A new type of seed bed cover for the market garden

ALL market gardeners use seed beds in their gardening programme. However, the basic design of seed beds and covers has not greatly altered over the years. The availability of cheap good quality plastic materials has now shown the way to improvements in the design of this type of gardening equipment

Co-operative control of the dingo

Vermin control measures in the pastoral areas have often been rendered less effective by the existence of a number of Vermin Boards each operating independently of its neighbours. Bonus payments for scalps for instance, have often varied considerably, even between boards with adjoining territories, so that trafficking in scalps was encouraged. Bonus payments by some boards have been excessively high, with the result that shortage of funds has soon compelled a reduction of the bonus rate which in turn has brought about a steep build-up in the vermin population

High yields from improved onion strain

FOLLOWING an intensive programme of bulb selection over a period of 10 years, a special strain of the locally developed Spearwood Brown Globe onion has been produced by the Department of Agriculture

Seroprevalence of rubella antibodies among antenatal patients in the Western Cape

Objectives. To determine the seroprevalence of rubella virus infection among antenatal patients aged  between 15 and 45 years in the Western Cape province of South Africa, in order to provide data to  determine the need for vaccination to protect women of childbearing age.Design. A cross-sectional study.Setting. Virology laboratory, Groote Schuur Hospital, National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS), South Africa.Subjects and methods. One thousand two hundred provincial serum specimens from participants in  the 2003 Department of Health antenatal HIV /syphilis serosurvey were selected from the 4 districts of the Western Cape. The specimens were agestratified and screened qualitatively for  rubellaimmunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies by means of a commercial immunoassay during October 2004.Results. Within the Western Cape a total o£95.3% of women in the 15- 24-year age group, 97.5% in the 25 - 34-year group and 98% in the 35 - 45-year age group were immune to rubella. There was no statistically significant difference in the rate of rubella susceptibility between the 4 districts tested.Conclusions. The study is an important step in addressing the seroprevalence of rubella infection in  women of childbearing age in South Africa. Further information is needed on rubella seroprevalence from the other provinces in South Africa as well as formal implementation of rubella and congenital rubella syndrome surveillance to determine the feasibility of routine rubella immunisation

A MAP Estimator for Simultaneous Superresolution and Detector Nonunifomity Correct

During digital video acquisition, imagery may be degraded by a number of phenomena including undersampling, blur, and noise. Many systems, particularly those containing infrared focal plane array (FPA) sensors, are also subject to detector nonuniformity. Nonuniformity, or fixed pattern noise, results from nonuniform responsivity of the photodetectors that make up the FPA. Here we propose a maximuma posteriori (MAP) estimation framework for simultaneously addressing undersampling, linear blur, additive noise, and bias nonuniformity. In particular, we jointly estimate a superresolution (SR) image and detector bias nonuniformity parameters from a sequence of observed frames. This algorithm can be applied to video in a variety of ways including using amoving temporal window of frames to process successive groups of frames. By combining SR and nonuniformity correction (NUC) in this fashion, we demonstrate that superior results are possible compared with the more conventional approach of performing scene-based NUC followed by independent SR. The proposed MAP algorithm can be applied with or without SR, depending on the application and computational resources available. Even without SR, we believe that the proposed algorithm represents a novel and promising scene-based NUC technique. We present a number of experimental results to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. These include simulated imagery for quantitative analysis and real infrared video for qualitative analysis

Young People’s Differential Vulnerability to Criminogenic Exposure: Bridging The Gap Between People and Place Oriented Approaches in the Study of Crime Causation

The overall purpose of this study is to contribute to bridging the gap between people and place oriented approaches in the study of crime causation. To achieve this we will explore some core hypotheses derived from Situational Action Theory (SAT) about what makes young people crime prone and places criminogenic, and about the interaction between crime propensity and criminogenic exposure predicting crime events. We will also calculate the expected reduction in aggregate levels of crime that will occur as a result of successful interventions targeting crime propensity and criminogenic exposure. To test the hypotheses we will utilise a unique set of space-time budget, small area community survey, land use and interviewer-led questionnaire data from the prospective longitudinal Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+) and an Artificial Neural Network approach to modelling. The results show that people’s crime propensity (based on their personal morals and abilities to exercise self-control) has the bulk of predictive power, but also that including criminogenic exposure (being unsupervised with peers and engaged in unstructured activities in residential areas of poor collective efficacy or commercial centres) demonstrates a substantial increase in predictive power (in addition to crime propensity). Moreover, the results show that the probability of crime is strongest when a crime prone person takes part in a criminogenic setting and, crucially, that the higher a person’s crime propensity the more vulnerable he or she is to influences of criminogenic exposure. Finally, the findings suggest that a reduction in people’s crime propensity has a much bigger impact on their crime involvement than a reduction in their exposure to criminogenic settings.This research was supported by grants from the UK Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC grant ES/K010646/1); the European Research Council (grants IDCAB 220/104702003 and Momentum 324247) and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond - the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences

AMPK Regulation of Mouse Oocyte Meiotic Resumption in Vitro

We have previously shown that the adenosine analog 5-aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide-1-β-d-ribofuranoside (AICAR), an activator of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), stimulates an increase in AMPK activity and induces meiotic resumption in mouse oocytes [Downs, S.M., Hudson, E.R., Hardie, D.G., 2002. A potential role for AMP-activated protein kinase in meiotic induction in mouse oocytes. Dev. Biol, 245, 200–212]. The present study was carried out to better define a causative role for AMPK in oocyte meiotic maturation. When microinjected with a constitutively active AMPK, about 20% of mouse oocytes maintained in meiotic arrest with dibutyryl cAMP (dbcAMP) were stimulated to undergo germinal vesicle breakdown (GVB), while there was no effect of catalytically dead kinase. Western blot analysis revealed that germinal vesicle (GV)-stage oocytes cultured in dbcAMP-containing medium plus AICAR possessed elevated levels of active AMPK, and this was confirmed by AMPK assays using a peptide substrate of AMPK to directly measure AMPK activity. AICAR-induced meiotic resumption and AMPK activation were blocked by compound C or adenine 9-beta-d-arabinofuranoside (araA, a precursor of araATP), both inhibitors of AMPK. Compound C failed to suppress adenosine uptake and phosphorylation, indicating that it did not block AICAR action by preventing its metabolism to the AMP analog, ZMP. 2′-Deoxycoformycin (DCF), a potent adenosine deaminase inhibitor, reversed the inhibitory effect of adenosine on oocyte maturation by modulating intracellular AMP levels and activating AMPK. Rosiglitazone, an anti-diabetic agent, stimulated AMPK activation in oocytes and triggered meiotic resumption. In spontaneously maturing oocytes, GVB was preceded by AMPK activation and blocked by compound C. Collectively, these results support the proposition that active AMPK within mouse oocytes provides a potent meiosis-inducing signal in vitro

A quasi classical approach to fully differential ionization cross sections

A classical approximation to time dependent quantum mechanical scattering in the M\o{}ller formalism is presented. Numerically, our approach is similar to a standard Classical-Trajectory-Monte-Carlo calculation. Conceptually, however, our formulation allows one to release the restriction to stationary initial distributions. This is achieved by a classical forward-backward propagation technique. As a first application and for comparison with experiment we present fully differential cross sections for electron impact ionization of atomic hydrogen in the Erhardt geometry.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure