Possibilities and limits of reduced primary tillage in organic farming

In two organically cultivated field trials, located in Germany and Greece, effects of reduced primary tillage systems on root and shoot growth of cereals were investigated. The field trial in Rommersheim near Mainz, Germany, was established in 1994 by the foundation „Stiftung Ökologie und Landbau“. The Agricultural University of Athens established in 1995 a similar experiment in a field trial carried out by The Laboratory of Crop Science, located in Athens, Greece

Sproß - und Wurzelentwicklung von Getreide bei reduzierter Grundbodenbearbeitung im Ökologischen Landbau

In a field trial established in 1994 by the foundation „Stiftung Ökologie und Landbau“, different primary tillage systems are being tested on their influence on root and shootgrowth of cereals. The tillage implements are : mouldboard plough, two layer plough and layer cultivator. Investigations oriented on soil physical parameters ( e.g. aggregate stability ), root parameters ( e.g. root-length-density ), shoot growth ( e.g. dry matter, yields) and laboratory analysis ( e.g., P, K Ct/Nt contents ). These parameters were also tested for the weeds, that can strongly compete with the crops, especially in reduced tillage systems. The results of the investigations combined with knowledge obtained from previous work and literature are being interpreted in order to assess the possibilities and limits of the reduced primary tillage intensity under given field conditions

Hate is not Binary: Studying Abusive Behavior of #GamerGate on Twitter

Over the past few years, online bullying and aggression have become increasingly prominent, and manifested in many different forms on social media. However, there is little work analyzing the characteristics of abusive users and what distinguishes them from typical social media users. In this paper, we start addressing this gap by analyzing tweets containing a great large amount of abusiveness. We focus on a Twitter dataset revolving around the Gamergate controversy, which led to many incidents of cyberbullying and cyberaggression on various gaming and social media platforms. We study the properties of the users tweeting about Gamergate, the content they post, and the differences in their behavior compared to typical Twitter users. We find that while their tweets are often seemingly about aggressive and hateful subjects, "Gamergaters" do not exhibit common expressions of online anger, and in fact primarily differ from typical users in that their tweets are less joyful. They are also more engaged than typical Twitter users, which is an indication as to how and why this controversy is still ongoing. Surprisingly, we find that Gamergaters are less likely to be suspended by Twitter, thus we analyze their properties to identify differences from typical users and what may have led to their suspension. We perform an unsupervised machine learning analysis to detect clusters of users who, though currently active, could be considered for suspension since they exhibit similar behaviors with suspended users. Finally, we confirm the usefulness of our analyzed features by emulating the Twitter suspension mechanism with a supervised learning method, achieving very good precision and recall.Comment: In 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (ACM HyperText 2017

CONSERVATION OF BIODIVERSITY FOR ORGANIC FARMING IN GREECE

AEGILOPS Network Ecology and Biodiversity in Agriculture was established in 2004. Our purpose is to conserve heritage varieties and traditional agricultural knowledge and to restore landrace varieties into contemporary agricultural practice in ways that benefit the traditional farmers. The goals of AEGILOPS are: a. to develop plant varieties adapted to local organic production which utilize the benefits of locally adapted genetic resources for ecological agriculture, and b. to strengthen the role of the farmers in the conservation of genetic resources as well as to protect their rights in taking part in the management and benefits of agrobiodiversity

Prelimenary results on a comparative study evaluating landraces of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) in organic agriculture in a protected area (Northern Greece)

Organic farming requires cultivars or landraces that are specifically adapted to this low input cropping system. Six landraces of Greek common dry bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and one from the neighbouring Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) were evaluated for different agronomic and physicochemical characteristics under organic conditions in the National Park of the lake Prespes, on the borders of Greece, FYROM and Albania. Significant differences among landraces were found in yield characteristics such as yield plant-1, pod plant-1 and seeds pod-1 with two of the landraces performing the best. The cooking time was estimated by measuring seed hardness using a penetrometer. There was a considerable variation between the landraces tested with cooking times between 25-45 minutes. Some of the landraces could be a useful resource for the development of organic farming systems in this protected area

Einfluß von drei Bodenbearbeitungssystemen auf bodenphysikalische Eigenschaften und Wurzelwachstum von Wintergerste auf einem Ackerstandort in Athen, Griechenland

Optimierte bodenphysikalische Eigenschaften sind Grundlage der Entwicklung vitaler Getreidebestände und hoher Kornerträge. Wurzelwachstum und Wurzelaktivität stehen in engem Zusammenhang mit Bodendichte, Porenverteilung, Eindringwiderstand und dem gewogenen mittleren Aggregatdurchmesser. Konventionelle Grundbodenbearbeitung mit dem Wendepflug führt häufig zu ungünstigerem Bodengefüge, im Zusammenhang mit hohen Auflasten, zu Pflugsohlen. Ziel des Projektes war es, den Einfluß verschiedener Bodenbearbeitungssysteme auf bodenphysikalische Eigenschaften und das Wurzelwachstum von Wintergerste unter den klimatischen Bedingungen des Mittelmeerraums zu untersuchen

Large scale crowdsourcing and characterization of Twitter abusive behavior

In recent years online social networks have suffered an increase in sexism, racism, and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior, often manifesting itself through offensive, abusive, or hateful language. Past scientific work focused on studying these forms of abusive activity in popular online social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Building on such work, we present an eight month study of the various forms of abusive behavior on Twitter, in a holistic fashion. Departing from past work, we examine a wide variety of labeling schemes, which cover different forms of abusive behavior. We propose an incremental and iterative methodology that leverages the power of crowdsourcing to annotate a large collection of tweets with a set of abuse-related labels.By applying our methodology and performing statistical analysis for label merging or elimination, we identify a reduced but robust set of labels to characterize abuse-related tweets. Finally, we offer a characterization of our annotated dataset of 80 thousand tweets, which we make publicly available for further scientific exploration.Accepted manuscrip

Einfluß von drei Bodenbearbeitungssystemen auf pflanzliche Parameter von Braugerste im Ökologischen Landbau

Der Ökologische Landbau wird häufig mit dem zurückhaltenden Einsatz des Wendepfluges in Verbindung gebracht. Erhebungen zeigen, daß der Streich-blechpflug in mehr als 90 % aller Grundbodenbearbeitungsmaßnahmen in der Praxis eingesetzt wird. In der Mehrzahl der Fälle wird bis zu 30 cm Bodentiefe gepflügt. Ziel unseres Forschungsvorhabens ist es, den Einfluß reduzierter Grundboden-bearbeitung auf die Ertragsbildung von Braugerste einschließlich ihrer Begleitflora unter den Bedingungen des Ökologischen Landbau zu untersuchen