and concepts that they tend to have in common. In particular, we investigate the terminology used for Quality of Service metrics, and present a taxonomy which summarises the underlying concepts and maps these terms to the diverse terminology used. We also survey typical requirements for developing, deploying and managing such applications. Given these requirements, we consider how the SWITCH platform can in principle support the entire life-cycle of time-critical CUDA application development and cloud deployment, and identify specific extensions which would be needed in order fully to support this particular class of time-critical cloud applications

Application-infrastructure co-programming: managing the entire complex application lifecycle

With an estimated 20 billion connected devices by 2020 generating enormous amounts of data, more data-centric ways of working are needed to cope with the dynamic load and reconfigurability of on-demand computing. There is a growing range of complex, specialised means by which this flexibility can be achieved, e.g. Software-defined networking (SDN). Specification of Quality of Service (QoS) constraints for time-critical characteristics, such as network availability and bandwidth, will be needed, in the same way that compute requirements can be specified in today's infrastructures. This is the motivation for SWITCH -- an EU-funded H2020 project addressing the entire lifecycle of time-critical, self-adaptive cloud applications by developing new middleware and tools for interactive specification of such applications. This paper presents a user-facing perspective on SWITCH by discussing the SWITCH Interactive Development Environment (SIDE) Workbench. SIDE provides a programmable and dynamic graphical modeling environment for cloud applications that ensures efficient use of compute and network resources while satisfying time-critical QoS requirements. SIDE enables a user to specify the software components, properties and requirements, QoS parameters, machine requirements and their composition into a fully operational, multi-tier cloud application. In order to enable SIDE to represent the software and infrastructure constraints and to communicate them to other SWITCH components, we have defined a co-programming model using TOSCA that is capable of representing the application's state during the entire lifecycle of the application. We show how the SIDE Web GUI, along with TOSCA and the other subsystems, can support three use cases and provide a walk-through of one of these use cases to illustrate the power of such an approach