Load Hiding of Household's Power Demand

With the development and introduction of smart metering, the energy information for costumers will change from infrequent manual meter readings to fine-grained energy consumption data. On the one hand these fine-grained measurements will lead to an improvement in costumers' energy habits, but on the other hand the fined-grained data produces information about a household and also households' inhabitants, which are the basis for many future privacy issues. To ensure household privacy and smart meter information owned by the household inhabitants, load hiding techniques were introduced to obfuscate the load demand visible at the household energy meter. In this work, a state-of-the-art battery-based load hiding (BLH) technique, which uses a controllable battery to disguise the power consumption and a novel load hiding technique called load-based load hiding (LLH) are presented. An LLH system uses an controllable household appliance to obfuscate the household's power demand. We evaluate and compare both load hiding techniques on real household data and show that both techniques can strengthen household privacy but only LLH can increase appliance level privacy

Animal Welfare Attitudes: Effects of Gender and Diet in University Samples from 22 Countries

Animal Welfare Attitudes (AWA) are defined as human attitudes towards the welfare of animals in different dimensions and settings. Demographic factors, such as age and gender are associated with AWA. The aim of this study was to assess gender differences among university students in a large convenience sample from twenty-two nations in AWA. A total of 7914 people participated in the study (5155 women, 2711 men, 48 diverse). Participants completed a questionnaire that collected demographic data, typical diet and responses to the Composite Respect for Animals Scale Short version (CRAS-S). In addition, we used a measure of gender empowerment from the Human Development Report. The largest variance in AWA was explained by diet, followed by country and gender. In terms of diet, 6385 participants reported to be omnivores, 296 as pescatarian, 637 ate a vegetarian diet and 434 were vegans (n = 162 without answer). Diet was related with CRAS-S scores; people with a vegan diet scored higher in AWA than omnivores. Women scored significantly higher on AWA than men. Furthermore, gender differences in AWA increased as gender inequality decreased

Bats in the anthropogenic matrix: Challenges and opportunities for the conservation of chiroptera and their ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes

Intensification in land-use and farming practices has had largely negative effects on bats, leading to population declines and concomitant losses of ecosystem services. Current trends in land-use change suggest that agricultural areas will further expand, while production systems may either experience further intensification (particularly in developing nations) or become more environmentally friendly (especially in Europe). In this chapter, we review the existing literature on how agricultural management affects the bat assemblages and the behavior of individual bat species, as well as the literature on provision of ecosystem services by bats (pest insect suppression and pollination) in agricultural systems. Bats show highly variable responses to habitat conversion, with no significant change in species richness or measures of activity or abundance. In contrast, intensification within agricultural systems (i.e., increased agrochemical inputs, reduction of natural structuring elements such as hedges, woods, and marshes) had more consistently negative effects on abundance and species richness. Agroforestry systems appear to mitigate negative consequences of habitat conversion and intensification, often having higher abundances and activity levels than natural areas. Across biomes, bats play key roles in limiting populations of arthropods by consuming various agricultural pests. In tropical areas, bats are key pollinators of several commercial fruit species. However, these substantial benefits may go unrecognized by farmers, who sometimes associate bats with ecosystem disservices such as crop raiding. Given the importance of bats for global food production, future agricultural management should focus on “wildlife-friendly” farming practices that allow more bats to exploit and persist in the anthropogenic matrix so as to enhance provision of ecosystem services. Pressing research topics include (1) a better understanding of how local-level versus landscape-level management practices interact to structure bat assemblages, (2) the effects of new pesticide classes and GM crops on bat populations, and (3) how increased documentation and valuation of the ecosystem services provided by bats could improve attitudes of producers toward their conservation

Biodesalination: A Case Study for Applications of Photosynthetic Bacteria in Water Treatment

Shortage of freshwater is a serious problem in many regions worldwide, and is expected to become even more urgent over the next decades as a result of increased demand for food production and adverse effects of climate change. Vast water resources in the oceans can only be tapped into if sustainable, energy-efficient technologies for desalination are developed. Energization of desalination by sunlight through photosynthetic organisms offers a potential opportunity to exploit biological processes for this purpose. Cyanobacterial cultures in particular can generate a large biomass in brackish and seawater, thereby forming a low-salt reservoir within the saline water. The latter could be used as an ion exchanger through manipulation of transport proteins in the cell membrane. In this article, we use the example of biodesalination as a vehicle to review the availability of tools and methods for the exploitation of cyanobacteria in water biotechnology. Issues discussed relate to strain selection, environmental factors, genetic manipulation, ion transport, cell-water separation, process design, safety, and public acceptance

Interest in Birds and its Relationship with Attitudes and Myths: A Cross-cultural Study in Countries with Different Levels of Economic Development

WOS: 000353305900020Birds are one of the most important species that can help protect biodiversity. Although birds are important beings for biodiversity and human existence, there is a relatively less quantity of research that has investigated the interest in and attitudes toward birds. This study aims to investigate the knowledge level of and attitudes toward birds among students in countries at different levels of economic development. To collect the data, a Bird Knowledge Questionnaire and a Bird Attitude Questionnaire were developed and used by the researchers in this study. These questionnaires were administered to a total of 852 students from different countries, including Colombia, Germany, Slovakia, and Turkey. The results obtained in this study showed that Colombian students had the highest interest in birds as compared to students in Slovakia, Turkey, and Germany. Girls had consistently higher interest in birds than boys in all countries, but there were no gender differences in the cognitive domain. Our research suggests that factual knowledge about birds is not a necessary prerequisite for interest in birds, but animal-related activities show strong associations with an interest in birds

Anxiety, disgust and negative emotions influence food intake in humans

Randler C, Desch IH, Otte im Kampe V, Wüst- Ackermann P, Wilde M, Prokop P. Anxiety, disgust and negative emotions influence food intake in humans. International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science. 2017;7:11-15.A growing body of research has shown that the emotion of disgust is adaptive since it protects humans from pathogens. The possible role of anxiety and other positive and negative emotions in pathogen avoidance remain less clear. We investigated individual food acceptance after a disgust-evoking experience ( a trout dissection) in a real-life setting by assessing the taking of a portion of trout. The unique contribution is that both state and trait disgust influence the likelihood of taking food after being disgusted. Participants who were more anxious, disgust sensitive or predisposed to more negative emotions avoided food after dissection significantly more frequently than their more positively affected counterparts. Males tended to accept food more often than females. Overall, these results suggest that anxiety, disgust and additional negative emotions are important in human food avoidance and that both anxiety and emotions can be considered as adaptive from an evolutionary perspectiv

Organoarsenic Compounds with In Vitro Activity against the Malaria Parasite Plasmodium falciparum

The rapid development of parasite drug resistance as well as the lack of medications targeting both the asexual and the sexual blood stages of the malaria parasite necessitate the search for novel antimalarial compounds. Eleven organoarsenic compounds were synthesized and tested for their effect on the asexual blood stages and sexual transmission stages of the malaria parasitePlasmodium falciparumusing in vitro assays. The inhibitory potential of the compounds on blood stage viability was tested on the chloroquine (CQ)-sensitive 3D7 and the CQ-resistant Dd2 strain using the Malstat assay. The most effective compounds were subsequently investigated for their effect on impairing gametocyte development and gametogenesis, using the gametocyte-producing NF54 strain in respective cell-based assays. Their potential toxicity was investigated on leukemia cell line Nalm-6 and non-infected erythrocytes. Five out of the 11 compounds showed antiplasmodial activities against 3D7, with half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values ranging between 1.52 and 8.64 mu M. Three of the compounds also acted against Dd2, with the most active compound As-8 exhibiting an IC(50)of 0.35 mu M. The five compounds also showed significant inhibitory effects on the parasite sexual stages at both IC(50)and IC(90)concentrations with As-8 displaying the best gametocytocidal activity. No hemolytic and cytotoxic effect was observed for any of the compounds. The organoarsenic compound As-8 may represent a good lead for the design of novel organoarsenic drugs with combined antimalarial and transmission blocking activities