Perceptions of the impacts of genetically modified cotton varieties: a case study of the cotton industry in Gujarat, India

The paper reports the findings of a study designed to consider the impact of the adoption of Bt cotton on markets, businesses, and institutional arrangements in India. Given that evidence to date suggests that widespread adoption of Bt cotton by farmers is likely to increase production, this study aims to assess possible implications for markets (access to inputs, prices of inputs and outputs, etc.) and local industries and to identify potential winners and losers. The results suggest that there are impacts on the cotton industry following from the release of Bt hybrids, and so far the impacts are most noticeable "upstream" (i.e., the input suppliers), where companies are rapidly moving away from the sale of bollworm insecticide and attempting to sell Bt seeds. Seed companies are looking for partnerships with Monsanto, the owner of the Bt gene. One reason that companies are keen to move away from insecticide is so they can avoid the need for credit supply to their customers. Seed purchase is not normally through credit, whereas insecticide purchase is. Issues for companies "downstream" (gins, textile manufacturers) relate more to the better quality of Bt cotton and the need for adequate segregation of Bt and non-Bt cotton.

Quality of medicines stored together in multi-compartment compliance aids

Background and Objective: Dispensing medicines into compliance aids is a common practice in pharmacy contrary to manufacturers’ advice and studies have shown the appearance of light-sensitive tablets is compromised by such storage; we previously found evidence of reduced bioavailability at elevated temperature and humidity. Our objective was to examine the physicochemical stability of two generic atenolol tablets in different compliance aids and with aspirin co-storage at room temperature and at 40 °C/75% relative humidity. Methods: The physicochemical stability of atenolol tablets was evaluated after 28 days of storage and compared with controls by examining visual appearance, weight, disintegration, dissolution, friability and hardness to accepted standards and using a previously validated HPLC method for chemical assay. Results and Discussion: The response to storage was brand-dependent and not straightforward. With one make of atenolol (Alpharma), storage in compliance aids even at room temperature impacted on physical stability, reducing tablet hardness, with storage in Dosett® exerting a greater impact than storage in Medidos® (t-test P < 0·001). Co-storage at elevated temperature and humidity also impacted on the appearance of non-coated aspirin tablets (Angette™). The chemical stability of atenolol was not affected and we did not find evidence of changes to bioavailability with either make. Certainly data for one atenolol make (CP Pharmaceuticals) co-stored with aspirin (Angette™ and Nu-Seals) in both compliance aids at room temperature provided evidence of short-term stability. But medicines are dispensed into compliance aids in multi-factorial ways so our study highlights not only the lack of evidence but also a realization that evidence to support real practice may not be accomplished through research. Conclusion: Reassuring practitioners of the continued stability of medicines in compliance aids under the countless condition in which they are dispensed in practice may requires a different approach involving medical device regulators and more definitive professional guidance.

Investigating age related changes in taste and affects on sensory perceptions of oral nutritional supplements

Background: sip feeds are oral nutritional supplements (ONSs) that are commonly prescribed to malnourished patients to improve their nutritional and clinical status. However, ONSs are poorly consumed and frequently wasted, with sweetness being identified as one of the factors leading to patients’ dislike of ONSs. Objectives: to investigate if age affects sweetness thresholds and if this impacts upon perceived sweetness intensity, hedonic (sweetness and overall) and ranked preference of ONS products. Design: prospective, observational. Subjects: thirty-six young adults (18–33 years) and 48 healthy older adults (63–85 years). Setting: Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences and the Clinical Health Sciences at the University of Reading. Methods: detection and recognition threshold levels, basic taste identification and ‘just about right’ level of sweetness were examined. Three ONSs (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry) and sucrose solutions were evaluated for hedonic sweetness, overall hedonic liking, sweetness intensity and rank preference. Results: significant differences were found in both sweetness detection and recognition thresholds (P = 0.0001) between young and older adults, with older adults more likely to incorrectly identify the taste (P = 0.0001). Despite the deterioration in sweetness sensitivity among the older adults, there were no significant differences found in sweetness intensity perceived for the ONS products presented (P > 0.05) when compared with the young adults. However, across both groups sweetness intensity was found to be correlated with overall product dislike across all flavour variants tested (R = 0.398, P = 0.0001). Conclusions: sweetness appears to be one of many factors contributing to the dislike of ONSs. Manufacturers are encouraged to reconsider the formulations of these products so that beneficial effects of ONSs can be delivered in a more palatable and acceptable form and wastage reduced.

Strategies, effectiveness and rationale of vector-borne disease control in the pastoralist system of south-western Uganda

In Uganda, control of vector-borne diseases is mainly in form of vector control, and chemotherapy. There have been reports that acaricides are being misused in the pastoralist systems in Uganda. This is because of the belief by scientists that intensive application of acaricide is uneconomical and unsustainable particularly in the indigenous cattle. The objective of this study was to investigate the strategies, rationale and effectiveness of vector-borne disease control by pastoralists. To systematically carry out these investigations, a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods was used, in both the collection and the analysis of data. Cattle keepers were found to control tick-borne diseases (TBDs) mainly through spraying, in contrast with the control of trypanosomosis for which the main method of control was by chemotherapy. The majority of herders applied acaricides weekly and used an acaricide of lower strength than recommended by the manufacturers. They used very little acaricide wash, and spraying was preferred to dipping. Furthermore, pastoralists either treated sick animals themselves or did nothing at all, rather than using veterinary personnel. Oxytetracycline (OTC) was the drug commonly used in the treatment of TBDs. Nevertheless, although pastoralists may not have been following recommended practices in their control of ticks and tick-borne diseases, they were neither wasteful nor uneconomical and their methods appeared to be effective. Trypanosomosis was not a problem either in Sembabule or Mbarara district. Those who used trypanocides were found to use more drugs than were necessary.

Agronomic techniques to control Lobesia botrana

The grapevine moth Lobesia botrana (Denis & Schiffermuller) (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) is a key pest of grapevines in Greece. As part of a broader study on integrated pest management, the effects were investigated of different cultural methods on the establishment and survival of L. botrana, specifically: application of different nitrogen levels (30 and 100 units of ammonium sulfate or 70 units of Agrobiosol); summer leaf and shoot pruning; application of growth regulators (Regalis, probexadione-calcium; or Falgro, gibberellic acid). There were significant differences among the three levels of N application. The lowest L. botrana infestation rates were found in plots treated with 30 units of (NH4)(2)SO4 and plots that received some summer pruning. Following the application of plant growth regulators, the lowest L. botrana infestation levels occurred in the plots treated with Regalis or Falgro at the manufacturers' recommended concentrations. On vines where growth regulators had been applied, the clusters had fewer berries than those not treated with growth regulators.

Condensation and moisture transport in cold roofs: effect of roof underlay

Cold pitched roofs, with their form of construction situating insulation on a horizontal ceiling, are intrinsically vulnerable to condensation. This study reports the results derived from using a simulation package (Heat, Air and Moisture modelling tool, or HAM-Tools) to investigate the risk of condensation in cold pitched roofs in housing fitted with a vapour-permeable underlay (VPU) of known characteristics. In order to visualize the effect of the VPUs on moisture transfer, several scenarios were modelled, and compared with the results from a conventional bituminous felt with high resistance (200 MNs/g, Sd = 40 m). The results indicate that ventilation is essential in the roof to reduce condensation. However, a sensitivity analysis proved that reducing the overall tightness of the ceiling and using lower-resistance VPUs would help in controlling condensation formation in the roof. To a large extent, the proposed characteristic performance of the VPU as predicted by manufacturers and some researchers may only be realistic if gaps in the ceiling are sealed completely during construction, which may be practically difficult given current construction practice.

Innovative approach to building systems integration problems: Using systems theory, technological forecasting and scenario planning

Building services are worth about 2% GDP and are essential for the effective and efficient operations of the building. It is increasingly recognised that the value of a building is related to the way it supports the client organisation’s ongoing business operations. Building services are central to the functional performance of buildings and provide the necessary conditions for health, well-being, safety and security of the occupants. They frequently comprise several technologically distinct sub-systems and their design and construction requires the involvement of numerous disciplines and trades. Designers and contractors working on the same project are frequently employed by different companies. Materials and equipment is supplied by a diverse range of manufacturers. Facilities managers are responsible for operation of the building service in use. The coordination between these participants is crucially important to achieve optimum performance, but too often is neglected. This leaves room for serious faults. The need for effective integration is important. Modern technology offers increasing opportunities for integrated personal-control systems for lighting, ventilation and security as well as interoperability between systems. Opportunities for a new mode of systems integration are provided by the emergence of PFI/PPP procurements frameworks. This paper attempts to establish how systems integration can be achieved in the process of designing, constructing and operating building services. The essence of the paper therefore is to envisage the emergent organisational responses to the realisation of building services as an interactive systems network.

Consistently inconsistent: commercially available starch-based Dysphagia products

Individuals with dysphagia may be prescribed thickened fluids to promote a safer and more successful swallow. Starch-based thickening agents are often employed; however, these exhibit great variation in consistency. The aim of this study was to compare viscosity and the rheological profile parameters complex (G*), viscous (G″), and elastic modulus (G′) over a range of physiological shear rates. UK commercially available dysphagia products at “custard” consistency were examined. Commercially available starch-based dysphagia products were prepared according to manufacturers’ instructions; the viscosity and rheological parameters were tested on a CVOR Rheometer. At a measured shear rate of 50 s−1, all products fell within the viscosity limits defined according to the National Dysphagia Diet Task Force guidelines. However, at lower shear rates, large variations in viscosity were observed. Rheological parameters G*, G′, and G″ also demonstrated considerable differences in both overall strength and rheological behavior between different batches of the same product and different product types. The large range in consistency and changes in the overall structure of the starch-based products over a range of physiological shear rates show that patients could be receiving fluids with very different characteristics from that advised. This could have detrimental effects on their ability to swallow.

Profiling management for personalised multimedia delivery on-demand within the AXMEDIS framework

Media content distribution on-demand becomes more complex when performed on a mass scale involving various channels with distinct and dynamic network characteristics, and, deploying a variety of terminal devices offering a wide range of capabilities. It is practically impossible to create and prepackage various static versions of the same content to match all the varying demand parameters of clients for various contexts. In this paper we present a profiling management approach for dynamically personalised media content delivery on-demand integrated with the AXMEDIS Framework. The client profiles comprise the representation of User, Device, Network and Context of content delivery based on MPEG-21:DIA. Although the most challenging proving ground for this personalised content delivery has been the mobile testbed i.e. the distribution to mobile handsets, the framework described here can be deployed for disribution, by the AXMEDIS PnP module, through other channels e.g. satellite, Internet to a range of client terminals e.g. desktops, kiosks, IPtv and other terrminals whose baseline terminal capabilities can be made availabe by the manufacturers as is normal.

A parallel convolutional coder including embedded puncturing with application to consumer devices

As consumers demand more functionality) from their electronic devices and manufacturers supply the demand then electrical power and clock requirements tend to increase, however reassessing system architecture can fortunately lead to suitable counter reductions. To maintain low clock rates and therefore reduce electrical power, this paper presents a parallel convolutional coder for the transmit side in many wireless consumer devices. The coder accepts a parallel data input and directly computes punctured convolutional codes without the need for a separate puncturing operation while the coded bits are available at the output of the coder in a parallel fashion. Also as the computation is in parallel then the coder can be clocked at 7 times slower than the conventional shift-register based convolutional coder (using DVB 7/8 rate). The presented coder is directly relevant to the design of modern low-power consumer devices

A human volunteer study to assess the impact of confectionery sweeteners on the gut microbiota composition.

Sweeteners are being sourced to lower the energetic value of confectionery including chocolates. Some, especially non-digestible carbohydrates, may possess other benefits for human health upon their fermentation by the colonic microbiota. The present study assessed non-digestible carbohydrate sweeteners, selected for use in low-energy chocolates, for their ability to beneficially modulate faecal bacterial profiles in human volunteers. Forty volunteers consumed a test chocolate (low-energy or experimental chocolate) containing 22·8 g of maltitol (MTL), MTL and polydextrose (PDX), or MTL and resistant starch for fourteen consecutive days. The dose of the test chocolates was doubled every 2 weeks over a 6-week period. Numbers of faecal bifidobacteria significantly increased with all the three test treatments. Chocolate containing the PDX blend also significantly increased faecal lactobacilli (P = 0·00 001) after the 6 weeks. The PDX blend also showed significant increases in faecal propionate and butyrate (P = 0·002 and 0·006, respectively). All the test chocolates were well tolerated with no significant change in bowel habit or intestinal symptoms even at a daily dose of 45·6 g of non-digestible carbohydrate sweetener. This is of importance not only for giving manufacturers a sugar replacement that can reduce energetic content, but also for providing a well-tolerated means of delivering high levels of non-digestible carbohydrates into the colon, bringing about improvements in the biomarkers of gut health.

PDM 2006: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Data Mining

Recently major processor manufacturers have announced a dramatic shift in their paradigm to increase computing power over the coming years. Instead of focusing on faster clock speeds and more powerful single core CPUs, the trend clearly goes towards multi core systems. This will also result in a paradigm shift for the development of algorithms for computationally expensive tasks, such as data mining applications. Obviously, work on parallel algorithms is not new per se but concentrated efforts in the many application domains are still missing. Multi-core systems, but also clusters of workstations and even large-scale distributed computing infrastructures provide new opportunities and pose new challenges for the design of parallel and distributed algorithms. Since data mining and machine learning systems rely on high performance computing systems, research on the corresponding algorithms must be on the forefront of parallel algorithm research in order to keep pushing data mining and machine learning applications to be more powerful and, especially for the former, interactive. To bring together researchers and practitioners working in this exciting field, a workshop on parallel data mining was organized as part of PKDD/ECML 2006 (Berlin, Germany). The six contributions selected for the program describe various aspects of data mining and machine learning approaches featuring low to high degrees of parallelism: The first contribution focuses the classic problem of distributed association rule mining and focuses on communication efficiency to improve the state of the art. After this a parallelization technique for speeding up decision tree construction by means of thread-level parallelism for shared memory systems is presented. The next paper discusses the design of a parallel approach for dis- tributed memory systems of the frequent subgraphs mining problem. This approach is based on a hierarchical communication topology to solve issues related to multi-domain computational envi- ronments. The forth paper describes the combined use and the customization of software packages to facilitate a top down parallelism in the tuning of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and the next contribution presents an interesting idea concerning parallel training of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and motivates their use in labeling sequential data. The last contribution finally focuses on very efficient feature selection. It describes a parallel algorithm for feature selection from random subsets. Selecting the papers included in this volume would not have been possible without the help of an international Program Committee that has provided detailed reviews for each paper. We would like to also thank Matthew Otey who helped with publicity for the workshop.

Europe’s biocidal products directive: benefits and costs in urban pest management

The European Commission’s Biocidal Products Directive (Council Directive 98/8 EC), known as the BPD, is the largest regulatory exercise ever to affect the urban pest control industry. Although focussed in the European Union its impact is global because any company selling pest control products in the EU must follow its principles. All active substances, belonging to 23 different biocidal product types, come within the Directive’s scope of regulatory control. This will eventually involve re-registration of all existing products, as well as affecting any new product that comes to the market. Some active substances, such as the rodenticides and insecticides, are already highly regulated in Europe but others, such as embalming fluids, masonry preservatives, disinfectants and repellents/attractants will come under intensive regulatory scrutiny for the first time. One of the purposes of the Directive is to offer enhanced protection for human health and the environment. The potential benefit for suppliers of pest control products is mutual recognition of regulatory product dossiers across 25 Member States of the European Union. This process, requiring harmonisation of all regulatory decision-making processes, should reduce duplicated effort and, potentially, allow manufacturers speedier access to European markets. However, the cost to industry is enormous, both in terms of the regulatory resources required to assemble BPD dossiers and the development budgets required to conduct studies to meet its new standards. The cost to regulatory authorities is also tremendous, in terms of the need to upgrade staff capabilities to meet new challenges and the volume of the work expected by the Commission when they are appointed the Rapporteur Member State (RMS) for an active substance. Users of pest control products will pay a price too. The increased regulatory costs of maintaining products in the European market are likely to be passed on, at least in part, to users. Furthermore, where the costs of meeting new regulatory requirements cannot be recouped from product sales, many well-known products may leave the market. For example, it seems that in future few rodenticides that are not anticoagulants will be available within the EU. An understanding of the BPD is essential to those who intend to place urban pest control products on the European market and may be useful to those considering the harmonisation of regulatory processes elsewhere. This paper reviews the operation of the first stages of the BPD for rodenticides, examines the potential benefits and costs of the legislation to the urban pest control industry and looks forward to the next stages of implementation involving all insecticides used in urban pest management.

The determinants of competitive success in the interwar British radio industry

This article discusses the sources of competitive advantage in the interwar British radio industry. Specifically, it examines why sections of the industry that reaped substantial monopoly rents from the downstream value chain failed to dominate the industry. During the 1920s Marconi (which controlled the fundamental UK patents) had a key cost advantage, as had other members of the ‘Big Six’ electrical engineering firms which formed the BBC and were granted preferential royalties. Meanwhile the valve manufacturers' cartel was also able to extract high rents from set manufacturers. The vertical integration literature suggests that input monopolists have incentives to control downstream production. Yet—in contrast to the gramophone industry, which became concentrated into two huge companies following market saturation in the 1930s—radio retained a much more competitive structure. The Big Six failed to capitalize fully on their initial cost advantages owing to logistical weaknesses in supplying markets subject to rapid technical and design obsolescence. Subsequently, during the 1930s, marketing innovations are shown to have played a key role in allowing several independents to establish successful brands. This gave them sufficient scale to provide strong bargaining positions with input suppliers, negating most of their initial cost disadvantage.