107,310 research outputs found
Innovation and research in organic farming: A multi‐level approach to facilitate cooperation among stakeholders
A wider range of stakeholders is expected to be involved in organic research. A decision‐support tool is needed to define priorities and to allocate tasks among institutions. Based on research and management experience in organic research, the authors have developed a framework for experimental and research
projects. The framework is based on a multi‐level approach. Each level is defined according to the directness of the innovation impact on the organic systems. The projects carried out for each level were assessed over a ten-year period. Two applications are presented: analysis of crop protection strategies in horticulture and plant breeding programmes. When combined with four development models of organic farming, this multi‐level analysis appears to be promising for defining research agendas
Expressive Stream Reasoning with Laser
An increasing number of use cases require a timely extraction of non-trivial
knowledge from semantically annotated data streams, especially on the Web and
for the Internet of Things (IoT). Often, this extraction requires expressive
reasoning, which is challenging to compute on large streams. We propose Laser,
a new reasoner that supports a pragmatic, non-trivial fragment of the logic
LARS which extends Answer Set Programming (ASP) for streams. At its core, Laser
implements a novel evaluation procedure which annotates formulae to avoid the
re-computation of duplicates at multiple time points. This procedure, combined
with a judicious implementation of the LARS operators, is responsible for
significantly better runtimes than the ones of other state-of-the-art systems
like C-SPARQL and CQELS, or an implementation of LARS which runs on the ASP
solver Clingo. This enables the application of expressive logic-based reasoning
to large streams and opens the door to a wider range of stream reasoning use
cases.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Extended version of accepted paper at ISWC 201
Combining high pressure and coherent diffraction: a first feasibility test
We present a first experiment combining high pression and coherent X-ray
diffraction. By using a dedicated diamond anvil cell, we show that the degree
of coherence of the X-ray beam is preserved when the X-ray beam passes through
the diamond cell. This observation opens the possibility of studying the
dynamics of slow fluctuations under high pressure.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, GHPR 2009 conferenc
The impact of motor symptoms on self-reported anxiety in Parkinson's disease
OBJECTIVE: Anxiety is commonly endorsed in Parkinson's disease (PD) and significantly affects quality of life. The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) is often used but contains items that overlap with common PD motor symptoms (e.g., “hands trembling”). Because of these overlapping items, we hypothesized that PD motor symptoms would significantly affect BAI scores.
METHODS: One hundred non-demented individuals with PD and 74 healthy control participants completed the BAI. PD motor symptoms were assessed by the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). Factor analysis of the BAI assessed for a PD motor factor, and further analyses assessed how this factor affected BAI scores.
RESULTS: BAI scores were significantly higher for PD than NC. A five-item PD motor factor correlated with UPDRS observer-rated motor severity and mediated the PD-control difference on BAI total scores. An interaction occurred, whereby removal of the PD motor factor resulted in a significant reduction in BAI scores for PD relative to NC. The correlation between the BAI and UPDRS significantly declined when controlling for the PD motor factor.
CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that commonly endorsed BAI items may reflect motor symptoms such as tremor instead of, or in addition to, genuine mood symptoms. These findings highlight the importance of considering motor symptoms in the assessment of anxiety in PD and point to the need for selecting anxiety measures that are less subject to contamination by the motor effects of movement disorders.Published versio
New light on gamma-ray burst host galaxies with Herschel
Until recently, dust emission has been detected in very few host galaxies of
gamma-ray bursts (GRBHs). With Herschel, we have now observed 17 GRBHs up to
redshift z~3 and detected seven of them at infrared (IR) wavelengths. This
relatively high detection rate (41%) may be due to the composition of our
sample which at a median redshift of 1.1 is dominated by the hosts of dark
GRBs. Although the numbers are small, statistics suggest that dark GRBs are
more likely to be detected in the IR than their optically-bright counterparts.
Combining our IR data with optical, near-infrared, and radio data from our own
datasets and from the literature, we have constructed spectral energy
distributions (SEDs) which span up to 6 orders of magnitude in wavelength. By
fitting the SEDs, we have obtained stellar masses, dust masses, star-formation
rate (SFR), and extinctions for our sample galaxies. We find that GRBHs are
galaxies that tend to have a high specfic SFR (sSFR), and like other
star-forming galaxies, their ratios of dust-to-stellar mass are well correlated
with sSFR. We incorporate our Herschel sample into a larger compilation of
GRBHs, and compare this combined sample to SFR-weighted median stellar masses
of the widest, deepest galaxy survey to date. This is done in order to
establish whether or not GRBs can be used as an unbiased tracer of cosmic
comoving SFR density (SFRD) in the universe. In contrast with previous results,
this comparison shows that GRBHs are medium-sized galaxies with relatively high
sSFRs; stellar masses and sSFRs of GRBHs as a function of redshift are similar
to what is expected for star-forming galaxy populations at similar redshifts.
We conclude that there is no strong evidence that GRBs are biased tracers of
SFRD; thus they should be able to reliably probe the SFRD to early epochs.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in A&A. Revised to
include Fig. 6, mistakenly omitted in origina
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Shared geriatric mental health care in a rural community
Introduction: A pilot project in shared mental health care was initiated to explore opportunities to increase the capacity of the rural primary care system as a resource for older people with mental health needs. This was done within a framework for the delivery of best practices in geriatric mental health outreach. Methods: Shared-care strategies combining education and clinical consultation between mentor psychiatrists and family physicians were implemented and then evaluated after one year to identify key factors in the success of approaches to shared mental health care for older people in a rural setting. Results: Results provided new insights into shared care between primary care and specialty geriatric mental health services, rural geriatric mental health service delivery, developmental phases in service learning approaches, and building knowledge networks to promote continuing best practices. Conclusion: The results from the project's process evaluation have been integrated into the development of a permanent shared geriatric mental health care service for the rural setting. Preparation for an outcome evaluation that will focus on the impact on patient care has also been initiated
Ultraviolet to infrared emission of z>1 galaxies: Can we derive reliable star formation rates and stellar masses?
We seek to derive star formation rates (SFR) and stellar masses (M_star) in
distant galaxies and to quantify the main uncertainties affecting their
measurement. We explore the impact of the assumptions made in their derivation
with standard calibrations or through a fitting process, as well as the impact
of the available data, focusing on the role of IR emission originating from
dust. We build a sample of galaxies with z>1, all observed from the UV to the
IR (rest frame). The data are fitted with the code CIGALE, which is also used
to build and analyse a catalogue of mock galaxies. Models with different SFHs
are introduced. We define different set of data, with or without a good
sampling of the UV range, NIR, and thermal IR data. The impact of these
different cases on the determination of M_star and SFR are analysed.
Exponentially decreasing models with a redshift formation of the stellar
population z ~8 cannot fit the data correctly. The other models fit the data
correctly at the price of unrealistically young ages when the age of the single
stellar population is taken to be a free parameter. The best fits are obtained
with two stellar populations. As long as one measurement of the dust emission
continuum is available, SFR are robustly estimated whatever the chosen model
is, including standard recipes. M_star measurement is more subject to
uncertainty, depending on the chosen model and the presence of NIR data, with
an impact on the SFR-M_star scatter plot. Conversely, when thermal IR data from
dust emission are missing, the uncertainty on SFR measurements largely exceeds
that of stellar mass. Among all physical properties investigated here, the
stellar ages are found to be the most difficult to constrain and this
uncertainty acts as a second parameter in SFR measurements and as the most
important parameter for M_star measurements.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication A&
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