Leitfaden für Praxisversuche

Nach Ansicht der Autoren sollen und können Versuche im eigenen Betrieb nicht wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen an Forschungseinrichtungen ersetzen. Vielmehr stellen sie eine sinnvolle Ergänzung zur Forschung an solchen Institutionen dar. Durch ein optimales Zusammenspiel beider Formen könnten so in Zukunft dem Landwirt die Informationen an die Hand gegeben werden, die er für seine erfolgreiche Betriebsführung braucht. Dieser Leitfaden für Praxisversuche deckt Experimente zur pflanzlichen Erzeugung ab. Unberührt davon lassen sich jedoch auch Versuche zur Tierhaltung, im Vermarktungsbereich oder zur Betriebswirtschaft im eigenen Betrieb durchführen. Der vorliegende Leitfaden gibt grundlegende und nützliche Informationen darüber, wie ein nicht wissenschaftlich ausgebildeter Landwirt in seinem Betrieb einfache Versuche anlegen kann, die einem Mindestmaß an wissenschaftlichen Anforderungen genügen, ohne jedoch den Landwirt zu überfordern. Dementsprechend versteht sich der Leitfaden für den Praktiker als „Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe“. Je nach Fragestellung, Ausbildungsstand und verfügbarer Zeit können Landwirte solche Praxisversuche allein durchführen oder sich Unterstützung durch ihren Berater oder andere Experten z.B. von Landesämtern und Landwirtschaftskammern, staatlichen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalten oder Universitäten holen. Der Schwerpunkt des Leitfadens liegt auf Hinweisen zur Planung und Durchführung von Experimenten im laufenden landwirtschaftlichen Betrieb. Dabei soll die Versuchsdurchführung eine Datenqualität liefern, die ein auf den gesamten Standort übertragbares Ergebnis und bei Bedarf tiefere statistische Auswertungen ermöglicht. In der Regel ist für den Landwirt in erster Linie die Gewinnung von Ergebnissen und Erkenntnissen entscheidend, die für seinen Betrieb oder Standort gelten. In den meisten Fällen sind dazu einfach zu berechnende statistische Größen wie Mittelwert und Streuungsmaß als Anhaltspunkte für die Datenauswertung ausreichend. Wir empfehlen allerdings, die Anlage der Versuche und die Erhebung der Daten in einer Weise durchzuführen, die die Möglichkeit offen hält, die Daten z. B. gemeinsam mit einem Experten vertieften statistischen Tests zu unterziehen, um ggf. eine weitere Bewertung der Daten vorzunehmen

Entwicklung eines Online-Leitfadens für On-Farm Research

Im Rahmen des Vorhabens wurde ein internetbasierter Online-Leitfaden für Praxisversuche erstellt. Ziel des über das zentrale Internetportal www.oekolandbau.de kommunizierten und der landwirtschaftlichen Praxis zugänglich gemachten Hilfsmittels ist es, Praktikern anhand eines menügeführten Leitfadens die selbstständige und / oder expertenunterstützte Durchführung von Praxisversuchen im eigenen Betrieb zu ermöglichen. Der Online-Leitfaden für Praxisversuche stellt ein Instrumentarium im Sinne einer „Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe“ zur Verfügung. Durch die angebotenen weitreichenden Hintergrundinformationen sowie Entscheidungshilfen wird der Nutzer einerseits mit den Grundlagen der Versuchsplanung, -durchführung und -auswertung vertraut gemacht. Andererseits erhält er konkrete Unterstützung bei der Versuchsfragestellung, Auswahl des Versuchsdesigns, der Datenerhebung und Auswertung. Dem Online-Leitfaden für Praxisversuche zugrunde liegen die in der Literatur verfügbaren Anleitungen zu Praxisversuchen aus dem In- und Ausland, Expertenbefragungen sowie zwei im Rahmen des Vorhabens durchgeführte Praxisversuche. Letztere dienten vor allem der Abschätzung des Zeitbedarfs für die gesamte Versuchsdurchführung und die zugrunde liegenden Arbeitsschritte sowie der Validierung der im Leitfaden vorgeschlagenen Arbeitsschritte. Der im Vorhaben erstellte Online-Leitfaden wird als Webseite www.praxisversuche.de über das Internetportal www.oekolandbau.de der Praxis zur Verfügung gestellt. Das zentrale Internetportal www.oekolandbau.de bietet hierfür die geeignete Umgebung mit zahlreichen inhaltlichen Informationen sowie Adressen von Beratern, Forschungsstätten etc. Der Online-Leitfaden für Praxisversuche bildet derzeit die in der Praxis am ehesten eingesetzten Versuchstypen ab. Er ist insbesondere ausgelegt für die Zielgruppe Landwirte bzw. die Kombination Landwirt plus externe Experten. Der Online-Leitfaden ist so aufgebaut, dass er weiterentwickelt werden kann, z. B. durch die Ergänzung weiterer Versuchsdesigns, tiefer reichender Auswertungsmöglichkeiten etc. Ferner erscheint die Entwicklung des Leitfadens zu einer Standardplattform für Praxisversuche, die sowohl von Landwirten wie instituionellen Versuchsanstellern genutzt werden kann, möglich und sinnvoll

The Kepler End-to-End Model: Creating High-Fidelity Simulations to Test Kepler Ground Processing

The Kepler mission is designed to detect the transit of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars by observing 100,000 stellar targets. Developing and testing the Kepler ground-segment processing system, in particular the data analysis pipeline, requires high-fidelity simulated data. This simulated data is provided by the Kepler End-to-End Model (ETEM). ETEM simulates the astrophysics of planetary transits and other phenomena, properties of the Kepler spacecraft and the format of the downlinked data. Major challenges addressed by ETEM include the rapid production of large amounts of simulated data, extensibility and maintainability

Robust brain-computer interfaces

A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables direct communication from the brain to devices, bypassing the traditional pathway of peripheral nerves and muscles. Current BCIs aimed at patients require that the user invests weeks, or even months, to learn the skill to intentionally modify their brain signals. This can be reduced to a calibration session of about half an hour per session if machine learning (ML) methods are used. The laborious recalibration is still needed due to inter-session differences in the statistical properties of the electroencephalography (EEG) signal. Further, the natural variability in spontaneous EEG violates basic assumptions made by the ML methods used to train the BCI classifier, and causes the classification accuracy to fluctuate unpredictably. These fluctuations make the current generation of BCIs unreliable. In this dissertation,we will investigate the nature of these variations in the EEG distributions, and introduce two new, complementary methods to overcome these two key issues. To confirm the problem of non-stationary brain signals, we first show that BCIs based on commonly used signal features are sensitive to changes in the mental state of the user. We proceed by describing a method aimed at removing these changes in signal feature distributions. We have devised a method that uses a second-order baseline (SOB) to specifically isolate these relative changes in neuronal firing synchrony. To the best of our knowledge this is the first BCI classifier that works on out-of-sample subjects without any loss of performance. Still, the assumption made by ML methods that the training data consists of samples that are independent and identically distributed (iid) is violated, because EEG samples nearby in time are highly correlated. Therefore we derived a generalization of the well-known support vector machine (SVM) classifier, that takes the resulting chronological structure of classification errors into account. Both on artificial data and real BCI data, overfitting is reduced with this dependent samples support vector machine (dSVM), leading to BCIs with an increased information throughput

Protostellar collapse and fragmentation using an MHD GADGET

Although the influence of magnetic fields is regarded as vital in the star formation process, only a few magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations have been performed on this subject within the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. This is largely due to the unsatisfactory treatment of non-vanishing divergence of the magnetic field. Recently smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics (SPMHD) simulations based on Euler potentials have proven to be successful in treating MHD collapse and fragmentation problems, however these methods are known to have some intrinsical difficulties. We have performed SPMHD simulations based on a traditional approach evolving the magnetic field itself using the induction equation. To account for the numerical divergence, we have chosen an approach that subtracts the effects of numerical divergence from the force equation, and additionally we employ artificial magnetic dissipation as a regularization scheme. We apply this realization of SPMHD to a widely known setup, a variation of the 'Boss & Bodenheimer standard isothermal test case', to study the impact of the magnetic fields on collapse and fragmentation. In our simulations, we concentrate on setups, where the initial magnetic field is parallel to the rotation axis. We examine different field strengths and compare our results to other findings reported in the literature. We are able to confirm specific results found elsewhere, namely the delayed onset of star formation for strong fields, accompanied by the tendency to form only single stars. We also find that the 'magnetic cushioning effect', where the magnetic field is wound up to form a 'cushion' between the binary, aids binary fragmentation in a case, where previously only formation of a single protostar was expected.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures. Final version (with revisions). Accepted to MNRA

Long-term Cross-reactivity Against Nonvaccine Human Papillomavirus Types 31 and 45 After 2- or 3-Dose Schedules of the AS04-Adjuvanted Human HPV-16/18 Vaccine

This analysis focused on long-term cross-reactive immunogenicity against nonvaccine human papillomavirus (HPV) types 31 and 45 following 2 doses of AS04-adjuvanted HPV-16/18 vaccine in girls aged 9-14 years or following 3 doses in women aged 15-25 years, for up to 3 years (HPV-070 study) and up to 5 years (HPV-048 study) after the first vaccination. Both schedules elicited antibodies against HPV-31 and HPV-45 up to 5 years after first dose. The antibody concentration was similar in young girls as compared to women. Specific CD4+ T-cell and B-cell responses to HPV-31 and HPV-45 at month 36 were similar across groups. Clinical trials registration: NCT01381575 and NCT00541970

Clinical and morphological phenotype of the filamin myopathy: a study of 31 German patients

Mutations in the filamin C gene (FLNC) cause a myofibrillar myopathy (MFM), morphologically characterized by focal myofibrillar destruction and abnormal accumulation of several proteins within skeletal muscle fibres. We studied 31 patients from four German families to evaluate the phenotype of filaminopathy. All patients harboured the same p.W2710X mutation in FLNC. Haplotype analysis suggested a founder mutation in these German filaminopathy families. The mean age at onset of clinical symptoms was 44 +/− 6 years (range, 24-57 years). Slowly progressive muscle weakness was mostly pronounced proximally, initially affecting the lower extremities and involving the upper extremities in the course of disease progression, similar to the distribution of weakness seen in limb-girdle muscular dystrophies (LGMD). Patients frequently developed respiratory muscle weakness. About one-third of the patients showed cardiac abnormalities comprising conduction blocks, tachycardia, diastolic dysfunction and left ventricular hypertrophy indicating a cardiac involvement in filaminopathy. Serum creatine kinase levels varied from normal up to 10-fold of the upper limit. Magnetic resonance imaging studies showed a rather homogenous pattern of muscle involvement in the lower extremities differing from that in other types of MFM. Myopathological features included perturbation of myofibrillar alignment, accumulation of granulofilamentous material similar to that seen in primary desminopathies and abnormal intracellular protein deposits typical of MFM. Decreased activities of oxidative enzymes and fibre hypertrophy seem to be early features, whereas dystrophic changes were present in advanced stages of filaminopathy. Rimmed vacuoles were detected in only a few cases. The intracellular aggregates were composed of a variety of proteins including filamin C, desmin, myotilin, Xin, dystrophin and sarcoglycans. Therapy is so far limited to symptomatic treatment. The German filaminopathy cohort, the largest group of patients studied so far, shares phenotypic features with LGMD and presents with characteristic histopathological findings of MF

Hippocampal and Hippocampal-Subfield Volumes From Early-Onset Major Depression and Bipolar Disorder to Cognitive Decline

Background: The hippocampus and its subfields (HippSub) are reported to be diminished in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), bipolar disorder (BD), and major depressive disorder (MDD). We examined these groups vs healthy controls (HC) to reveal HippSub alterations between diseases. Methods: We segmented 3T-MRI T2-weighted hippocampal images of 67 HC, 58 BD, and MDD patients from the AFFDIS study and 137 patients from the DELCODE study assessing cognitive decline, including subjective cognitive decline (SCD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and AD, via Free Surfer 6.0 to compare volumes across groups. Results: Groups differed significantly in several HippSub volumes, particularly between patients with AD and mood disorders. In comparison to HC, significant lower volumes appear in aMCI and AD groups in specific subfields. Smaller volumes in the left presubiculum are detected in aMCI and AD patients, differing from the BD group. A significant linear regression is seen between left hippocampus volume and duration since the first depressive episode. Conclusions: HippSub volume alterations were observed in AD, but not in early-onset MDD and BD, reinforcing the notion of different neural mechanisms in hippocampal degeneration. Moreover, duration since the first depressive episode was a relevant factor explaining the lower left hippocampal volumes present in groups

Sustained Immunogenicity of 2-dose Human Papillomavirus 16/18 AS04-adjuvanted Vaccine Schedules in Girls Aged 9-14 Years: A Randomized Trial

Background: We previously reported the noninferiority 1 month after the last dose of 2-dose human papillomavirus 16/18 AS04-adjuvanted (AS04-HPV-16/18) vaccine schedules at months 0 and 6 (2D_M0,6) and months 0 and 12 (2D_M0,12) in girls aged 9-14 years compared with a 3-dose schedule at months 0, 1, and 6 (3D_M0,1,6) in women aged 15-25 years. Here, we report the results at study end (month 36 [M36]).Methods: Girls were randomized 1:1 and received 2 vaccine doses either 6 months (2D_M0,6) or 12 months apart (2D_M0,12); women received 3 doses at months 0, 1, and 6 (3D_M0,1,6). Endpoints included noninferiority of HPV-16/18 antibodies for 2D_M0,6 versus 3D_M0,1,6; 2D_M0,12 versus 3D_M0,1,6; and 2D_M0,12 versus 2D_M0,6; and assessment of neutralizing antibodies, T cells, B cells, and safety.Results: At M36, the 2D_M0,6 and 2D_M0,12 schedules remained noninferior to the 3D_M0,1,6 schedule in terms of seroconversion rates and 3D/2D geometric mean titers for anti-HPV-16 and anti-HPV-18. All schedules elicited sustained immune responses up to M36.Conclusions: Both 2-dose schedules in young girls remained noninferior to the 3-dose schedule in women up to study conclusion at M36. The AS04-HPV-16/18 vaccine administered as a 2-dose schedule was immunogenic and well tolerated in young girls

A Dual-Species Atom Interferometer Payload for Operation on Sounding Rockets

We report on the design and the construction of a sounding rocket payload capable of performing atom interferometry with Bose-Einstein condensates of 41 K and 87 Rb. The apparatus is designed to be launched in two consecutive missions with a VSB-30 sounding rocket and is qualified to withstand the expected vibrational loads of 1.8 g root-mean-square in a frequency range between 20–2000 Hz and the expected static loads during ascent and re-entry of 25 g. We present a modular design of the scientific payload comprising a physics package, a laser system, an electronics system and a battery module. A dedicated on-board software provides a largely automated process of predefined experiments. To operate the payload safely in laboratory and flight mode, a thermal control system and ground support equipment has been implemented and will be presented. The payload presented here represents a cornerstone for future applications of matter wave interferometry with ultracold atoms on satellites