The contradictions between the original three master Belgica and present regulations

On 16 August 1897, the Belgian captain Adrien de Gerlache together with an international crew of 15 left Antwerp (Belgium) for the Antarctic on the three-master Belgica. This expedition was the first Antarctic expedition of a purely scientific nature and the first to spend a winter in the austral polar night. Trapped in ice in March 1898 she managed to escape in February the year after. She was initially built as a whaler with a length of 34.60m, beam of 7.28m and draught of 3.46m. In 2007 a project was initiated to build a replica (or look alike) of this vessel at the workshops of De Steenschuit (Boom, Belgium), specialized in traditional shipbuilding techniques and maritime restoration. After a short historic review and a description of the main goals of the present project, the paper will emphasize the contradictions between the attempt to reconstruct the original vessel on one hand, and the requirements imposed by present regulations that have to be fulfilled by a vessel capable of sailing against the polar ice on the other hand. Also the application of modern day techniques in combination with traditional materials will be discussed

Influence of sex steroids on the viability and CD11b, CD18 and CD47 expression of blood neutrophils from dairy cows in the last month of gestation

In the period around parturition, cows experience an increased susceptibility for the development of Escherichia coli mastitis. This increased susceptibility has been correlated with a decreased functionality of neutrophils. In the current study, it is suggested that the decreased neutrophil functionality may be induced by the extensive alterations in sex steroid levels occurring around parturition. It was first hypothesized that 17 beta-estradiol and progesterone influence the viability, apoptosis and necrosis of blood neutrophils from cows in their last month of gestation. Subsequently, it was hypothesized that 17 beta-estradiol modulates the expression of CD11b, CD18 or CD47 thereby explaining its influence on the migration of bovine neutrophils. Neither 17 beta-estradiol nor progesterone significantly influenced viability, apoptosis or necrosis in spontaneous apoptosis conditions. However, when apoptosis was induced with TNF-alpha and gliotoxin, progesterone exerted a survival effect ( P < 0.05). In addition, 17 beta-estradiol treatment of bovine blood neutrophils significantly decreased the expression of CD47 ( P < 0.05) but not of CD11b or CD18. It can be concluded that 17 beta-estradiol and progesterone do not affect spontaneous apoptosis of bovine blood neutrophils while a survival effect was observed for progesterone on induced neutrophils apoptosis. Moreover, our results concerning the influence of 17 beta-estradiol on the CD11b, CD18 and CD47 expression extend previous demonstrations of the suppressive effect of 17 beta-estradiol on neutrophils migration and indicate that the altered expression of CD47 may contribute to this phenomenon

Validation of internal control genes for gene expression analysis in bovine polymorphonuclear leukocytes

Analysis of gene expression is becoming more important in all areas of biological research to evaluate gene expression during physiological and pathological conditions (e.g., mastitis), not the least in the field of animal research. Presently, real-time gene expression analysis is considered to be the method of choice for accurate and sensitive quantification of mRNA transcripts. Because comparison of gene expression levels is frequently the aim of these experiments, there is a critical need to validate internal control genes. When studying gene expression in bovine polymorphonuclear leukocytes, special attention should be paid to this validation, because polymorphonuclear leukocytes are subjected to numerous physiological influences, depending on the stage of lactation. In this study, 8 commonly used reference genes (ACT, GAPD, H2A, TBP, HPRT1, SDHA, YWHAZ, and 18S rRNA) were evaluated in bovine polymorphonuclear leukocytes. The transcription levels of 6 reference genes were determined using real-time PCR. By geometrically averaging the expression levels of these genes, SDHA, YWHAZ, and 18S rRNA were selected as being the most stable genes for accurate normalization of real-time results of bovine polymorphonuclear leukocytes

Mensenhandel en -smokkel : de weg naar een eengemaakte vervolging en berechting

Matroesjka-verhalen, loverboys, huisjesmelkerij, economische uitbuiting en detacheringsfraude, insluiping in havenfaciliteiten en vrachtwagens, … Mensenhandel en -smokkel uit zich actueel in verschillende fenomenen en nam de voorbije jaren sterk toe. In de provincie West-Vlaanderen is vanuit rechterlijke hoek een origineel initiatief ontstaan om te streven naar een eengemaakte benadering. Zo werd één correctionele kamer bevoegd voor de berechting van deze dossiers over het volledige territorium, met centrale zittingsplaats. Dit werkte ook stimulerend voor de actoren in de handhavingsketen: parket en arbeidsauditoraat coördineren onderling strafonderzoeken. Ook de politie- en inspectiediensten slaan de handen in elkaar via multidisciplinaire controles. Dit verzamelwerk werd samengesteld door betrokken magistraten en biedt een inzicht in de huidige best practices in het deelgebied. Het is actueel: er wordt ingehaakt op jonge tendensen en initiatieven in de gerechtelijke wereld. Het cahier is origineel: een beschrijving van evoluties in het gerechtelijk werkveld; vraagstukken die nauwelijks aan bod komen in andere juridische bijdragen. Het is praktijkgericht: het verzamelwerk biedt een inzicht in de best practices op het niveau van het openbaar ministerie en de zetel. Ook niet-gepubliceerde rechtspraak uit het arrondissement van de rechtbank van eerste aanleg West-Vlaanderen en het ressort van het hof van beroep Gent wordt besproken. De aanpak is multidisciplinair: de aanpak van mensenhandel en -smokkel doorkruist verschillende rechtstakken (strafrecht, arbeidsrecht, socialezekerheidsrecht, vennootschapsrecht, rij- en rusttijden, administratief recht, …). Het onderwerp wordt achtereenvolgens benaderd vanuit het oogpunt van de verschillende segmenten binnen Justitie (zetel, parket van de procureur des Konings, arbeidsauditoraat). +++ Op 20 september 2018 gaat de Studieavond: Het arrest Altun. Doorbraak van de Europese fraude- en misbruikdoctrine in het sociaal recht? door in Antwerpen (Crowne Plaza) van 17u45 tot 20u00. Dit werk is bij deelname inbegrepen. Voor meer informatie en inschrijving, klik hier Op 23 oktober 2018 gaat het Colloquium Mensenhandel en -smokkel: De weg naar een eengemaakte vervolging en berechting door in Brugge (Gerechtsgebouw) van 13u30 tot 17u30. Dit cahier is bij deelname inbegrepen. Online inschrijfformulie

Relationship between nondestructive firmness measurements and commercially important ripening fruit stages for peaches, nectarines and plums

Fruit firmness measurement is a good way to monitor fruit softening and to predict bruising damage during harvest and postharvest handling. Ripening protocols traditionally utilize a destructive penetrometer-type fruit firmness measure to monitor ripening. Until recently, methods of assessing fruit texture properties nondestructively were not commercially available. The nondestructive Sinclair iQ™ firmness tester was investigated to monitor ripening and predict bruising susceptibility in stone fruit. This work was carried out on four peach, three plum, and five nectarine cultivars over two seasons. The correlations between destructive and nondestructive firmness measurements were significant (p-value = 0.0001), although too low for commercial applications as they varied from r2 = 0.60–0.71 according to fruit type. Using a different approach, the relationship between destructive and nondestructive firmness measures was characterized in terms of segregating these fruit according to their stages of ripening. This was done by using discriminant analysis (66–90% agreement in ripeness stage classification was observed in validation tests). Discriminant analysis consistently segregated nondestructive firmness measured fruit into commercially important classes (“ready to eat”, “ready to buy”, “mature and immature”). These represented key ripening stages with different bruising potentials and consumer acceptance. This work points out the importance to relate nondestructive measurements directly to important commercial physiological stages rather than to correlate them with the current standard penetrometer values. Thus, destructive and nondestructive firmness measurements can be directly used to identify the stage of ripeness and potential susceptibility to bruising during postharvest changes. Further work is recommended to evaluate the performance of this nondestructive sensor in segregating fruit according to their stage of ripeness under packinghouse or processing plant conditions

Real-time outlier detection for large datasets by RT-DetMCD

Modern industrial machines can generate gigabytes of data in seconds, frequently pushing the boundaries of available computing power. Together with the time criticality of industrial processing this presents a challenging problem for any data analytics procedure. We focus on the deterministic minimum covariance determinant method (DetMCD), which detects outliers by fitting a robust covariance matrix. We construct a much faster version of DetMCD by replacing its initial estimators by two new methods and incorporating update-based concentration steps. The computation time is reduced further by parallel computing, with a novel robust aggregation method to combine the results from the threads. The speed and accuracy of the proposed real-time DetMCD method (RT-DetMCD) are illustrated by simulation and a real industrial application to food sorting

Reliability of vibration measurements and impact response characteristics for the quality assessment of tomatoes

The applicability of the acoustic impulse-response and the impact response devices for t he measurement of fresh table tomato firmness states with both instruments. A high positive correlation wasfound between the maximal acceleration, measured with the impact response device, and the stiffness measured with the acoustic tester. For the impact tester, the ratio between the maximal acceleration and the impact duration was the most segregating parameter when classifying tomatoes into different firmness classes. For the acoustic tester, the repeatability of the measurements was significantly higher at the equator than at the bottom of the tomato. This was not the case for the impact tester, which gave similar results at both positions. The overall discrimant power of both methods was found to be very similar. For the acoustic tester, discrimination between different firmness states was much better when measuring at the bottom. For the impact tester, it makes not too much difference in discriminat power where to measure

Real-time discriminant analysis in the presence of label and measurement noise

Quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) is a widely used classification technique. Based on a training dataset, each class in the data is characterized by an estimate of its center and shape, which can then be used to assign unseen observations to one of the classes. The traditional QDA rule relies on the empirical mean and covariance matrix. Unfortunately, these estimators are sensitive to label and measurement noise which often impairs the model's predictive ability. Robust estimators of location and scatter are resistant to this type of contamination. However, they have a prohibitive computational cost for large scale industrial experiments. We present a novel QDA method based on a recent real-time robust algorithm. We additionally integrate an anomaly detection step to classify the most atypical observations into a separate class of outliers. Finally, we introduce the label bias plot, a graphical display to identify label and measurement noise in the training data. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated in a simulation study with huge datasets, and on real datasets about diabetes and fruit