Saturday Creek

https://issuu.com/burwellm/docs/cirque_14_-_fullYe

Rising

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Leaving Egypt

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Care Package for Eva

Originally published in Cirque https://issuu.com/burwellm/docs/cirque_14_-_fullYe

Samantha's Births

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Analysis of Veterinary Drug Residues in Imported and Domestic Crawfish Using Liquid Chromatography—Mass Spectrometry

Aquaculture production has greatly increased over the past few decades, and will continue to grow as the world fisheries become overfished and demand for seafood increases. With increased production comes more intense cultivation methods and heavy use of formulated feeds that may contain veterinary drug residues. Currently no antibiotics are allowed in the U.S. for crawfish aquaculture; yet, detectable levels of various antibiotics have been found in imported seafood samples.The FDA is responsible for testing aquaculture products entering the United States, but only has the capabilities to test a minimal amount of those imports. Additionally, for crawfish there is only one published FDA method to test for chloramphenicol, and they have yet to publish a method to test for multiple veterinary drug residues. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop a method that could test various antibiotics in commercially available frozen crawfish, and use that method to test imported and domestic crawfish. Crawfish were obtained from the Aquaculture Research Station at Louisiana State University, and were used as blank crawfish to validate a method to test for chloramphenicol, florfenicol, enrofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, and sarafloxacin using liquid chromatography—mass spectrometry. In short, the tissue was extracted with dilute acetic acid and acetonitrile with added sodium chloride. After centrifugation, the extract was evaporated to dryness with nitrogen and reconstituted in mobile phase. The extract was passed through a syringe and 0.2μm PVDF membrane filter into an auto-sampler vial. A Waters Acquity TQD LC/MS/MS operated in the positive and negative ion mode; ciprofloxacin, enrofloxacin, and sarafloxacin in positive ion mode, and florfenicol and chloramphenicol in negative ion mode. Results indicated acceptable method performance characteristics for selectivity, linearity, accuracy (recovery), precision (RSD), and MDL and LOQ. Though ciprofloxacin did show some of the lowest recoveries, and chloramphenicol did have quite high RSD values. Retail samples tested negative for most of the veterinary drug residues with the exception of chloramphenicol in one Louisiana brand at an average concentration of 0.91 ng/g, and in a Chinese brand at an average concentration of 0.52 ng/g

Exploring the Capability of LLMs in Performing Low-Level Visual Analytic Tasks on SVG Data Visualizations

Data visualizations help extract insights from datasets, but reaching these insights requires decomposing high level goals into low-level analytic tasks that can be complex due to varying degrees of data literacy and visualization experience. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for lowering barriers for users to achieve tasks such as writing code and may likewise facilitate visualization insight. Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a text-based image format common in data visualizations, matches well with the text sequence processing of transformer-based LLMs. In this paper, we explore the capability of LLMs to perform 10 low-level visual analytic tasks defined by Amar, Eagan, and Stasko directly on SVG-based visualizations. Using zero-shot prompts, we instruct the models to provide responses or modify the SVG code based on given visualizations. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can effectively modify existing SVG visualizations for some tasks like Cluster but perform poorly on tasks requiring mathematical operations like Compute Derived Value. We also discovered that LLM performance can vary based on factors such as the number of data points, the presence of value labels, and the chart type. Our findings contribute to gauging the general capabilities of LLMs and highlight the need for further exploration and development to fully harness their potential in supporting visual analytic tasks

Treatment strategies for sheep scab:an economic model of farmer behaviour

Ovine psoroptic mange (sheep scab) is a debilitating and damaging condition caused by a hypersensitivity reaction to the faecal material of the parasitic mite Psoroptes ovis. Farmers incur costs from the use of prophylactic acaricides and, if their sheep become infected, they incur the costs of therapeutic treatment plus the economic loss from reduced stock growth, lower reproductive rate, wool loss and hide damage. The unwillingness of farmers to use routine prophylactic treatment has been cited as a primary cause of the growing incidence of sheep scab in the United Kingdom (UK) since the disease was deregulated in 1992. However, if farmers behave rationally from an economic perspective, the optimum strategy that they should adopt will depend on the risk of infection and the relative costs of prophylactic versus therapeutic treatment, plus potential losses. This calculation is also complicated by the fact that the risk of infection is increased if neighbours have scab and reduced if neighbours treat prophylactically. Hence, for any farmer, the risk of infection and optimum approach to treatment is also contingent on the behaviour of neighbours, particularly when common grazing is used. Here, the relative economic costs of different prophylactic treatment strategies are calculated for upland and lowland farmers and a game theory model is used to evaluate the relative costs for a farmer and his/her neighbour under different risk scenarios. The analysis shows that prophylaxis with organophosphate (OP) dipping is a cost effective strategy, but only for upland farmers where the risk of infection is high. In all other circumstances prophylaxis is not cost effective relative to reliance on reactive (therapeutic) treatment. Hence, farmers adopting a reactive treatment policy only, are behaving in an economically rational manner. Prophylaxis and cooperation only become economically rational if the risk of scab infection is considerably higher than the current national average, or the cost of treatment is lower. Should policy makers wish to reduce the national prevalence of scab, economic incentives such as subsidising the cost of acaricides or rigorously applied financial penalties, would be required to make prophylactic treatment economically appealing to individual farmers. However, such options incur their own infrastructure and implementation costs for central government

Sheep scab transmission:a spatially explicit dynamic metapopulation model

International audiencePsoroptic mange (sheep scab), caused by the parasitic mite, Psoroptes ovis, is an important disease of sheep worldwide. It causes chronic animal welfare issues and economic losses. Eradication of scab has proved impossible in many sheep-rearing areas and recent reports of resistance to macrocyclic lactones, a key class of parasiticide, highlight the importance of improving approaches to scab management. To allow this, the current study aimed to develop a stochastic spatial metapopulation model for sheep scab transmission which can be adapted for use in any geographical region, exhibited here using data for Great Britain. The model uses agricultural survey and sheep movement data to geo-reference farms and capture realistic movement patterns. Reported data on sheep scab outbreaks from 1973 to 1991 were used for model fitting with Sequential Monte Carlo Approximate Bayesian Computation methods. The outbreak incidence predicted by the model was from the same statistical distribution as the reported outbreak data (χ2 = 115.3, p = 1) and the spatial location of sheep scab outbreaks predicted was positively correlated with the observed outbreak data by county (τ = 0.55, p < 0.001), confirming that the model developed is able to accurately capture the number of farms infected in a year, the seasonality of scab incidence and the spatial patterns seen in the data. This model gives insight into the transmission dynamics of sheep scab and will allow the exploration of more effective control strategies