The epidemiological situation of strongyle infections in adult horses in Switzerland is characterized by a strong dominance of small strongyles (Cyathostominae) and an overall low level of egg shedding in the faeces. The prevailing attitude towards anthelmintic therapy considers neither husbandry conditions nor pasture hygiene measures. Instead, calendar-based routine medication, comprising usually 3 to 4 annual treatments, is the typical strategy. Such an approach, however, often results in an excessive administration of anthelmintics. With respect to the continuous spread of drug resistant cyathostomins a change of strategy seems inevitable. A consensus has been agreed on between equine parasitologists and clinicians of the Vetsuisse Faculty in Zurich and Berne to focus on the concept of a selective control approach, based on individual faecal egg counts as the central element. It is now recommended that clinically healthy horses (> 4 y) are treated only when their strongyle egg count is equal to or higher than 200 eggs per gram of faeces. A regular analysis of the strongyle population based on larval cultures, the control of drug efficacy, and quarantine measures for incoming horses are mandatory components of the concept. Recent experiences in several pilot farms have indicated that only 4 % of the McMaster analyses resulted in a deworming treatment. For horses that did not receive any nematicidal anthelmintic during the current season, a "safety" treatment is recommended at the end of the grazing period.

This paper presents a comprehensive design methodology for guaranteeing end-to-end requirements of real-time systems. Applications are structured as a set of process components connected by asynchronous channels, in which the endpoints are the system's external inputs and outputs. Timing constraints are then postulated between these inputs and outputs; they express properties such as end-to-end propagation delay, temporal input-sampling correlation, and allowable separation times between updated output values.The automated design method works as follows: First the end-to-end requirements are transformed into a set of intermediate rate constraints on the tasks, and new tasks are created to correlate related inputs.The intermediate constraints are then solved by an optimization algorithm, whose objective is to minimize CPU utilization. If the algorithm fails, a restructuring tool attempts to eliminate bottlenecks by transforming the application, which is then re-submitted into the assignment algorithm. The final result is a schedulable set of fully periodic tasks, which collaboratively maintain the end-to-end constraints.

In this paper we propose an extension of the well-known circular menu paradigm, in virtual environments. We propose a menu where items are arranged on a portion of a circle and controlled by rotating the wrist in the horizontal plane. Experience shows that this manipulation is easy to carry out even for novice users, and precision is high thanks to an innovative filtering technique we called the "reduced hotspot". The limitation of the number of items in the menu is solved using hierarchy and an adequate layout is proposed, the "stacked rings". All hypothesis are validated by user tests.

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