Effects of environmental pollutants on the reproduction and welfare of ruminants

Anthropogenic pollutants comprise a wide range of synthetic organic compounds and heavy metals, which are dispersed throughout the environment, usually at low concentrations. Exposure of ruminants, as for all other animals, is unavoidable and while the levels of exposure to most chemicals are usually too low to induce any physiological effects, combinations of pollutants can act additively or synergistically to perturb multiple physiological systems at all ages but particularly in the developing foetus. In sheep, organs affected by pollutant exposure include the ovary, testis, hypothalamus and pituitary gland and bone. Reported effects of exposure include changes in organ weight and gross structure, histology and gene and protein expression but these changes are not reflected in changes in reproductive performance under the conditions tested. These results illustrate the complexity of the effects of endocrine disrupting compounds on the reproductive axis, which make it difficult to extrapolate between, or even within, species. Effects of pollutant exposure on the thyroid gland, immune, cardiovascular and obesogenic systems have not been shown explicitly, in ruminants, but work on other species suggests that these systems can also be perturbed. It is concluded that exposure to a mixture of anthropogenic pollutants has significant effects on a wide variety of physiological systems, including the reproductive system. Although this physiological insult has not yet been shown to lead to a reduction in ruminant gross performance, there are already reports indicating that anthropogenic pollutant exposure can compromise several physiological systems and may pose a significant threat to both reproductive performance and welfare in the longer term. At present, many potential mechanisms of action for individual chemicals have been identified but knowledge of factors affecting the rate of tissue exposure and of the effects of combinations of chemicals on physiological systems is poor. Nevertheless, both are vital for the identification of risks to animal productivity and welfare

Aspekte des Dolmetschverhaltens

Available from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(5)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Dialogue interpreting: data and analysis

Up to the development of the Verbmobil-prototype mainly two types of speech data within the domain of appointment scheduling are recorded: 1. German-German dialogues serving as test and trianing data, 2. Wizard-of-Oz-dialogues and some authentic German-English and German-Japanese dialogues with human interpreter. Most of the dialogues of type 2 are recorded by the Verbmobil Subproject 13 in Hamburg and are stored in a special database (DiaBoLiC, Dialogue Interpreting: Analysis Base of Linguistic Corpora). In this paper, we describe characteristic features of the data of type 2, existing analysis and the structure of DiaBoLic, and we present new results of data analysis (extension of the list of dialogue acts for the domain TRAVEL PLANNING, analysis of translation strategies). As dialogues of type 2 are regarded as relevant for the Verbmobil application, the data have been analyzed with reference to key-words in the realization of dialogue acts ([2]). A list of key-words for dialogue acts as well as a list of tested scenarios is attached to this paper. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(189)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Eine zyklische Approximation an Sprechhandlungstypen - Zur Annotierung von Aeusserungen in Dialogen

SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RR 5221(28)+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekBundesministerium fuer Forschung und Technologie (BMFT), Bonn (Germany)DEGerman

Dynamic teaching materials for ESSLLI

In the context of the European Network of Excellence in Computational Logic (CoLogNet, http://www.colognet.org/), the European Association for Logic, Language and Computation (FoLLI, http://www.folli.org) has started a project on E-Learning in Computational Logic and the development of Dynamic Teaching Materials for its annual European Summer Schools (ESSLLIs). The project has a double aim: (i) to enhance the (re)usability of existing ESSLLI teaching materials by creating a richly structured repository; and (ii) to develop dynamic teaching materials for the upcoming ESSLLIs, integrating textual presentation, exercises, and computational tools (theorem provers, parsers) into a user-centered "living book". This paper presents the background of the project, gives some brief information about ESSLLI and describes the two subtasks in which the project is divided