In-Farm Research - a Swiss Perspective

Conclusions The examination of the question, “why animals on farms” demonstrates the potential of “in-farm research” to gaining in-depth knowledge of the farm. The scientist’s observations and co-working on the farm are a method of choices that allows an accurate evaluation of the current situation of the farm, its atmosphere and the inner perspective of the farmers. It also lets the scientist contrast impressions from a personal point of view and to challenge statements made by the farmers. In addition, farmers were grateful for the “non-economic” assessments of the farm. As a consequence of this work, the reasons farmers give for keeping cows has become more conscious, and their decisions may strengthen their motives while also helping with public relations. Interestingly enough, looking at the farm as an individual organism, and trying to understand its intrinsic values the research methodology increasingly resembles that of social science, e.g. participative research. The researcher has to be trained in “objectivity” and precision in observational skills, and professional experience in agriculture is mandatory. Curricula in agri-science should include training programs to develop them. In-farm research cannot, and will not, be an alternative to other scientific endeavors. Rather, it is a complementary approach, especially for developing sustainable farming practices

Modernist perambulations through time and space: From Enlightened walking to crawling, stalking, modelling and street-walking

Analysing diverse modes of walking across a wide range of texts from the Enlightenment period and beyond, this article explores how the practice of walking was discovered by philosophers, educators and writers as a rich discursive trope that stood for competing notions of the morally good life. The discussion proceeds to then investigate how psychological, philosophical and moral interpretations of bad prac- tices of walking in particular resurface in texts by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and the interwar writer Irmgard Keun. It is argued that literary modernism transformed walking from an Enlightenment trope signifying progress into the embodiment of moral and epistemological ambivalence. In this process, walking becomes an expression of the disconcerting experience of modernity. The paper concludes with a discussion of walking as a gendered performance: while the male walkers in the modernist texts under discussion suffer from a bad gait that leads to ruination, the new figure of the flâneuse manages to engage in pleasurable walking by abandoning the Enlightenment legacy of the good gait

On the use of the IAST method for gas separation studies in porous materials with gate-opening behavior

Highly flexible nanoporous materials, exhibiting for instance gate opening or breathing behavior, are often presented as candidates for separation processes due to their supposed high adsorption selectivity. But this view, based on "classical" considerations of rigid materials and the use of the Ideal Adsorbed Solution Theory (IAST), does not necessarily hold in the presence of framework deformations. Here, we revisit some results from the published literature and show how proper inclusion of framework flexibility in the osmotic thermodynamic ensemble drastically changes the conclusions, in contrast to what intuition and standard IAST would yield. In all cases, the IAST method does not reproduce the gate-opening behavior in the adsorption of mixtures, and may overestimates the selectivity by up to two orders of magnitude

A U-statistic estimator for the variance of resampling-based error estimators

We revisit resampling procedures for error estimation in binary classification in terms of U-statistics. In particular, we exploit the fact that the error rate estimator involving all learning-testing splits is a U-statistic. Therefore, several standard theorems on properties of U-statistics apply. In particular, it has minimal variance among all unbiased estimators and is asymptotically normally distributed. Moreover, there is an unbiased estimator for this minimal variance if the total sample size is at least the double learning set size plus two. In this case, we exhibit such an estimator which is another U-statistic. It enjoys, again, various optimality properties and yields an asymptotically exact hypothesis test of the equality of error rates when two learning algorithms are compared. Our statements apply to any deterministic learning algorithms under weak non-degeneracy assumptions. In an application to tuning parameter choice in lasso regression on a gene expression data set, the test does not reject the null hypothesis of equal rates between two different parameters

Warum Demeter-Betriebe Tiere halten

Die Pflicht zur Tierhaltung ist eine Besonderheit der biodynamischen Landwirtschaft (Demeter), doch werden angesichts der Lage der Landwirtschaft die persönlichen Motive der Landwirte zunehmend gewichtiger als funktionale Aspekte. Die Untersuchung ergänzt methodisch das In-Farm Research um Elemente der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Ergebnis: Die Haltung von Tieren, z.B. von Kühen, stärkt u.a. die Identität eines Betriebes