The use of animal-based health and welfare parameters – what is it all about?

Organic farming is characterized by several goals that are expressed in daily practices and in standards. Some of the important goals for organic production systems are naturalness, harmony on all levels of production, local recycling of resources, and the principle of precaution (Anonymous, 2002). For organic herds, good animal welfare is an explicit goal, and this includes that the overall goal for the organic farming systems regarding naturalness and harmony in the herd are met by giving the animals possibilities to perform natural behavior and achieve harmony within the group. Freedom for the animals to make as many choices as possible should be respected (Vaarst et al., 2004; Verhoog et al., 2002 & 2004). The production system is not sustainable if animals show evidence of pain, disease, or distress as a result of an inadequate system or disharmony between the animals and the system. Therefore it is of crucial importance to be able to assess and evaluate the animals’ response to the system. This need is not only relevant for organic systems. Public concern about farm animal welfare has steadily grown during recent years. In this context, welfare assessment has many roles such as identifying current welfare problems, checking farm assurance and legislative requirements have been met, indicating risk factors leading to a welfare problem, testing the efficacy of interventions, formulating a product information/labelling system, or research tool for evaluating and comparing production systems, environments, management systems, animal genotype etc. (Whay, 2007). Improvements in animal welfare may be achieved through (1) assessment of animal welfare, (2) identification of risk factors potentially leading to welfare problems and (3), interventions in response to the risk factors. In order to see whether the improvements have worked, it is furthermore important to be able to measure or assess the improvements and see if it has worked. In this process the animal based parameters help us to identify the animal’s response to the system, and therefore also the potential problems in this system. It is the aim of this presentation to give an overview over concepts of welfare assessments, and animal based parameters, and present the ideas in the project Welfare Quality in order to create a background for understanding and discussing the use of animal based parameters in the current ANIPLAN project

Balloon Flight Record Status Report

No abstract availabl

The Rigidity Conjecture

A central question in dynamics is whether the topology of a system determines its geometry. This is known as rigidity. Under mild topological conditions rigidity holds for many classical cases, including: Kleinian groups, circle diffeomorphisms, unimodal interval maps, critical circle maps, and circle maps with a break point. More recent developments show that under similar topological conditions, rigidity does not hold for slightly more general systems. In this paper we state a conjecture which describes how topological classes are organized into rigidity classes.Comment: 6 page

Plasma heating, plasma flow and wave production around an electron beam injected into the ionosphere

A brief historical summary of the Minnesota ECHO series and other relevant electron beam experiments is given. The primary purpose of the ECHO experiments is the use of conjugate echoes as probes of the magnetosphere, but beam-plasma and wave studies were also made. The measurement of quasi-dc electric fields and ion streaming during the ECHO 6 experiment has given a pattern for the plasma flow in the hot plasma region extending to 60m radius about the ECHO 6 electron beam. The sheath and potential well caused by ion orbits is discussed with the aid of a model which fits the observations. ELF wave production in the plasma sheath around the beam is briefly discussed. The new ECHO 7 mission to be launched from the Poker Flat range in November 1987 is described

Modulation and heliocentric gradient of low energy cosmic rays near solar minimum, 1965

Modulation and heliocentric gradient of low energy cosmic rays near solar minimum, 196

Magnetospheric substorm effects on energetic electrons in the outer Van Allen belt /Summary of technical report CR-137/

Substorm-associated acceleration effects on electron increases in post-midnight sector of outer radiation bel

A survey of the total radiation in space observed by the OGO satellites, 5 September 1964 - 27 May 1968

Graphical and tabular summaries of ionization rates in space recorded by OGO spacecraft ion chamber

Monetary Union: European Lessons, Latin American Prospects

In this paper selective issues of long-run sustainability of monetary unions are analyzed. Using theoretical insights and the experience of EMU up to now we argue that empirical evidence on OCA criteria for EMU suggests that benefits for the countries participating in EMU outweigh costs by a relatively large margin although by varying degrees from country to country. We also conclude that the Stability Pact is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for EMU to succeed and that EMU has been driven by political considerations. A sound financial sector is a precondition. With regard to lessons to be drawn for Latin America and the Caribbean we first find that there has been a strong push towards the floating cum inflation-targeting corner and to regional trade integration. Moreover, it seems that, in contrast to EMU, the benefit-cost balance of a move to monetary union is much less favorable in Latin America and the Caribbean and, most important, the political dimension missing.