Feeding live prey to zoo animals: response of zoo visitors in Switzerland

In summer 2007, with the help of a written questionnaire, the attitudes of more than 400 visitors to the zoological garden of Zurich, Switzerland, toward the idea of feeding live insects to lizards, live fish to otters, and live rabbits to tigers were investigated. The majority of Swiss zoo visitors agreed with the idea of feeding live prey (invertebrates and vertebrates) to zoo animals, both off‐ and on‐exhibit, except in the case of feeding live rabbits to tigers on‐exhibit. Women and frequent visitors of the zoo disagreed more often with the on‐exhibit feeding of live rabbits to tigers. Study participants with a higher level of education were more likely to agree with the idea of feeding live invertebrates and vertebrates to zoo animals off‐exhibit. In comparison to an earlier study undertaken in Scotland, zoo visitors in Switzerland were more often in favor of the live feeding of vertebrates. Feeding live prey can counter the loss of hunting skills of carnivores and improve the animals' well‐being. However, feeding enrichments have to strike a balance between optimal living conditions of animals and the quality of visitor experience. Our results show that such a balance can be found, especially when live feeding of mammals is carried out off‐exhibit. A good interpretation of food enrichment might help zoos to win more support for the issue, and for re‐introduction programs and conservation. Zoo Biol 29:344–350, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

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Protocols for Neural Cell Culture

1. Neurosphere and Neural Colony Forming Cell Assays Sharon A. Louis and Brent A. Reynolds 2. Directed Neuronal Differentiation of Embryonic and Adult Derived Neurosphere Cells Marcos R. Costa, Ravi Jagasia, and Benedikt Berninger 3. Culture and Differentiation of Human Neural Stem Cells Soojung Shin and Mohan Vemuri 4. Neural Differentiation of Human Embryonic Stem Cells Mirella Dottori, Alice Pebay, and Martin F. Pera 5. Isolation and Culture of Primary Human CNS Neural Cells Manon Blain, Veronique E. Miron, Caroline Lambert, Peter J. Darlington, Qiao-Ling Cui, Philippe Saikali, V. Wee Yong, and Jack P. Antel 6. Bioengineering Protocols for Neural Precursor Cell Expansion Behnam A. Baghbaderani, Arindom Sen, Michael S. Kallos, and Leo A. Behie 7. Intracellular Calcium Assays in Dissociated Primary Cortical Neurons Navjot Kaur, David V.Thompson, David Judd, David R. Piper, and Richard G. Del Mastro 8. Dissociated Hippocampal Cultures Francine Nault and Paul De Koninck 9. Primary Sensory and Motor Neuron Cultures Andrea M. Vincent and Eva L. Feldman 10. Retinal Cell and Tissue Culture Francisco L.A.F. Gomes and Michel Cayouette 11. Preparation of Normal and Reactive Astrocyte Cultures Jean de Vellis, Cristina A Ghiani, Ina B. Wanner, and Ruth Cole 12. Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell Culture Akiko Nishiyama, Ryusuke Suzuki, Hao Zuo, and Xiaoqin Zhu 13. Isolation of Microglia Subpopulations Makoto Sawada and Hiromi Suzuki 14. Microglia from Progenitor Cells in Mouse Neopallium Sergey Fedoroff and Arleen Richardson 15. Primary Schwann Cell Cultures Haesun A. Kim and Patrice Maurel 16. PrimaryDissociated Astrocyte and Neuron Co-Culture Shelley Jacobs and Laurie C. Doering 17. Cerebellar Slice Cultures Josef P. Kapfhammer 18. Hippocampal Slice Cultures Jesse E. Hanson, Adrienne L. Orr, Silvia Fernandez-Illescas, Ricardo A. Valenzuela, and Daniel V. Madison 19. Molecular Substrates for Growing Neurons in Culture Saulius Satkauskas, Arnaud Muller, Morgane Roth, and Dominique Bagnard 20. Guidance and Outgrowth Assays for Embryonic Thalamic Axons Alexandre Bonnin 21. Detection of Cell Death in Neuronal Cultures Sean P. Cregan 22. Live Imaging of Neural Cell Functions Sabine Bavamian, Eliana Scemes, and Paolo Meda 23. Tissue Culture Procedures and Tips Arleen Richardson and Sergey Fedoroff

A Software Engineering Method for the Design of Mixed Reality Systems

The domain of mixed reality systems is currently making decisive advances on a daily basis. However, the knowledge and know-how of HCI scientists and interaction engineers, used in the design of such systems, are not well understood. This chapter addresses this issue by proposing a software engineering method that couples a process for designing mixed reality interaction with a process for developing the functional core. Our development method features a Y-shaped development cycle that separates the description of functional requirements and their analysis from the study of technical requirements of the application. These sub-processes produce Business Objects and Interactional Objects, which are connected to produce a complete mixed reality system. The whole process is presented via a case study, with a particular emphasis on the design of the interactive solution.

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Security of Blind Signatures under Aborts

We explore the security of blind signatures under aborts where the user or the signer may stop the interactive signature issue protocol prematurely. Several works on blind signatures discuss security only in regard of completed executions and usually do not impose strong security requirements in case of aborts. One of the exceptions is the paper of Camenisch, Neven and shelat (Eurocrypt 2007) where the notion of selective-failure blindness has been introduced. Roughly speaking, selective-failure blindness says that blindness should also hold in case the signer is able to learn that some executions have aborted. Here we augment the work of Camenisch et al. by showing how to turn every secure blind signature scheme into a selective-failure blind signature scheme. Our transformation only requires an additional computation of a commitment and therefore adds only a negligible overhead. We also study the case of multiple executions and notions of selective-failure blindness in this setting. We then discuss the case of user aborts and unforgeability under such aborts. We show that every three-move blind signature scheme remains unforgeable under such user aborts. Together with our transformation for selective-failure blindness we thus obtain an easy solution to ensure security under aborts of either party and which is applicable for example to the schemes of Pointcheval and Stern (Journal of Cryptology, 2000). We finally revisit the construction of Camenisch et al. for simulatable adaptive oblivious transfer protocols, starting from selective-failure blind signatures where each message only has one valid signature (uniqueness). While our transformation to achieve selective-failure blindness does not preserve uniqueness, it can still be combined with a modified version of their protocol. Hence, we can derive such oblivious transfer protocols based on unique blind signature schemes only (in the random oracle model), without necessarily requiring selective-failure blindness from scratch.

Security of Sanitizable Signatures Revisited

Sanitizable signature schemes, as defined by Ateniese et al. (ESORICS 2005), allow a signer to partly delegate signing rights to another party, called the sanitizer. That is, the sanitizer is able to modify a predetermined part of the original message such that the integrity and authenticity of the unchanged part is still verifiable. Ateniese et al. identify five security requirements for such schemes (unforgeability, immutability, privacy, transparency and accountability) but do not provide formal specifications for these properties. They also present a scheme that is supposed to satisfy these requirements. Here we revisit the security requirements for sanitizable signatures and, for the first time, present a comprehensive formal treatment. Besides a full characterization of the requirements we also investigate the relationship of the properties, showing for example that unforgeability follows from accountability. We then provide a full security proof for a modification of the original scheme according to our model.

Transactions on High-Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers II

There is a growing trend to use general-purpose operating systems like Linux in embedded systems. Previous research focused on using compaction and specialization techniques to adapt a general-purpose OS to the memory-constrained environment, presented by most, embedded systems. However, there is still room for improvement: it has been shown that even after application of the aforementioned techniques more than 50% of the kernel code remains unexecuted under normal system operation. We introduce a new technique that reduces the Linux kernel code memory footprint, through on-demand code loading of infrequently executed code, for systems that support virtual memory. In this paper, we describe our general approach, and we study code placement algorithms to minimize the performance impact of the code loading. A code, size reduction of 68% is achieved, with a 2.2% execution speedup of the system-mode execution time, for a case study based on the MediaBench II benchmark suite

Linux Kernel Compaction through Cold Code Swapping

There is a growing trend to use general-purpose operating systems like Linux in embedded systems. Previous research focused on using compaction and specialization techniques to adapt a general-purpose OS to the memory-constrained environment presented by most embedded systems. However, there is still room for improvement: it has been shown that even after application of the aforementioned techniques more than 50% of the kernel code remains unexecuted under normal system operation. We introduce a new technique that reduces the Linux kernel code memory footprint through on-demand code loading of infrequently executed code, for systems that support virtual memory. In this paper, we describe our general approach, and we study code placement algorithms to minimize the performance impact of the code loading. A code size reduction of 68% is achieved, with a 2.2% execution speedup of the system-mode execution time, for a case study based on the MediaBench II benchmark suite.

Application-Independent Feature Construction from Noisy Samples

International audienceWhen training classifiers, presence of noise can severely harm theirperformance. One may differentiate class noise from attribute noise.The earlier has been extensively studied while a few methods havebeen recently developed to handle the latter. Among the recentapproaches, detecting, cleansing and correcting are the main words.In this paper, we focus on attribute noise and we consider how afrequent fault-tolerant (FFT) pattern mining task can be used tosupport noise-tolerant classification. Our method copes with noisewithout changing or removing any information from the data. It isbased on an application independent strategy for featureconstruction based on the so-called delta-free pattern type whichhas been proposed earlier as an approximate condensedrepresentations of frequent itemsets. Our experimental evaluation onnoisy training data sets shows accuracy improvement when using thecomputed features instead of the original ones