Eggspection, organic egg verification tool

The institute for Food safety (RIKILT), part of Wageningen Univeristy and Research centre (Wageningen UR) has developed a method to verify the organic nature of eggs. The fingerprint of the natural caretonoids (carotenes and xanthophyllis) in eggs are used to discriminate between production systems. After extraction and processing the results are subsequently compared by statistical methods

Organic produce and production system conformity assessments : eggs and isotope analysis

Eggs were analysed for stable isotope composition, as a measure for organic produce authentication

Purity or pragmatism? : Reflecting on the use of systematic review methodology in development

Systematic review methodology pioneered in health care has been increasingly applied to development questions of importance in lower- and middle-income countries. This paper reports one such review on the topic of microfinance in sub-Saharan Africa and reflects on the number of pragmatic methodological compromises made when applying the method to a new field. These compromises relate to multidisciplinary teamwork, application of regional filters, drawing on evidence from additional study types and exploring mechanisms for change through the development and testing of a causal pathway. The paper concludes that a pragmatic rigorous approach to systematically reviewing evidence of effectiveness is needed for international development

B_K in Staggered Chiral Perturbation Theory

We calculate the kaon B-parameter, B_K, to next-to-leading order in staggered chiral perturbation theory. We find expressions for partially quenched QCD with three sea quarks, quenched QCD, and full QCD with m_u = m_d but not equal to m_s. We extend the usual power counting to include the effects of using perturbative (rather than non-perturbative) matching factors. Taste breaking enters through the O(a^2) terms in the effective action, through O(a^2) terms from the discretization of operators, and through the truncation of matching factors. These effects cause mixing with several additional operators, complicating the chiral and continuum extrapolations. In addition to the staggered expressions, we present B_K at next-to-leading order in continuum partially quenched chiral perturbation theory for N_f=3 sea quarks with m_u = m_d but not equal to m_s.Comment: 56 pages, 3 figures (v3: Corrected normalization error in Eq.(4) and subsequent equations; physics results unchanged. Version accepted to Phys. Rev. D.

Automatic acquisition of Spanish LFG resources from the Cast3LB treebank

In this paper, we describe the automatic annotation of the Cast3LB Treebank with LFG f-structures for the subsequent extraction of Spanish probabilistic grammar and lexical resources. We adapt the approach and methodology of Cahill et al. (2004), O’Donovan et al. (2004) and elsewhere for English to Spanish and the Cast3LB treebank encoding. We report on the quality and coverage of the automatic f-structure annotation. Following the pipeline and integrated models of Cahill et al. (2004), we extract wide-coverage probabilistic LFG approximations and parse unseen Spanish text into f-structures. We also extend Bikel’s (2002) Multilingual Parse Engine to include a Spanish language module. Using the retrained Bikel parser in the pipeline model gives the best results against a manually constructed gold standard (73.20% predsonly f-score). We also extract Spanish lexical resources: 4090 semantic form types with 98 frame types. Subcategorised prepositions and particles are included in the frames