370 research outputs found
An examination of the temperamental and ability characteristics of large animals under open-field and stress conditions
In this study an attempt was made to adapt two tests, developed for use with rats and mice, for work with the larger animals in order to assess their worth for measuring the temperamental and ability characteristics of domestic farm species.
To assess the temperamental characteristics an open-field, scaled to 72 feet by 72 feet, was used to score 30 pigs, 30 sheep and 44 cows on three criteria; ambulation, elimination and vocalisation. These scores were correlated with dairymen’s ratings of the cows and plasma cortisol levels in the sheep. It became clear that the open-field test requires further modification before it can provide meaningful results for domestic stock.
The closed-field test was used with 63 pigs, 103 sheep, and 73 cows to measure the “intelligence” of normal farm animals. Time and error scores and general behaviour were recorded and analysed, and showed characteristic species differences.
In the evaluation of scores from both tests the importance of group effects found in herd animals was considered. A relationship between the closed-field test performance, and the social status of the animals in each test group was considered. Practical problems such as; animal-experimenter interactions; adequate motivation of ruminants; the impossibility of man-handling large animals like cows, and the kind of modifications which must be made to apparatus for this type of work ,are fully discussed. Isolating herd or flock animals appears to cause stress.
The results of the closed-field test were compared with similar results from other studies where mice, rats, cats, dogs, ferrets, hens and other species have been tested in smaller versions of the closed-field. The general conclusion is that the potential for training, or utilising in other ways the ability inherent in the farm animal in New Zealand has hardly been touched. Though a number of experimenters have commented on these abilities during trials in research institutions such information has not been fully exploited in normal farm practice
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An Evaluation of the Food FARMacy Pantry Program
Objective. The purpose of this study is to describe the effects of a food pantry program on household food security, diet and health during COVID-19 in the greater New York City area and to understand the facilitators and barriers to accessing this vital safety-net program. Methods. This study employed a three-stage design to evaluate clinical-community food pantry program, known as the Food FARMacy program, implemented to address food insecurity in New York City. Through this program three community organizations recruited participants to receive 40 pounds of fresh produce, whole grains, beans, rice and protein on a bi-weekly basis. Analysis one was a cross-sectional analysis of baseline data to understand food security, diet, and health in those registering for the Food FARMacy program. Analysis two was a longitudinal pre-post analysis comparing baseline data with 6-month follow-up data to determine the effects of food pantry participation on food security, diet, and health. Analysis three was a qualitative case study with program participants to understand their experience participating in the program, including key facilitators and barriers to participating in a food pantry program during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data Analysis. For analysis one, descriptive statistics were used to report demographic, food security, diet and health characteristics upon program enrollment. X² tests and independent t-tests as well as multivariable regression models were used to examine predictors of very low food security status and food security score at enrollment. For analysis two, Wilcoxon signed rank and McNemar’s tests were used to identify changes in food security, diet, and health from baseline to six-months follow-up. Regression models were built to examine the association between attendance and food security status. For analysis three, a subset of 24 participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview format to understand their lived experience with the program and barriers and facilitators to participating.
Results. Through this program, 492 participants were enrolled from July 2020 to April 2021 and provided with fresh, healthy food and beverages on a twice monthly basis. The majority of the enrollees reported low (42.3%) or very low (45.5%) food security status. At 6-months follow-up, the percent of those reporting very low food security status improved significantly from 45.5% to 13.2% (p < .001). Further, fruit intake two or more times per day increased from 23.7 to 35.1%, and the percent of those reporting no fruit intake decreased from 36.6 to 15.4% (p < .001). Vegetable intake two or more times in the previous day also increased from 21.5 to 41.8%, with the percent of those consuming no vegetables in the previous day declining from 32.6 to 13.2% (p < .001). The percent drinking two or more SSBs in the previous day decreased from 23.1 to 9.5% (p < .001). The percent of participants reporting excellent, very good or good health increased from 52.3 to 60.0%, while the percent reporting fair or poor health decreased from 48 to 40% from baseline to six-months follow-up (p = .017). Qualitative analysis revealed that participants valued the fresh, high-quality food that they could prepare themselves and caring customer service provided through the program. Transportation and access to childcare were reported as intermittent barriers to accessing the pantry program. Overall, participants reported very positive experiences with the program and improvements were noted in food security, diet, and health from baseline to 6-months follow-up.
Conclusions. Effective and sustainable solutions are needed to curb household food insecurity. Rapid development and implementation of an emergency food pantry program through an integrated healthcare system and community organization partnership was feasible and effectively reached high-need patients and community members. Pantry programs can be an effective mechanism for addressing disparities in food access and diet among vulnerable populations
Dress, Law and Naked Truth
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why are civil authorities in so-called liberal democracies affronted by public nudity and the Islamic full-face ‘veil’? Why is law and civil order so closely associated with robes, gowns, suits, wigs and uniforms? Why is law so concerned with the ‘evident’ and the need for justice to be ‘seen’ to be done? Why do we dress and obey dress codes at all? In this, the first ever study devoted to the many deep cultural connections between dress and law, the author addresses these questions and more. His responses flow from the radical thesis that ‘law is dress and dress is law’. Engaging with sources from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Carlyle, Dickens and Damien Hirst, Professor Watt draws a revealing history of dress and civil order and offers challenging conclusions about the nature of truth and the potential for individuals to fit within the forms of civil life
Матеріали 9-го семінару з хмарних технологій в освіті (CTE 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 17 грудня 2021 року
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Cloud Technologies in Education (CTE 2021). Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, December 17, 2021.Матеріали 9-го семінару з хмарних технологій в освіті (CTE 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 17 грудня 2021 року
Risk Prediction and New Prophylaxis Strategies for Thromboembolism in Cancer
Thromboembolism is a compelling challenge in cancer care because of its life-threatening nature as well as its impact on specific treatments. Current guidelines do not generally recommend antithrombotic prophylaxis, except in selected categories of patients at high risk of thrombosis. Accordingly, several clinical decision models have been developed to guide the oncologist in thromboembolic risk assessment and targeted prophylaxis. Low-molecular-weight heparins (LMWH) are currently considered as the standard approach in clinical practice guidelines, but recent randomized controlled trials (RCT) indicate that direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) are effective for the treatment/prophylaxis of cancer-associated thromboembolism. However, many unanswered questions remain on the efficacy and safety of anticoagulants in selected cancer subgroups, and in primary and secondary prevention settings, where anticoagulation needs to be balanced on the risk of bleeding complications. Presently, patient selection remains the main challenge. Improvement in existing VTE risk models or the construction of alternative risk assessment tools are needed in order to ameliorate the risk stratification of cancer patients. This reprint will cover the current clinical evidence supporting the standard of care and emerging treatment/prophylactic options for cancer-associated thromboembolism during both active treatment and simultaneous/palliative care. Tailored approaches based on the use of individualized factors to stratify the thrombotic/bleeding risk in each individual patient are discussed
ToDD: Topological Compound Fingerprinting in Computer-Aided Drug Discovery
In computer-aided drug discovery (CADD), virtual screening (VS) is used for
identifying the drug candidates that are most likely to bind to a molecular
target in a large library of compounds. Most VS methods to date have focused on
using canonical compound representations (e.g., SMILES strings, Morgan
fingerprints) or generating alternative fingerprints of the compounds by
training progressively more complex variational autoencoders (VAEs) and graph
neural networks (GNNs). Although VAEs and GNNs led to significant improvements
in VS performance, these methods suffer from reduced performance when scaling
to large virtual compound datasets. The performance of these methods has shown
only incremental improvements in the past few years. To address this problem,
we developed a novel method using multiparameter persistence (MP) homology that
produces topological fingerprints of the compounds as multidimensional vectors.
Our primary contribution is framing the VS process as a new topology-based
graph ranking problem by partitioning a compound into chemical substructures
informed by the periodic properties of its atoms and extracting their
persistent homology features at multiple resolution levels. We show that the
margin loss fine-tuning of pretrained Triplet networks attains highly
competitive results in differentiating between compounds in the embedding space
and ranking their likelihood of becoming effective drug candidates. We further
establish theoretical guarantees for the stability properties of our proposed
MP signatures, and demonstrate that our models, enhanced by the MP signatures,
outperform state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets by a wide and highly
statistically significant margin (e.g., 93% gain for Cleves-Jain and 54% gain
for DUD-E Diverse dataset).Comment: NeurIPS, 2022 (36th Conference on Neural Information Processing
Systems
And what if two musical versions don't share melody, harmony, rhythm, or lyrics ?
Version identification (VI) has seen substantial progress over the past few
years. On the one hand, the introduction of the metric learning paradigm has
favored the emergence of scalable yet accurate VI systems. On the other hand,
using features focusing on specific aspects of musical pieces, such as melody,
harmony, or lyrics, yielded interpretable and promising performances. In this
work, we build upon these recent advances and propose a metric learning-based
system systematically leveraging four dimensions commonly admitted to convey
musical similarity between versions: melodic line, harmonic structure, rhythmic
patterns, and lyrics. We describe our deliberately simple model architecture,
and we show in particular that an approximated representation of the lyrics is
an efficient proxy to discriminate between versions and non-versions. We then
describe how these features complement each other and yield new
state-of-the-art performances on two publicly available datasets. We finally
suggest that a VI system using a combination of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and
lyrics features could theoretically reach the optimal performances obtainable
on these datasets
XV Міжнародна конференція з математичної, природничо-наукової та технологічної освіти (ICon-MaSTEd 2022) 18-20 травня 2022 року, м. Кривий Ріг, Україна
Матеріали XV Міжнародної конференції з математичної, природничо-наукової та технологічної освіти (ICon-MaSTEd 2022) 18-20 травня 2022 року, м. Кривий Ріг, Україна.Proceedings of the XV International Conference on Mathematics, Science and Technology Education (ICon-MaSTEd 2022) 18-20 May 2022, Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine
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