User behaviour, best practice and the risks of non-target exposure associated with anticoagulant rodenticide use

Usage of anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) is an integral component of modern agriculture and is essential for the control of commensal rodent populations. However, the extensive deployment of ARs has led to widespread exposure of a range of non-target predatory birds and mammals to some compounds, in particular the second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SCARS). As a result, there has been considerable effort placed into devising voluntary best practice guidelines that increase the efficacy of rodent control and reduce the risk of non-target exposure. Currently, there is limited published information on actual practice amongst users or implementation of best practice. We assessed the behaviour of a typical group of users using an on-farm questionnaire survey. Most baited for rodents every year using SGARs. Most respondents were apparently aware of the risks of non-target exposure and adhered to some of the best practice recommendations but total compliance was rare. Our questionnaire revealed that users of first generation anticoagulant rodenticides rarely protected or checked bait stations, and so took little effort to prevent primary exposure of non-targets. Users almost never searched for and removed poisoned carcasses and many baited for prolonged periods or permanently. These factors are all likely to enhance the likelihood of primary and secondary exposure of non-target species. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Direct evidence for cation non-stoichiometry and Cottrell atmospheres around dislocation cores in functional oxide interfaces

Long-range strain fields associated with dislocation cores at an oxide interface are shown to be sufficient enough to create significant variations in the chemical composition around the core (Cottrell atmospheres). Such stress-assisted diffusion of cations towards the cores is proposed to significantly impact the properties of nanoscale functional devices. The figure shows a Z-contrast image of a single dislocation core at an oxide interface.

Web Data Extraction from Query Result Pages Based on Visual and Content Features

A rapidly increasing number of Web databases are now become accessible via
their HTML form-based query interfaces. Query result pages are dynamically generated
in response to user queries, which encode structured data and are displayed for human
use. Query result pages usually contain other types of information in addition to query
results, e.g., advertisements, navigation bar etc. The problem of extracting structured data
from query result pages is critical for web data integration applications, such as comparison
shopping, meta-search engines etc, and has been intensively studied. A number of approaches
have been proposed. As the structures of Web pages become more and more complex, the
existing approaches start to fail, and most of them do not remove irrelevant contents which
may a®ect the accuracy of data record extraction. We propose an automated approach for
Web data extraction. First, it makes use of visual features and query terms to identify data
sections and extracts data records in these sections. We also represent several content and
visual features of visual blocks in a data section, and use them to ¯lter out noisy blocks.
Second, it measures similarity between data items in di®erent data records based on their
visual and content features, and aligns them into di®erent groups so that the data in the
same group have the same semantics. The results of our experiments with a large set of
Web query result pages in di®erent domains show that our proposed approaches are highly
e®ective.