Welfare benchmarking and herd health plans on organic dairy farms (OF0343)

Introduction In response to the recommendations of recent studies on the health and welfare of dairy cattle (Whay et al. 2003) and to assist farmers to meet legislative requirements, promoting farm animal welfare and meeting consumer demand, this study investigated, by means of farmer interviews, the effectiveness of herd health and welfare assessment and benchmarking as a farm management tool. The aims of the study were to • offer support to the organic farming sector and provide detail relevant to all dairy farms utilising herd health plans; • provide information to both organic dairy farmers and their veterinary advisors on the most important elements of herd health plans and the benefits of their effective implementation; and • identify the benefits and constraints to the use and adoption of comparative animal health and welfare assessment as a herd health management tool. From this information, recommendations for practical application and future research would be developed. Other DEFRA funded projects would benefit from findings relevant to their objectives, the development of herd health planning and improvement of farm animal welfare. Objectives As part of a larger study with an objective to carry out health and welfare assessment and benchmarking on organic dairy farms in order to assist farmers and their advisors to identify strengths and weaknesses in herd health and welfare performance, the objectives of this study were to • use qualitative research interviews to a. evaluate farmer responses to the welfare assessment and benchmarking, b. assess the impact and evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention in delivering animal health and welfare improvements and c. as a tool to develop herd health plans for organic systems; • ensure that the results are effectively disseminated to farmers, veterinarians and advisors. Background Benchmarking of production performance has been actively used by many farmers to compare their achievements with those of others and to target areas for improvement with the aim of increasing financial returns from dairy, beef, sheep and other farm enterprises. A protocol to apply this benchmarking concept to farm animal health and welfare has been developed using animal based observations. By observing the animals it becomes possible to compare production systems with different resource provisions, such as quality of flooring, amount of trough space and stocking density, and management approaches. This approach facilitates the identification of strengths and weaknesses in the different management systems assessed and through comparison with others, can demonstrate what it is possible to achieve and where improvements might be made. Qualitative research interviews enable the researcher to gather insights on the interviewee’s perception and opinion. They allow the beliefs and concerns of interviewees to be explored and enable the consistency and weight of the story told to be evaluated. This technique has been used in a range of subject areas including in a farm animal welfare context. However this method for collection of information provides a descriptive account based upon the observations and interpretation of the interview material by the researcher, rather than attempting to quantify opinion or experience. It cannot be used to provide statistically valid numerical data. Summary of assessment and benchmarking process a) Phase 1 During winter 2002 to 2003, 15 organic dairy farms in SW England took part in a herd health and welfare assessment and benchmarking project. The response to the benchmarking process was evaluated by qualitative research interviews. Farmers had implemented changes and requested that there should be a repeat assessment to identify any effect of the changes on cow welfare on their farms. b) Phase 2 In response to this farmer request, fourteen of the fifteen organic dairy farms which had participated in Phase 1 were recruited to Phase 2 of a herd health and welfare assessment and benchmarking study in September 2003. The sample size was increased by the recruitment of a further fourteen new farms following the award of additional funding for the study. On-farm health and welfare assessment and benchmarking of the 28 organic dairy herds was carried out during winter housing period 2003 to 2004. Methodology Semi-structured qualitative research interviews were used to obtain farmer feedback on their participation in comparative assessment of herd health and welfare. Interviews were conducted with all participating farmers between August and November 2004, on a one to one basis on farm either in the house or in the farm office, by the same interviewer. The interviews were recorded onto mini-discs then transcribed in full. Data were analysed using a ‘Grounded Theory’ approach in which common themes across interviews were identified. Results The average length of the research interviews was one hour and fifteen minutes (range thirty minutes to two hours and thirty minutes). Five common and inter-related themes were identified from the farmer interviews: 1. Sensitivities and misgivings Some participants admitted to experiencing feelings of exposure and vulnerability as a result of allowing such a process to be carried out on their herds. Others experienced feelings of shock, failure and disappointment as a result of the assessment outcome. There was considerable concern about the potential for mis-interpretation and mis-use of the results by others outside farming and research circles, particularly if taken out of context and without clear explanation and understanding of the assessment process. Some expressed concerns that that the findings from the assessment and benchmarking might be used in the development of new legislation or that the process might become a requirement of farm quality assurance schemes. 2. Acceptability of scoring methodology and indicators assessed On the whole, the measures used for the assessment were considered to be relevant to herd health and welfare. Farmers were critical of the way in which scores were applied and questioned the relevance, at low/mild levels, of indicators assessed to animal health and welfare. This was particularly true of some scores for mild degrees of dirtiness, lameness and injuries from the environment where the assessment was considered to have been marked ‘severely’, ‘overly critically’ or ‘harshly’. Some were particularly distressed that their efforts to keep their animals clean had apparently failed and were at a loss as to what steps could be taken to improve the situation further. Whilst farmers acknowledged that lameness was a major herd health problem, their initial reactions were of shock and disbelief at the percentage of their cows that were classified as lame on the day of the assessment. Some were of the opinion that if detection of very mild lameness was so difficult, the measure at such a mild level was impractical and had no relevance to day to day management of herd health and welfare. Others considered that where detection and investigation of very mild cases of lameness was possible, it might have some value as a management tool in preventing more serious problems from developing. Injury to hocks, ranging in severity from slight rubbing of the hair to swelling and ulceration was a main focus of farmers’ attention. Although scores given were again at three levels of severity, interestingly there was greater acceptance of the significance of mild levels of incidence of hock injury. Furthermore, the links between hock damage, aspects of the housing environment and lameness were clearly recognised. It was suggested that the assessment should include all dairy animals, from calves, rearing and in calf heifers, dry and milking cows, to bulls. Respondents also considered that the addition of medicine use, fertility and calving indices and mastitis management to the assessment and benchmarking would add value to the process. 3. Raised awareness and motivation to improve Farmers commented that participation in the assessment, had raised their awareness about their animals’ health and welfare and of factors that might affect animal health and welfare within their individual farming systems. Most participants had been keen to affect improvements and had changed at least one element of their system with the aim of better health and welfare for the herd. The main foci for change were the causes of lameness, dirtyness, injuries from the environment mainly involving damage to hocks and necks and condition scoring. There was strong agreement amongst participants that the health and welfare of the cows and financial considerations were the main drivers for change on the farm. Most were of the opinion that the two were inextricably linked in that the health and welfare status of the cows would directly affect performance and therefore financial returns. Constraints to improving animal welfare on farm were largely related to housing issues and lack of finance to implement change in both old cubicle housing and in new and refurbished systems, representing considerable and often recent investment. 4. Veterinary support and herd health planning It was clear that some participants had a very good working relationship with their veterinary advisors. A number of these farms had actively sought out a new veterinary advisor in order to improve the quality of veterinary support for their organic system. Others reported that they were dissatisfied with the service they had received from their veterinary practices and had become reluctant to involve their veterinarians in routine aspects of herd health and welfare management. The degree to which Herd Health Plans had been developed as a useful management tool was clearly linked to the level of interest and quality of veterinary support available to the farmer. 5. Value of assessment and benchmarking With regard to benchmarking, the main focus of attention was on the identification of particular strengths and weaknesses and how improvements to weaker elements might be affected within individual farming systems. Keen to improve their own situation year on year, farmers were interested to learn if management or structural changes they had introduced translated into improvements to herd health and welfare and lead to improved performance within the benchmarking league table. Nevertheless, a number of participants suggested that breed, calving pattern, herd size, housing and other system differences made benchmarking between farms less useful than it might at first appear. Instead they considered that year on year within farm comparison was the more useful measure to determine where progress had been made. Implicit in these comments was the desire to participate in further on-farm health and welfare assessment and to continue the process of improvement into the future. Although farmers suggested a range of timescales from six months to five years, within which repeat assessments should occur, most considered that the interval should be greater than one year. Most considered that the ideal assessor would be a veterinarian with a farm and cattle background. Others thought that whilst a veterinary qualification was probably not essential, the assessor should have a clear understanding of farm animal health and welfare. Farmers voiced concerns over inter-observer reliability. Of utmost concern was that continuity and the validity of any comparison between farms and between years might be lost if more than one person carried out the assessments for a particular group of farms. Recommendations 1. It is recommended that the provision of clear explanation and support is built into all future development and implementation of on-farm welfare assessments to ensure that individuals and groups of farmers fully understand the process in which they participate. 2. It is recommended that • a system of acceptable tolerance levels of welfare indicators is developed in conjunction with a scoring system that applies positive scores to the assessment procedure which takes into account the difficulties of practical application on farm and establishes realistic and achievable goals in welfare improvement. • assessment protocols should only include indicators proven by sound scientific evidence to be appropriate to the goal of improved farm animal health and welfare. 3. There is a requirement for the development of an assessment protocol for calves in order that a complete picture of dairy herd health and welfare can be produced. 4. It is recommended that the need for investigation and clarification of which changes are likely to improve animal welfare and the timescale within which improvements can be expected to occur within farming systems is addressed before widespread implementation of farm animal health and welfare assessment is introduced. 5. It is strongly recommended that an animal welfare payment scheme is introduced to • assist in making improvements in animal welfare • act as an incentive and reward the achievement of improved welfare status, whilst at the same time, • ease the financial burden for farmers. This should be linked to the updating and redevelopment of farm buildings where such action is justified on animal health and welfare grounds. 6. To address this shortfall veterinary training should be expanded to include organic farming principles, preventative and reduced medicine use and homeopathy. 7. It is recommended that in order that such problematic issues are identified, the formation of assessment groups of farms should be supported and encouraged. It is further recommended that areas where difficulties in affecting welfare improvement are experienced should be targeted for further research. 8. A system of training and accreditation of assessors that includes regular monitoring of performance and updating of skills should be developed as an integral part of farm animal health and welfare assessment. 9. A system of training and accreditation of assessors that includes regular monitoring of performance and updating of skills should be developed as an integral part of farm animal health and welfare assessment. It is recommended that the evaluation of the consistency and reliability of welfare assessment over time, and the impacts of potential errors on farming businesses should be made the focus of future research. 10. What is now required is to develop simpler yet robust approaches that enable farmer perception and opinion to be included as key elements in future herd health and welfare endeavours. Clarity of purpose would appear to be an imperative. A starting point may be to examine the approach taken by other disciplines, such as human medicine and environmental management

Archaeological Investigations at the Edwards Creek Site (41FT549) in the Trinity River Basin, Freestone County, Texas

The Edwards Creek site (41Ff549) was found during the course of a 2005 archaeological survey of a proposed small lake project in the adjoining Indian Creek stream valley in southeastern Freestone County, Texas. The site was identified while reconnoitering the general project area, and at that time a darkly stained midden area was noted on the surface here, with animal bones and other artifacts visible across it. With the permission of the landowner, we returned to the Edwards Creek site to investigate the site and its midden deposits

On the Change in Archivability of Websites Over Time

As web technologies evolve, web archivists work to keep up so that our digital history is preserved. Recent advances in web technologies have introduced client-side executed scripts that load data without a referential identifier or that require user interaction (e.g., content loading when the page has scrolled). These advances have made automating methods for capturing web pages more difficult. Because of the evolving schemes of publishing web pages along with the progressive capability of web preservation tools, the archivability of pages on the web has varied over time. In this paper we show that the archivability of a web page can be deduced from the type of page being archived, which aligns with that page's accessibility in respect to dynamic content. We show concrete examples of when these technologies were introduced by referencing mementos of pages that have persisted through a long evolution of available technologies. Identifying these reasons for the inability of these web pages to be archived in the past in respect to accessibility serves as a guide for ensuring that content that has longevity is published using good practice methods that make it available for preservation.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2013, Valletta, Malt

Assessing the Effectiveness of Schools to Safeguard Their Pupil’s Use of Social Media Through an Analysis of School Inspection Reports

While social media remains a facet of life that many children and young people happily engage in, its use comes with some recognised risks and dangers. Parents can feel ill-equipped to support their children with this and there is consequently a reliance on schools to teach children how to use these platforms appropriately. To evaluate the effectiveness of secondary schools in teaching pupils about social media, this study makes use of evidence from Ofsted school inspection reports. Exploiting techniques developed in computer science, the Ofsted web portal was automatically scraped for reports and the content searched for reference to social media. This identified 317 reports which referred to the platforms. The report’s texts were coded through content analysis and subsequently revealed that over 90% of the references to social media contained in inspection reports were positive in reporting that pupils both understood the risks and knew how to describe how to manage their online activities. The results suggest that schools are effective in addressing these safeguarding issues although pupils are not always putting their knowledge into practise

Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office

In this paper we explore the notion of creating personally evocative collections of content from publicly available material. Compared to the personal media that we look at, reminisce over, or personalise our offices with, public media offers the potential for a different type of nostalgia, signifiers of an era such as entertainment, products, or fashions. We focus on an office environment, where the use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over protecting privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity, while keeping the existing benefits of office personalisation in terms of reminiscence, improving mood, and developing identity. After preliminary explorations of content and form, we developed a two-screen ambient display that cycled through 500 images automatically retrieved based on four simple user questions. We ran a two-week trial of the display with six users. We present qualitative results of the trial from which we see that it is possible to bring the delight associated with personal content into the workplace, while being mindful of issues of appropriateness and privacy. Images of locations from childhood were particularly evocative for all participants, while simple objects such as stickers, music, or boardgames were more varied across participants. We discuss a number of avenues for future work in the workplace and beyond: improving the chance of an evocative moment, capturing the mundane, and the crowdsourcing of nostalgia

Dynamic Restaurants Quality Mapping Using Online User Reviews

Millions of users post comments to TripAdvisor daily, together with a numeric evaluation of their experience using a rating scale of between 1 and 5 stars. At the same time, inspectors dispatched by national and local authorities visit restaurant premises regularly to audit hygiene standards, safe food practices, and overall cleanliness. The purpose of our study is to analyze the use of online-generated reviews (OGRs) as a tool to complement official restaurant inspection procedures. Our case study-based approach, with the help of a Python-based scraping library, consists of collecting OGR data from TripAdvisor and comparing them to extant restaurants’ health inspection reports. Our findings reveal that a correlation does exist between OGRs and national health system scorings. In other words, OGRs were found to provide valid indicators of restaurant quality based on inspection ratings and can thus contribute to the prevention of foodborne illness among citizens in real time. The originality of the paper resides in the use of big data and social network data as a an easily accessible, zero-cost, and complementary tool in disease prevention systems. Incorporated in restaurant management dashboards, it will aid in determining what action plans are necessary to improve quality and customer experience on the premises

PandeMedia: an annotated corpus of digital media for issue salience

Tese de mestrado, Ciência de Dados, 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasThe ubiquitous sharing of information via the Internet has shifted much of society’s communication and information-seeking to digital spaces, such as news websites and social networks. As the Web represents a massive hub of information dissemination and discussion, it has also made possible the extraction of great amounts of highly detailed data to answer complex questions on human behaviour and preferences. This shift towards online life was exaggerated during the earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many countries were in lockdown and in-person contact was severely limited. Therefore, in addition to the ongoing political, economic, and public health crisis, there were, on the one hand, new opportunities to study human behaviour thought digital data, including support for public health measures or trust in science, while, on the other hand, the deluge of new data and the fast-changing nature of the pandemic created new challenges to data science research, particularly the need to build quality pipelines for data extraction, collection, and future analysis. In this thesis, we focus on the important issue of salience of science and scientists during a health crisis and ask how to build a pipeline to select, store, extract and analyse longitudinal digital media data, that might allow for long-term study of media effects on salience. Therefore, this project has two main components: first, we showcase a data pipeline that makes use of media and social media data, available online, to build a media corpus of news and tweets with millions of documents, spanning billions of tokens, corresponding to more than two years of coverage and multiple media sources and topics; second, we show how this corpus can be leveraged to study the problem of salience, and use the visibility of science during the earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic as a case-study, comparing between salience in traditional versus social media. Overall, we present both a transparent and scaleable pipeline and a specific application of this approach, to tackle the question of how science visibility changed during this massive crisis. We use different media types and sources to potentiate text mining and other analytical purposes, offering a digital data-centric computational methodology to investigate questions in the social sciences.Os dados tomam, nos dias de hoje, um papel central no funcionamento das sociedades humanas. Com o desenvolvimento das tecnologias digitais, aliadas à ubíqua conetividade à Internet, em particular à World Wide Web (WWW), vivemos na chamada “era da informação” . Este paradigma da sociedade alicerça-se no fenómeno tipicamente referido como datafication, que se refere ao processo já enraizado e inerente à vida quotidiana através do qual a nossa atividade humana e formas de participação na sociedade são convertidas em dados. Esta produção em larga escala e em tempo real de dados funciona como o combustível para um amplo leque de aplicações nos mais variados domínios, desde a indústria, à investigação científica, à saúde, entre outros. Deste modo, testemunhamos uma crescente procura, e mesmo necessidade, de grandes coleções de dados, para alimentarem os diferentes setores de atividade. A Web representa talvez o maior volume de dados amplamente disponível ao público em geral. É nos websites e nas aplicações online que uma grande parte da população realiza diariamente um conjunto de tarefas e ações, sejam estas de caráter profissional ou lúdico. Os nossos hábitos de consumo de informação são assegurados predominantemente por estes espaços digitais, como as redes sociais ou as plataformas digitais de media tradicionais. Da mesma forma, as nossas interações sociais mediadas por dispositivos digitais são cada vez mais frequentes. A Web é, portanto, um reservatório de potenciais descobertas e de informação valiosa, que pode ser eventualmente extraída através da exploração dos dados que contém. Pela sua própria natureza, a Web levanta grandes desafios relativos às formas de capturar este valor presente nos dados digitais. Enormes volumes de dados podem ser rapidamente e facilmente identificados e extraídos. No entanto, não existe um processo de acréscimo de valor a estes dados sem que passem primeiramente por uma fase de organização. Para que seja possível extrair conhecimento dos dados obtidos, é necessário que estes apresentam a devida organização e qualidade. As maiores dificuldades nas metodologias de colheita e gestão de dados digitais passam por assegurar precisamente esta qualidade. Os dados da Web são naturalmente muito heterogéneos, visto resultarem da convergência de imensas fontes de informação. São também, na sua maioria, não estruturados, nomeadamente em formatos textuais que precisam de ser interpretados computacionalmente e compartimentalizados para facilitar futura análise. Muitas vezes, existem também dados em falta ou que apresentam uma qualidade tão baixa que são inviáveis para as finalidades em mente. Para além destes fatores intrínsecos aos dados em si, as questões que os rodeiam são também cruciais a considerar: a capacidade de detetar e localizar os dados pretendidos, a capacidade de aceder a estes dados, e o grau de disponibilidade destes dados, quando acessíveis. Deve também ter-se em consideração as questões éticas, de privacidade e de direitos de autor associadas aos dados passíveis de serem colecionados. ... automatizar processos de colheita para fontes e tipos de dados tão diversos quanto aqueles que se encontram disponíveis na Web. A pandemia causada pelo SARS-CoV-2, agente da COVID-19, representa uma crise de enormes proporções nas esferas política, económica e de saúde pública. Com a população do mundo restrita nos seus comportamentos e hábitos de modo a prevenir um agravamento da propagação do vírus, as pessoas recorreram ao digital como meio de comunicação e de obtenção e disseminação de informação (e desinformação). Assim, os media e as redes sociais foram relevantes pontos de convergência de uma grande parte da atenção do público, levantando questões importantes sobre a perceção pública dos especialistas científicos e sobre a saliência de certos tópicos de discussão. Num contexto mais alargado, podemos perspetivar a crise pandémica como um desafio no domínio das tecnologias da informação. No desenvolver desta emergência de saúde pública, temos vindo a ser confrontados com vários dos desafios presentes em data science: dados complexos, na escala de populações inteiras, a serem produzidos em tempo real por múltiplas fontes, com diferentes estruturas e formatos, e que sofrem uma rápida desatualização, requerem rápida análise, mas também processos de limpeza e melhoramento robustos. Todos estes fatores nos levam à nossa questão principal: numa crise que evolui tão rapidamente como a pandemia da COVID-19, como podemos construir uma pipeline que nos permita responder aos desafios da coleção e gestão de dados, de modo a criar um dataset de media digital para análise? Para extrair os dados necessários, recorremos a três fontes distintas: a plataforma open-source Media Cloud, a base de dados Internet Archive, e o API da rede social Twitter. Começámos por definir dezoito tópicos distintos, constituídos por palavras-chaves para uso na pesquisa pelos artigos e posts de media. Alguns tópicos são relacionados com a pandemia, enquanto outros funcionam como potenciais controlos positivos e negativos. A coesão semântica de cada tópico foi assegurada através do uso da base de dados léxica WordNet, que fornece significados e relações de palavras. Os metadados inicialmente obtidos foram processados e utilizados para identificar as fontes primárias dos dados de notícias. A partir de Web scraping, obtivemos dados brutos de artigos de media dos Estados Unidos da América disponíveis online, de Janeiro de 2019 a Janeiro de 2021 (inclusive). Estes foram subsequentemente transformados, passando por um processo de filtragem, limpeza e formatação, que é acompanhado de uma análise exploratória dos dados e visualização de dados para efeitos de diagnóstico do processo completo. Os dados da rede social foram extraídos através de um API próprio, especificando parâmetros para restringir resultados aos Estados Unidos e ao intervalo de tempo anteriormente definido. Os dados devidamente tratados foram posteriormente armazenados na base de dados desenhada e contruída para o propósito. A base de dados foi concebida com quatro tabelas, que incluem os dados de notícias, os dados da rede social Twitter, os metadados das pesquisas originais e metadados sobre as fontes das notícias, e feita através do sistema de gestão de bases de dados PostgreSQL. Para otimizar o desempenho das pesquisas no nosso conjunto de dados, procedemos à construção de índices para campos específicos, nomeadamente campos de texto, que são o nosso interesse principal. Utilizando as funcionalidades disponíveis, foram construídas representações vetoriais do texto das notícias, e a partir destas foi contruído um índice apropriado para pesquisa em dados textuais, que reduziu o tempo de pesquisa por um fator nas dezenas de milhares de vezes. Demonstramos ainda a pesquisa preliminar de dados longitudinais para efeitos de estudo da saliência de diferentes tópicos nos meios de comunicação. Foram aplicadas diferentes metodologias estatísticas de análise de séries temporais para responder às questões a abordar. Através do uso de médias móveis, os sinais foram clarificados para melhor visualização. Os testes de estacionaridade serviram de diagnóstico para as transformações a aplicar aos dados de modo a garantir a validade de análises posteriores. Com testes de causalidade de Granger, foi possível estabelecer relações entre séries temporais com base no poder preditivo e assim compreender a dinâmica de interação de diferentes media. Com recurso a técnicas de deteção de pontos de quebra, conseguimos defender a ideia de que existiram períodos de mudança dos padrões observados nos media que coincidem com o despoletar da crise pandémica. Assim, potenciada por uma pipeline customizada, robusta e transparente, conseguimos gerar um corpus de media, contendo milhões de documentos, que albergam milhares de milhões de tokens, correspondendo a um período de tempo superior a dois anos e múltiplas fontes de notícias e tópicos, permitindo assim potenciar finalidades de mineração de texto (text mining) e outros propósitos analíticos, oferecendo uma metodologia computacional centrada nos dados digitais para investigar este tipo de questões nas ciências sociais

An Automated Grading and Feedback System for a Computer Literacy Course

Computer Science departments typically offer a computer literacy course that targets a general lay audience. At Appalachian State University, this course is CS1410 - Introduction to Computer Applications. computer literacy courses have students work with various desktop and web-based software applications, including standard office applications. CS1410 strives to have students use well known applications in new and challenging ways, as well as exposing them to some unfamiliar applications. These courses can draw large enrollments which impacts efficient and consistent grading. This thesis describes the development and successful deployment of the Automated Grading And Feedback (AGAF) system for CS1410. Specifically, a suite of automated grading tools targeting the different types of CS1410 assignments has been built. The AGAF system tools have been used on actual CS1410 submissions and the resulting grades were verified. AGAF tools exist for Microsoft Office assignments requiring students to upload a submission file. Another AGAF tool accepts a student “online text submission” where the text encodes the URL of a Survey Monkey survey and a blog. Other CS1410 assignments require students to upload an image file. AGAF can process images in multiple ways, including decoding of a QR two-dimensional barcode and identification of an expected image pattern