Veterinary treatment in organic husbandry

The organic farming regulations put emphasis on the preservation of animal health by prophylaxis in the agriculture. The No 5 of the regulation EC 1804/99 (EC organic regulation) Appendix I B defines the veterinary treatments in organic animal husbandry. The veterinarian can use any medicine, which is effective for the indication and the animal species. If possible, effective homeopathics, phytotherapeutics or the like should have priority. Problems of implementing the EC organic regulation into the daily farm practice arise mostly from the doubling of the withdrawal period and the restriction of the numbers of treatments. The strict ban on prophylactic treatments is not mentioned any longer in the new regulation 834/2007, which shall apply as from 1st January 2009. Clarification of the guidelines for animal treatments in organic farming seems to be useful for farmers, veterinarians and boards of control

Continuous intravascular blood gas monitoring: development, current techniques, and clinical use of a commercial device

This review focuses on the development, current techniques, and clinical use of continuous intravascular blood gas monitoring (CIBM) devices in anaesthesia and intensive care. The operating principles, range of application, performance, limitations, costs, and impact on patient treatment and outcome, are discussed. Studies of early and currently available CIBM devices were analysed. At present, the Paratrend 7+® (PT7+®) for adults and Neotrend™ (NT™) for newborns are the only commercially available CIBM systems. The PT7+® contains three optical sensors to measure Po2, Pco2 and pH, as well as a thermocouple to measure temperature. The NT™ is a modification of the PT7+® to continuously monitor Po2, Pco2, pH and temperature in newborns. Under laboratory conditions, good performance over a wide range of blood gas values was observed with the Paratrend 7® (PT7®). Performance in the clinical setting was not as satisfactory, especially for Po2 values. However, the performance and accuracy of CIBM devices appear to be sufficient for clinical use and they are being used clinically in selected patient groups. Several factors affecting the performance of CIBM are considered. Br J Anaesth 2003: 91; 397-40

Information management throughout the life cycle of buildings - Basics and new approaches such as blockchain

Ensuring sustainability for real estate is subject - among other aspects - to building related information. This information needs to be stored and updated continuously throughout the life cycle of a building. A delivery to buyers, tenants, consultants or other actors must be possible at any time. However, in most cases transactions cause significant loss of information while the issues associated with the "building passport" approach remains unsolved to date. Considering the long service life of buildings, various questions arise: (1) How to support data generation and storage within the life cycle and how to encourage actors to compete? (2) How to assure a high data quality and how to store it over a long period of time? (3) How to assure that all data users can track down the data owners at any point of time to manage compliance and legal issues? (4) Are there any new business models or new scopes for designers or other service providers? Information needs of actors along the life cycle are analysed and new information technologies (e.g. blockchain) are discussed. A relation to Building Information Modeling (BIM) is shown. Potentials of enhancing existing approaches regarding documentation retracing and accessibility of building and life cycle related information by using new technologies and IT are discussed; benefits of using a blockchain based system is pointed out by referring to existing pilot projects and first examples. Solution approaches for building passports are shown

Continuous intravascular blood gas monitoring: development, current techniques, and clinical use of a commercial device

This review focuses on the development, current techniques, and clinical use of continuous intravascular blood gas monitoring (CIBM) devices in anaesthesia and intensive care. The operating principles, range of application, performance, limitations, costs, and impact on patient treatment and outcome, are discussed. Studies of early and currently available CIBM devices were analysed. At present, the Paratrend 7+® (PT7+®) for adults and Neotrend™ (NT™) for newborns are the only commercially available CIBM systems. The PT7+® contains three optical sensors to measure Po2, Pco2 and pH, as well as a thermocouple to measure temperature. The NT™ is a modification of the PT7+® to continuously monitor Po2, Pco2, pH and temperature in newborns. Under laboratory conditions, good performance over a wide range of blood gas values was observed with the Paratrend 7® (PT7®). Performance in the clinical setting was not as satisfactory, especially for Po2 values. However, the performance and accuracy of CIBM devices appear to be sufficient for clinical use and they are being used clinically in selected patient groups. Several factors affecting the performance of CIBM are considered. Br J Anaesth 2003: 91; 397-40

Entwicklung präventiver Tiergesundheitskonzepte bei kleinen Wiederkäuern im ökologischen Landbau

Die Ergebnisse gelten für ökologische und konventionelle Betriebe. Sehr problematisch ist die regional mangelhafte Verfügbarkeit spezialisierter Tierärzte/Berater. Endoparasiten: Durch Prophylaxe, gezielte Diagnostik und restriktiven Arzneimitteleinsatz kann ein tolerabler Parasitendruck hergestellt und der Entwicklung von Anthelmintikaresistenz entgegengesteuert werden. Einzeltier- oder Teilherdenbehandlung sollte die Routinebehandlung der Gesamtherde ersetzen. Die überwiegende Stallhaltung mit befestigtem Auslauf ist in Problembetrieben sinnvoll. Ein Herdengesundheitsplan und die Züchtung auf Resistenz ist wünschenswert. Alternative Behandlungsverfahren können derzeit nicht empfohlen werden. Infektionskrankheiten: Basale Präventionsmaßname ist die routinemäßige Bestandsdokumentation sowie die Untersuchung von verendeten Tieren/Kümmerern (ab 5%). Freiwillige, modulare Hygieneprogramme werden von Tierhaltern gegenüber bindenden Leitlinien bevorzugt. Notwendig ist eine erleichterte Impfstoffeinfuhr und -anwendung aus dem EU-Ausland. Homöopathie ist zur Entwurmung ungeeignet, indikationsbedingt zur Stärkung der Immunabwehr evt. sinnvoll. Positiver Nebeneffekt der Homöopathikagabe sind verbesserte Tierbeobachtung und spezielleres Management. Neu wird zukünftig vor allem die Übertragung der Verantwortung für die Sicherstellung der Lebensmittelqualität auf den Erzeuger sein. Spurenelemente: Mineralfuttereinsatz ist auch im Ökolandbau notwendig. Kompensationsmöglichkeiten über selektive Pflanzen- oder Laubfütterung/ -düngung sind gering. Für Ziegen sind die Gehalte fast aller Futterpflanzen zu gering. Futtermittel- sowie Blut- und Organanalysen sollten zur Objektivierung der Bestandssituation vermehrt erhoben werden. Zunehmender Verlust an Biodiversität trägt maßgeblich zur Verarmung der Futtermittel bei. In der Diagnostik, auf dem Gebiet der Referenzwerte sowie bezüglich der örtlich zu erwartenden Spurenelemente in Futterpflanzen besteht dringender Forschungsbedarf

On the Usability of Probably Approximately Correct Implication Bases

We revisit the notion of probably approximately correct implication bases from the literature and present a first formulation in the language of formal concept analysis, with the goal to investigate whether such bases represent a suitable substitute for exact implication bases in practical use-cases. To this end, we quantitatively examine the behavior of probably approximately correct implication bases on artificial and real-world data sets and compare their precision and recall with respect to their corresponding exact implication bases. Using a small example, we also provide qualitative insight that implications from probably approximately correct bases can still represent meaningful knowledge from a given data set.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures; typos added, corrected x-label on graph

Revisiting Pattern Structure Projections

International audienceFormal concept analysis (FCA) is a well-founded method for data analysis and has many applications in data mining. Pattern structures is an extension of FCA for dealing with complex data such as sequences or graphs. However the computational complexity of computing with pattern structures is high and projections of pattern structures were introduced for simplifying computation. In this paper we introduce o-projections of pattern structures, a generalization of projections which defines a wider class of projections preserving the properties of the original approach. Moreover, we show that o-projections form a semilattice and we discuss the correspondence between o-projections and the representation contexts of o-projected pattern structures

IrF4: From Tetrahedral Compass Model to Topological Semimetal

The intersection of topology, symmetry, and magnetism yields a rich structure of possible phases. In this work, we study theoretically the consequences of magnetism on IrF4, which was recently identified as a possible candidate topological nodal chain semimetal in the absence of magnetic order. We show that the spin-orbital nature of the Ir moments gives rise to strongly anisotropic magnetic couplings resembling a tetrahedral compass model on a diamond lattice. The predicted magnetic ground state preserves key symmetries protecting the nodal lines, such that they persist into the ordered phase at the mean-field level. The consequences for other symmetry reductions are also discussed

Discovering Implicational Knowledge in Wikidata

Knowledge graphs have recently become the state-of-the-art tool for representing the diverse and complex knowledge of the world. Examples include the proprietary knowledge graphs of companies such as Google, Facebook, IBM, or Microsoft, but also freely available ones such as YAGO, DBpedia, and Wikidata. A distinguishing feature of Wikidata is that the knowledge is collaboratively edited and curated. While this greatly enhances the scope of Wikidata, it also makes it impossible for a single individual to grasp complex connections between properties or understand the global impact of edits in the graph. We apply Formal Concept Analysis to efficiently identify comprehensible implications that are implicitly present in the data. Although the complex structure of data modelling in Wikidata is not amenable to a direct approach, we overcome this limitation by extracting contextual representations of parts of Wikidata in a systematic fashion. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of our approach through several experiments and show that the results may lead to the discovery of interesting implicational knowledge. Besides providing a method for obtaining large real-world data sets for FCA, we sketch potential applications in offering semantic assistance for editing and curating Wikidata