Flexible Fencing and Watering Systems for Rotational Grazing

Creating proper and watering systems is critical for managing livestock. Not only do farmers need fencing to contain their livestock on their property, but also to ensure the livestock eat down the forage intended rather than areas that are supposed to be rested. With temporary fencing there are many options for laying out flexible fencing which will be discussed below. In many rotational grazing setups access to water is the limiting factor. There are options and considerations that can make a watering system more flexible as well. When trying to develop or improve a rotational grazing strategy being able to create flexible fencing and watering systems can provide valuable opportunities

Barn Considerations for Cash Hay Operations

A well designed and built a barn can be invaluable for cash hay operation. Barn provide opportunity to reduce losses in dry matter and help maintain quality throughout the winter. There are numerous styles of barns that hay producers can purchase or build themselves. Wood frame structures, often with metal roofs and metal sides, are fairly common. You can also build barns with a steel structure with or without metal siding on the walls. Hoop barns are another common hay storage structure - particularly common with round bale storage. All, however, provide valuable storage for hay. There are four areas of consideration for ensuring the barn style chosen will be effective on a specific hay operation: site selection, barn sizing, construction approaches, and ventilation

Environmental and energy assessment of an aviary laying-hen housing system in the Midwestern United States

The laying-hen industry in the United States has been under pressure to change or modify the conventional housing systems. Traditionally, hens have been kept in conventional cages inside environmentally-controlled buildings. These cages are stacked wire mesh enclosures with mechanized egg collection, feed and water delivery systems. Over the past decade there has been much pressure to improve the welfare of the hens by replacing conventional cages with alternative housing systems. There are a number of alternative housing options under consideration or being used. In the cage free system the birds have access to the floor, but are limited to the inside of a barn. The aviary system monitored in this study is a subset of this cage-free system where a tiered structure is used to increase space allocation to the hen while accommodating more hens (than a single level barn). The aviary system also use mechanized egg collection, feed and water delivery systems similar to traditional barns. When the studies described in this dissertation were started, information on the aviary system seemed quite valuable, but the timeliness of the data has become even more apparent over the last few years. Where some states had previously been dealing with transitions to lower stocking densities (fewer hens per unit of area) or alternative systems, there is now an agreement on the table that may bring this transition to a national level. Because the aviary system is so different from conventional housing, there are questions about the impact and performance of such a system. The most obvious difference in all alternative housing, including aviaries, is the lower stocking density. With the lower stocking density, there are many questions about the correct management of houses, especially in winter. The potential issue with ventilation for indoor air quality at the lower stocking density is the possible need for supplemental heat and its proper distribution in the house. This dissertation looks at this issue from many different angles including ventilation rate, indoor air quality, heat and moisture production of the birds, fuel usage, and the birds\u27 preference for winter temperature-ammonia combinations. With the lower stocking density there is also a concern that the labor and utilities provided on a per bird basis will be higher. Another concern with the systems is that a portion of manure from the birds is held in the house on the floor as litter. The litter on the floor impacts indoor air quality. The ammonia and dust concentrations and emissions were two of the major concerns with regard to the litter. With the aviary system, the birds have the ability to be more active. There are questions about how this activity level impacts the heat and moisture production rates of these birds. Overall, there is very little information on the aviary system in the United States. This dissertation aims to address these questions and concerns

Gypsy moths and American dog ticks: Space partners

An experiment intended for the space shuttle and designed to investigate the effects of weightlessness and total darkness on gypsy moth eggs and engorged American dog ticks is described. The objectives are: (1) to reevaluate the effects of zero gravity on the termination of diapause/hibernation of embryonated gypsy moth eggs, (2) to determine the effect of zero gravity on the ovipositions and subsequent hatch from engorged female American dog ticks that have been induced to diapause in the laboratory, and (3) to determine whether morphological or biochemical changes occur in the insects under examination. Results will be compared with those from a similar experiment conducted on Skylab 4

Cuff-less continuous blood pressure monitoring system using pulse transit time techniques

This paper describes the development of a continuous cuff-less blood pressure system based on the pulse transit time (PTT) technique. In this study, PTT is defined by two different approaches denoted as PTT1 and PTT2. PTT1 is the time difference between the R-wave peak of the Electrocardiogram (ECG) and the peak of the Photoplethysmogram (PPG). PTT2 is the time difference between two peak PPG signals on same cardiac cycle at different positions on the body. The ECG is acquired on the chest using 3 lead electrodes and a reflection mode optical sensor is deployed on brachial artery and fingertip to monitor the PPGs. These data were synchronized using a National Instruments data acquisition card along with Matlab software for subsequent analysis. A wrist-type cuff-based blood pressure device was used to measure blood pressure on the right hand. Brachial blood pressure was measured on the upper left arm using oscillometric blood pressure monitor. Experiments were conducted by elevating the right hand at different position to investigate variability of PTT under the effects of hydrostatic pressure. Next the variability of PTT due to blood pressure changes during a Valsalva maneuver was investigated. The result shows that the PTT1 is inversely proportional to blood pressure in both experiments. Meanwhile, there is weak correlation between PTT2 and blood pressure measurement which suggests that by excluding the pre-ejection period (PEP) time in PTT calculation may reduce the accuracy of PTT for blood pressure measurement. In conclusion, PTT measurement between ECG and PPG signals has potential to be a reliable technique for cuff-less blood pressure measurement

A Survey of Issues in the Recruitment, Hiring and Retention of Law Enforcement Officers: Investigating the Rural-Urban Divide

The continuing crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and issues surrounding disparate policing practices have illuminated an underlying issue facing law enforcement agencies: how to recruit, hire, and retain qualified officers. Using survey data from over 200 rural and urban agencies across three states, this article explores the various issues agencies have with recruitment and retention, paying particular attention to the apparent differences between agency type and size, as well as the extent of urbanization in the jurisdiction. The implications of and potential policy solutions to these issues are then discussed

Development of tubular cardiovascular phantom system for pulse transit time simulation

This paper presents on the development of a tubular cardiovascular phantom system to simulate pulse transit time (PTT). The PTT defined as the delay time between two pulses in one cardiac cycle has been shown to be promising method for cuffless continuous blood pressure (BP) measurement. However most of the PTT measurement was performed on human subjects, thus giving a difficulty in validating sensor performance due to variability of BP. Therefore, a cardiovascular phantom system was proposed for simulate the PTT measurement. An electronic controlled module was developed to control pump operation for pulse generation. Plastic optical fibre (POF) sensors were used to measure the pulse signal on the flexible tube and the results were compared with an in-line pressure sensor. In this experiment, the delay time between two pulses were calculated offline using Matlab software and correlated with pulse pressure. The result demonstrate that the pulse delay time recorded by both sensors decreased with increase of pulse rate and pulse pressure. These results on the phantom study showed similar pattern to the human model, thus indicating that the system is able to simulate PTT for sensor validation purposes

High-Spatial Resolution Laser Doppler Blood Flow Imaging

This paper was presented at the 4th Micro and Nano Flows Conference (MNF2014), which was held at University College, London, UK. The conference was organised by Brunel University and supported by the Italian Union of Thermofluiddynamics, IPEM, the Process Intensification Network, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Heat Transfer Society, HEXAG - the Heat Exchange Action Group, and the Energy Institute, ASME Press, LCN London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL University College London, UCL Engineering, the International NanoScience Community, www.nanopaprika.eu.A full-field laser Doppler blood flow imaging (LDI) system based on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) coupled with a high-speed CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) camera chip has been developed which provides blood flow images with flexible frame rates and spatial resolution. When a high spatial resolution is required, 1280x1024-pixel blood flow images were obtained by processing up to 2048 samples at 0.2 frames per second (fps). Alternatively, a maximum of 15.5fps was achieved by reducing the spatial resolution and sampling points to 256x256 pixels and 128 samples respectively. This system was applied to a high-spatial resolution flow imaging application in which a mixture of water and polystyrene microspheres was pumped through a micropipette (diameter = 250m) with controlled velocities, and the resulting flow was imaged and processed. The performance was demonstrated by the resulting flow images which are of size 1280×1024 pixels and obtained by processing 2048 samples at each pixel

An Evaluation of Pullet and Young Laying Hen Ammonia Aversion Using a Preference Test Chamber

This research evaluated what ammonia concentration causes pullets or young laying hens to show an aversion. Because previous studies had shown conflicting data for laying hen aversion at 25 ppm ammonia, this aversion was tested with pullets and young laying hens in the current study. The test birds used in this study had not previously experienced elevated ammonia concentrations and thus their natural aversion could be determined. The evaluation of aversion was done using a newly developed Environmental Preference Test Chamber (EPTC). The birds were monitored to determine the percentage of occupation time (POT) under a higher ammonia concentration (25 ppm) vs. a low ammonia concentration (\u3c10 ppm). The POT was measured over the total day (24 hr) as well as the lighted period only. Feed usage was also monitored as a possible indicator of aversion. Although none of the differences in POT or feed usage were significantly different, both lighted day POT and feed usage showed a trend of relationship (p= 0.13, p=0.16 respectively). This ongoing study aims to determine the birds’ aversion as part of a larger study to determine if ammonia or thermal discomfort drives preference

Exoplanetary atmosphere target selection in the era of comparative planetology

The large number of new planets expected from wide-area transit surveys means that follow-up transmission spectroscopy studies of their atmospheres will be limited by the availability of telescope assets. We argue that telescopes covering a broad range of apertures will be required, with even 1m-class instruments providing a potentially important contribution. Survey strategies that employ automated target selection will enable robust population studies. As part of such a strategy, we propose a decision metric to pair the best target to the most suitable telescope, and demonstrate its effectiveness even when only primary transit observables are available. Transmission spectroscopy target selection need not therefore be impeded by the bottle-neck of requiring prior follow-up observations to determine the planet mass. The decision metric can be easily deployed within a distributed heterogeneous network of telescopes equipped to undertake either broadband photometry or spectroscopy. We show how the metric can be used either to optimise the observing strategy for a given telescope (e.g. choice of filter) or to enable the selection of the best telescope to optimise the overall sample size. Our decision metric can also provide the basis for a selection function to help evaluate the statistical completeness of follow-up transmission spectroscopy datasets. Finally, we validate our metric by comparing its ranked set of targets against lists of planets that have had their atmospheres successfully probed, and against some existing prioritised exoplanet lists.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figures, 3 tables. Revision 3, accepted by MNRAS. Improvements include always using planetary masses where available and reliable, treatment for sky backgrounds and out-of-transit noise and a use case for defocused photometr