Backqualität und/oder Brotqualität?

Backqualität spielt eine immer wichtigere Rolle im ökologischen Weizenanbau. Der Bericht erläutert anhand von zwei Versuchen die geringe Korrelation zwischen Qualitätsparametern und dem Backergebnis. In beiden Versuchen sind die Korrelationen zwischen Labor- / Felddaten und den Resultaten der Backversuche sehr gering (< 0,6), oder unbedeutend (< 0,5). Der Einfluss der Backtechnologie bleibt aufgrund der größeren Bedeutung auf das Backergebnis weiter zu untersuchen

Austausch von Aminosäuren und Proteinen zwischen Pflanzen und Böden über die erdnahen Luftschichten [Exchange of amino acids and proteins between plants and soils through the air]

Fazit: Es gibt einen Austausch bzw. Kreislauf von Aminosäuren und Proteinen zwischen dem Boden, Pflanzen und der Atmosphäre. Blütenpollen dominieren im Frühling die Proteingehalte in den erdnahnen Luftschichten, während in der übrigen Jahreszeit Böden und Pflanzen die Hauptquellen zu sein scheinen. Aminosäuren und Proteine der erdnahen Luftschichten werden durch Tau und Regen auf die Pflanzen und die Böden wieder niedergeschlagen. In der Luft werden sie von Mensch und Tiereingeatmet oder über die Schleimhäute aufgenommen. In einem Ökosystem besteht ein Stoffaustausch über die erdnahen Luftschichten zwischen den einzelnen Kompartimenten, über deren Bedeutung für Mensch, Tier und Pflanzenwachstum wir noch sehr wenig wissen

Cytotoxic flavonoids and other constituents from the stem bark of Ochna schweinfurthiana

Seven flavonoids, hemerocallone (1), 6,7-dimethoxy-3′,4′-dimethoxyisoflavone (2), amentoflavone (4), agathisflavone (6), cupressuflavone (8), robustaflavone (9) and epicatechin (10), together with three other compounds, lithospermoside (3), β-D- fructofuranosyl-α-D-glucopyranoside (5) and 3β-O-D-glucopyranosyl-β-stigmasterol (7), were isolated from the ethyl acetate extract of the stem bark of Ochna schweinfurthiana F. Hoffm. All the compounds were characterised by spectroscopic and mass spectrometric methods, and by comparison with literature data. Cytotoxicity of the extracts and compounds against cervical adenocarcinoma (HeLa) cells was evaluated by MTT assay. Compounds 4 and 6 exhibited good cytotoxic activity, with IC50 values of 20.7 and 10.0 μM, respectively

Plasminogen Activator from Porcine Heart Tissue: Isolation and Partial Characterization

By ion exchange chromatography, precipitation with (NH4)2SO4 and gel filtration highly enriched tissue activator of plasminogen is prepared from pig heart tissue. Further purification can be achieved by isoelectric focusing. With the same technique five different forms of the activator were observed with isoelectric points between pH 7.2 and 8.9. The existence of multiple forms was also confirmed by disc polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis at pH 3.8. From gel filtration parameters a molecular weight of 58000 was obtained for the tissue activator

Disentangling participatory ICT design in socioeconomic development

Participatory design in socioeconomic development is an invariably political activity fraught with both political as well as ethical entanglements. ICT for development (ICTD) - often involved in contexts of great inequality and heteogeneity - places these in especially sharp relief. This paper draws attention to these entanglements as well as what they mean for the role and practice of designer-researchers practicing PD. We then draw upon our experiences in an active PD project to highlight approaches that serve as a partial response to these entanglements. These presents both limitations as well as orientations for our role as designer-researchers in engaging with and organising PD work in ICTD - providing a starting point for answering the question “who participates with whom in what and why?

The antioxidant activity of some curcuminoids and chalcones

The antioxidant properties of the synthetic compound (C1)–(C8), which comprised 7 curcuminoids and a chalcone, were evaluated by two complementary assays, DPPH and β-carotene/linoleic acid. It was found that, in general, the free radical scavenging ability of (C1)–(C8) was concentration-dependent. Compounds (C1) and (C4), which contained (4-OH) phenolic groups, were found to be highly potent antioxidants with higher antioxidant values than BHT suggesting that synthetic curcuminoids are more potent antioxidants than standard antioxidants like BHT. Using β-carotene-linoleic acid assay, only the water-soluble 2, 4,6-trihydroxyphenolic chalcone (C5) showed 85.2 % inhibition of the formation of conjugated dienes reflecting on its potent antioxidant activity

Model Adaptation for Sentence Unit Segmentation from Speech

The sentence segmentation task is a classification task that aims at inserting sentence boundaries in a sequence of words. One of the applications of sentence segmentation is to detect the sentence boundaries in the sequence of words that is output by an automatic speech recognition system (ASR). The purpose of correctly finding the sentence boundaries in ASR transcriptions is to make it possible to use further processing tasks, such as automatic summarization, machine translation, and information extraction. Being a classification task, sentence segmentation requires training data. To reduce the labor-intensive labeling task, available labeled data can be used to train the classifier. The high variability of speech among the various speech styles makes it inefficient to use the classifier from one speech style (designated as out-of-domain) to detect sentence boundaries on another speech style (in-domain) and thus, makes it necessary for one classifier to be adapted before it is used on another speech style. In this work, we first justify the need for adapting data among the broadcast news, conversational telephone and meeting speech styles. We then propose methods to adapt sentence segmentation models trained on conversational telephone speech to meeting conversations style. Our results show that using the model adapted from the telephone conversations, instead of the model trained only on meetings conversation style, significantly improves the performance of the sentence segmentation. Moreover, this improvement holds independently from the amount of in-domain data used. In addition, we also study the differences between speech styles, with statistical measures and by examining the performances of various subsets of features. Focusing on broadcast news and meeting speech style, we show that on the meeting speech style, lexical features are more correlated with the sentence boundaries than the prosodic features, whereas it is the contrary on the broadcast news. Furthermore, we observe that prosodic features are more independent from the speech style than lexical features

Tangible Interfaces for Learning:Training Spatial Skills in Vocational Classrooms

There have been many claims that Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can have a positive impact on learning. Alleged benefits include increasing usability, improving engagement and collaboration of students, and providing a better perception of the task, especially spatial ones. However, there exists little empirical data to back up these claims. Moreover, for all their potential benefits for learning, TUIs are still scarcely used in schools. This thesis explores these two issues in the specific context of vocational education and training of carpenter apprentices. The learning objectives concern spatial skills and in particular, the mapping between 2D and 3D representations. We study (1) whether TUIs can support the training of spatial skills, and if so what features allow them to do so, and (2) what kinds of classroom pedagogical scenarios TUIs can support. We follow a design-based research approach and run empirical studies, mostly in classrooms. The contributions of this thesis touch on three research domains: 1. Spatial skills. Our results show that TUIs can help teach spatial skills to carpenter apprentices. The tangible nature of TUIs can help the learner relate multiple representations of an object, especially for difficult problems. It can also lower the barrier to entry into a learning domain for beginners. 2. Learning with TUIs. According to our results, TUIs can benefit learning, but the mere fact of using TUIs does not guarantee learning. Instead, special attention needs to be given to the design of the TUI. Small design variations, such as the physical correspondence between the tangible object and its virtual representations, or the type and timing of feedback given to the user, can have a significant impact on learning. 3. Classroom technologies and orchestration. We explore several classroom pedagogical scenarios that TUIs can support. The most promising one is to use a TUI as part of a hybrid classroom learning activity that includes both TUI and non TUI steps. Additionally, we devise two ways to promote the integration of TUIs in classroom. First, we introduce 5 design principles that reduce the classroom orchestration load. Second, we show how new web technologies can be used to deploy TUIs in schools at a lower cost