676 research outputs found
Potentials of Organic Farming in the Region of Marchfeld (Austria)
Marchfeld is one of the most important crop production regions in Austria. High input agriculture causes environmental problems, especially groundwater pollution by nitrate and pesticides, decline of soil fertility and ecosystem diversity. While Austria has about 8.3 % certified organic farms, Marchfeld has only 1.5 %. The presented study was carried out in order to investigate the potentials of organic farming for solving environmental problems. The main interest of this work is the present economic and social situation of organic agriculture, its environmental effects and the identification of factors that support or hamper the further increase of organic farming in this regio
Ventricular Tachycardia in a Pediatric Patient with High-Risk Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia Purpura
An 8-year-old previously healthy male was diagnosed with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) and increased serum cardiac troponin I. Telemetry recorded non-sustained ventricular tachycardia, without ST-segment changes or other abnormalities on serial electrocardiogram. This case illustrates that cardiac monitoring by telemetry should be considered in high-risk TTP with elevated cardiac troponin
Cosmological Information in Weak Lensing Peaks
Recent studies have shown that the number counts of convergence peaks
N(kappa) in weak lensing (WL) maps, expected from large forthcoming surveys,
can be a useful probe of cosmology. We follow up on this finding, and use a
suite of WL convergence maps, obtained from ray-tracing N-body simulations, to
study (i) the physical origin of WL peaks with different heights, and (ii)
whether the peaks contain information beyond the convergence power spectrum
P_ell. In agreement with earlier work, we find that high peaks (with amplitudes
>~ 3.5 sigma, where sigma is the r.m.s. of the convergence kappa) are typically
dominated by a single massive halo. In contrast, medium-height peaks (~0.5-1.5
sigma) cannot be attributed to a single collapsed dark matter halo, and are
instead created by the projection of multiple (typically, 4-8) halos along the
line of sight, and by random galaxy shape noise. Nevertheless, these peaks
dominate the sensitivity to the cosmological parameters w, sigma_8, and
Omega_m. We find that the peak height distribution and its dependence on
cosmology differ significantly from predictions in a Gaussian random field. We
directly compute the marginalized errors on w, sigma_8, and Omega_m from the
N(kappa) + P_ell combination, including redshift tomography with source
galaxies at z_s=1 and z_s=2. We find that the N(kappa) + P_ell combination has
approximately twice the cosmological sensitivity compared to P_ell alone. These
results demonstrate that N(kappa) contains non-Gaussian information
complementary to the power spectrum.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, 14 tables. Accepted for publication in PRD
(version before proofs
Potenziale der biologischen Landwirtschaft zur Entlastung des Natur- und Landschaftshaushaltes im Marchfeld
Das Marchfeld unterliegt heute einer überwiegend intensiven landwirtschaftlichen Nutzung, die maßgeblich über eine konventionelle bzw. Integrierte Produktion erfolgt. Die unter ökonomischen Gesichtspunkten aus der Sicht der Landwirte erforderliche intensive Produktion wirkt sich belastend auf das Grundwasser (Stoffeintrag), die Bodenkrume (Erosion) und die Arten und Lebensraumvielfalt aus. Die Anwendung und Umsetzung der Prinzipien des ökologischen Landbaus lässt eine Reihe ökologischer Leistungen erwarten, die insbesondere auch zur Entlastung oben genannter, durch die Landwirtschaft verursachter Probleme im Marchfeld beitragen können
South Dakota Corn Performance Tests, 1956
Yield trials on those corn hybrids currently most popular among farmers are conducted each year by the Agronomy Department of the South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station. The purpose is to supply farmers and ranchers with information on the relative performing ability of the various hybrids when they are subjected to similar environmental conditions such as rainfall, soil moisture, and fertility level. Such information, when used as a guide in selecting hybrids for planting, can aid the farmer in obtaining maximum yields under his field conditions. In 1956, fourteen tests were planted throughout South Dakota. Each contained from 20 to 40 entries planted in replicated plots. Yields, moisture percentages at harvest, and in some cases lodging and dropped ears, were obtained and are presented in the tables in this publication. Most areas of the state entered the 1956 season with low reserves of subsoil moisture. Temperatures approached long time averages in May but June was exceedingly warm at all locations, averaging several degrees above normal. Rapid and succulent early growth of corn resulted. This, coupled with severe drought conditions throughout the season caused an extremely poor corn crop in the usually productive southeastern part of the state, even though July and August were unusual in that their temperatures were below those of June. Elsewhere in the state, such as at Brookings and Watertown, above average rainfall in July and August, coupled with the relatively cool temperatures, resulted in excellent yields of corn in spite of the low springtime soil reserves. An early frost on September 6 killed the corn prematurely in some areas, such as the test at Claremont. This, coupled with high winds during much of September and October, caused a great deal of stalk lodging and dropped ears by the time the trials were harvested
Konventionalisierungsfalle? was tun?
Der Öko-Landbau schrieb in den letzten Jahren Erfolgsgeschichte: Der Biosektor und seine Akteure scheinen in ihren Strukturen, Funktions- und Handlungsweisen der konventionellen Landwirtschaft immer ähnlicher zu werden. Während die einen Werte- und Sinnverlust beklagen, begrüßen die anderen Wachstum und öffentliche Anerkennung. Maßnahmen zur Überwindung dieses Spannungsfeldes wurden im März 2005 auf der Wissenschaftstagung zum Ökologischen Landbau im Rahmen eines Symposiums erörtert
Boxicity and separation dimension
A family of permutations of the vertices of a hypergraph is
called 'pairwise suitable' for if, for every pair of disjoint edges in ,
there exists a permutation in in which all the vertices in one
edge precede those in the other. The cardinality of a smallest such family of
permutations for is called the 'separation dimension' of and is denoted
by . Equivalently, is the smallest natural number so that
the vertices of can be embedded in such that any two
disjoint edges of can be separated by a hyperplane normal to one of the
axes. We show that the separation dimension of a hypergraph is equal to the
'boxicity' of the line graph of . This connection helps us in borrowing
results and techniques from the extensive literature on boxicity to study the
concept of separation dimension.Comment: This is the full version of a paper by the same name submitted to
WG-2014. Some results proved in this paper are also present in
arXiv:1212.6756. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1212.675
Sustainability assessment of organic dairy farms in mountainous areas of Austria
Dairy farming plays a major role in mountainous regions of Austria, mostly due to high proportion of grasslands. In general, Austria’s dairy farming faces challenges regarding sustainability, e.g. environmental impacts, but specifically for alpine areas low productivity and dependency on direct payments are lowering sustainability. Organic farming is considered as a strategy to overcome these challenges.
Considering this general background, we analysed the sustainability performance and its main drivers of organic dairy farms in mountainous regions of Austria
Probing the time dependence of dark energy
A new method to investigate a possible time-dependence of the dark energy
equation of state is proposed. We apply this methodology to two of the most
recent data sets of type Ia supernova (Union2 and SDSS) and the baryon acoustic
oscillation peak at . For some combinations of these data, we show
that there is a clear departure from the standard CDM model at
intermediary redshifts, although a non-evolving dark energy component () cannot be ruled out by these data. The approach developed here may be
useful to probe a possible evolving dark energy component when applied to
upcoming observational data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, LaTe
Probing Cosmology with Weak Lensing Minkowski Functionals
In this paper, we show that Minkowski Functionals (MFs) of weak gravitational
lensing (WL) convergence maps contain significant non-Gaussian,
cosmology-dependent information. To do this, we use a large suite of
cosmological ray-tracing N-body simulations to create mock WL convergence maps,
and study the cosmological information content of MFs derived from these maps.
Our suite consists of 80 independent 512^3 N-body runs, covering seven
different cosmologies, varying three cosmological parameters Omega_m, w, and
sigma_8 one at a time, around a fiducial LambdaCDM model. In each cosmology, we
use ray-tracing to create a thousand pseudo-independent 12 deg^2 convergence
maps, and use these in a Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the joint confidence
contours on the above three parameters. We include redshift tomography at three
different source redshifts z_s=1, 1.5, 2, explore five different smoothing
scales theta_G=1, 2, 3, 5, 10 arcmin, and explicitly compare and combine the
MFs with the WL power spectrum. We find that the MFs capture a substantial
amount of information from non-Gaussian features of convergence maps, i.e.
beyond the power spectrum. The MFs are particularly well suited to break
degeneracies and to constrain the dark energy equation of state parameter w (by
a factor of ~ three better than from the power spectrum alone). The
non-Gaussian information derives partly from the one-point function of the
convergence (through V_0, the "area" MF), and partly through non-linear spatial
information (through combining different smoothing scales for V_0, and through
V_1 and V_2, the boundary length and genus MFs, respectively). In contrast to
the power spectrum, the best constraints from the MFs are obtained only when
multiple smoothing scales are combined.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 5 table
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