Challenges related to statistical methods and sensor systems for the daily prediction of health disorders in individual dairy cows

The use of digital support systems has become a standard in dairy farming, and significant effort has been made to detect individual animals that are in need for a treatment by using sensor data. However, developing systems that are of actual use for practical farming remains a challenge. A variety of combinations of sensor systems and statistical algorithms for the detection of problems related to mastitis and lameness has been investigated to this date. These studies are mostly limited to certain conditions, models, and dependent variables that describe the disease to be detected, which makes them difficult to compare with one another and adapt to new datasets. An inherent challenge is the low prevalence of disease or treatment events, respectively, when looking at each individual cow on a day-by-day basis. As a result, even models with seemingly suitable combinations of sensitivity and specificity produce a large portion of false positive alarms. Within the framework of this dissertation, two studies addressing these challenges were carried out and published. The aim of the first study was to use available (sensor) data from the Frankenforst experimental farm of the University of Bonn to develop classification models with which cows in need of treatments for lameness and mastitis could be detected. A wide range of statistical and machine learning algorithms were tested, as well as different ways of re-sampling the training data to achieve class balance between days with and without treatment. The ExtraTrees Classifier model achieved the best results with a mean area under curve (AUC) of 0.79 for mastitis and 0.71 for lameness treatments, while the sampling methods had no significant influence on the results. In a second subsequent study, the four best models from the first study were re-trained with an expanded data base to include data from two additional experimental farms in order to test the transferability of the developed models to previously unknown data from two additional farms. For this purpose, the models were trained on data from one farm and then tested on the remaining farms’ data. In addition, special attention was paid to the possibility of reducing false alarms by forming risk groups and risk times in the data and testing their potential to increase the relative frequency of occurrence of treatment days and thus a higher positive predictive value. It was found that the models showed poorer detection performances for data from an unknown farm, especially for lameness treatments, so that in conclusion training on data from the same farm was recommended. Regarding the subgroups with a higher risk for a treatment, especially the cows with a previous treatment of the same category (mastitis or lameness) in the current lactation showed a significantly increased risk compared to the test data without grouping. However, the resulting increased positive predictive values (up to 20%) are still not sufficient for satisfactory use in practice. Here it was shown that the problem of the high number of false alarms is predominantly based in stochastics, which challenges the use of such models for the daily detection of cows, or livestock in general, in need of a treatment. Overall, it is essential for the discussion to shift towards how these sensor systems can meet the requirements and expectations for practical decision support systems. Future research needs to focus on the transferability of the individual experimental conditions, the specificity of the features derived from sensor data, the choice of statistical models and especially the daily prevalence of the condition to be detected

Teaching Our Education Students to Teach Christianly

What does it mean to teach Christianly? We may not always agree on what it means. There can be no doubt, however, that the calling of teacher education departments in Christian post-secondary institutions is to prepare students to teach Christianly, whether in public or Christian schools. But how do we do this? I shall address this question by considering four themes: current conceptions of what it means to teach Christianly, an alternative model, the context of teaching Christianly, and some implications for our teacher education programs

Britain's spiritual life: how can it be deepened?: Seebohm Rowntree, Russell Lavers, and the "crisis of belief", ca. 1946-54

This article examines the response of two social investigators in the early post-World War II period to the apparent secularization of British society. It explains how an unpublished survey that the two men carried out, along with the work of other Christian and non-Christian commentators in this period, expressed the hope that religious influences would be strengthened through secular institutions, including communal organizations, workplaces, and the military. A revival of Christian belief, in some form, was seen as a bulwark against communism in the context of the Cold War in which the Soviet regime was seen to present a threat to the "Christian civilization" of the West. The "spiritual life of the nation" was synonymous with the "national character," and for the information and opinion on which their study was based, Seebohm Rowntree and Russell Lavers turned to those who they believed were in a position to influence the national character

Digital Theology: Is the Resurrection Virtual?

Many recent writers have developed a rich system of theological concepts inspired by computers. This is digital theology. Digital theology shares many elements of its eschatology with Christian post-millenarianism. It promises a utopian perfection via technological progress. Modifying Christian soteriology, digital theology makes reference to four types of immortality. I look critically at each type. The first involves transferring our minds from our natural bodies to superior computerized bodies. The second and third types involve bringing into being a previously living person, or person who has never existed, within an artificial digital environment. The fourth involves promotion of our lives into some higher level computational reality

Interactions between herbivory and warming in aboveground biomass production of arctic vegetation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Many studies investigating the ecosystem effects of global climate change have focused on arctic ecosystems because the Arctic is expected to undergo the earliest and most pronounced changes in response to increasing global temperatures, and arctic ecosystems are considerably limited by low temperatures and permafrost. In these nutrient limited systems, a warmer climate is expected to increase plant biomass production, primarily through increases in shrubs over graminoids and forbs. But, the influence of vertebrate and invertebrate herbivores has been largely absent in studies investigating the effects of vegetation responses to climate change, despite the fact that herbivory can have a major influence on plant community composition, biomass and nutrient cycling. Here, we present results from a multi-annual field experiment investigating the effects of vertebrate herbivory on plant biomass response to simulated climate warming in arctic Greenland.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results after four years of treatments did not give any clear evidence of increased biomass of shrubs in response climate warming. Nor did our study indicate that vertebrate grazing mediated any increased domination of shrubs over other functional plant groups in response to warming. However, our results indicate an important role of insect outbreaks on aboveground biomass. Intense caterpillar foraging from a two-year outbreak of the moth <it>Eurois occulta </it>during two growing seasons may have concealed any treatment effects. However, there was some evidence suggesting that vertebrate herbivores constrain the biomass production of shrubs over graminoids and forbs.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Although inconclusive, our results were likely constrained by the overwhelming influence of an unexpected caterpillar outbreak on aboveground biomass. It is likely that the role of large vertebrate herbivores in vegetation response to warming will become more evident as this experiment proceeds and the plant community recovers from the caterpillar outbreak. Due to the greater influence of invertebrate herbivory in this study, it is advisable to consider both the effect of invertebrate and vertebrate herbivores in studies investigating climate change effects on plant communities.</p

Transforming Culture: Christian Truth Confronts Post-Christian America

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The ambivalence of Christian-Muslim public presences in post-colonial Tanzania

In post-colonial Tanzania, efforts to govern the relations between Christianity and Islam—the country’s largest religions—have been impacted by the growing potential for conflict between and among diverse strands of the two faiths from the mid-1990s onward. They have also been shaped by the highly unequal relations between various Christian and Muslim actors and the Tanzanian government in the context of globalization. This article describes how the governance of religious multiplicity in Tanzania has affected the domains of transnational development, the registration of new religious bodies, and the regulation of religious instruction in schools. It argues that a comprehensive understanding of ‘lived religion’ needs to focus on the way in which religious multiplicities are molded as socio-cultural realities through a wide range of governing interventions

Transforming Culture: Christian Truth Confronts Post-Christian America

Automatically harvested by the SBTS Archives on 2010-10-0

Local Culture and Early Parenting in China

With the increase of Chinese Christians born in the "post-70s" and "post-80s" generations, the issue of early childhood education in Christian families deserves attention from an academic standpoint in these days. This study aims to interpret the meaning of Christian families' childrearing experiences within the social and cultural contexts of China. It explores the educational philosophy of Chinese Christian families and examines how it influenced their childrearing activities through the detailed descriptions of Chinese Christian mothers' childrearing experiences. Christian fathers are more involved in education than non-Christian. The parents act with the dual cultural orientation of "Sincization" and "Christianization"

Preaching Christian doctrine in a post-Christian society

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1240/thumbnail.jp