The usefulness of models and simulators for training practical bovine artificial insemination skills

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Ambivalent animal

The Ambivalent Animal project explores the interactions of animals, culture and technology. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory, each in ways that inspire the other. My creative practice centers around two projects that focus on domestic pets. These projects highlight the animal's uncertain status as they explore the overlapping ontologies of animal, human and machine. They provide concrete artifacts that engage with theoretical issues of anthropocentrism, animality and alterity. My theoretical work navigates between the fields of animal studies, art and design, media and culture studies, and philosophy. My dissertation explores animality through four real and imagined animal roles: cyborg, clone, chimera and shapeshifter. Each animal role is considered in relation to three dialectics: irreducibility and procedurality, autonomy and integration, aura and abjection. These dialectics do not seek full synthesis but instead embrace the oscillations of irresolvable debates and desires. The dialectics bring into focus issues of epistemology, ontology, corporeality and subjectivity. When the four animal roles engage the three dialectics, connected yet varied themes emerge. The cyborgian animal is simultaneously liberated and regulated, assisted and restricted, integrated and isolated. The cloned animal is an emblem of renewal and loss; she is both idealized code and material flesh and finds herself caught in the battles of nature and nurture. The chimera is both rebel and conformist; his unusual juxtapositions pioneer radical corporeal transgressions but also conform to the mechanisms of global capital. And the shapeshifter explores the thrill and anxiety of an altered phenomenology; she gains new perceptions though unstable subjectivity. These roles reveal corporeal adjustments and unfamiliar subjectivities that inspire the creative practice. Both my writing and making employ an ambivalent aesthetic--an aesthetic approach that evokes two or more incompatible sensibilities. The animal's uncertain status contributes to this aesthetic: some animals enjoy remarkable care and attention, while others are routinely exploited, abused and discarded. Ambivalence acknowledges the complexity of lived experience, philosophical and political debate, and academic inquiry. My approach recognizes the light and dark of these complex ambivalences--it privileges paradox and embraces the confusion and wonder of creative research. Rather than erase, conceal or resolve ambiguity, an ambivalent aesthetic foregrounds the limits of language and representation and highlights contradiction and irresolution.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Bolter, Jay; Committee Member: DiSalvo, Carl; Committee Member: Do, Ellen; Committee Member: Prophet, Jane; Committee Member: Thacker, Eugen

Life Sciences Program Tasks and Bibliography

This document includes information on all peer reviewed projects funded by the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, Life Sciences Division during fiscal year 1995. Additionally, this inaugural edition of the Task Book includes information for FY 1994 programs. This document will be published annually and made available to scientists in the space life sciences field both as a hard copy and as an interactive Internet web pag

Sustainable Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research

ca. 200 words; this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms. [There is ever more research on smart cities and new interdisciplinary approaches proposed on the study of smart cities. At the same time, problems pertinent to communities inhabiting rural areas are being addressed, as part of discussions in contigious fields of research, be it environmental studies, sociology, or agriculture. Even if rural areas and countryside communities have previously been a subject of concern for robust policy frameworks, such as the European Union’s Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy Arguably, the concept of ‘the village’ has been largely absent in the debate. As a result, when advances in sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT) led to the emergence of a rich body of research on smart cities, the application and usability of ICT in the context of a village has remained underdiscussed in the literature. Against this backdrop, this volume delivers on four objectives. It delineates the conceptual boundaries of the concept of ‘smart village’. It highlights in which ways ‘smart village’ is distinct from ‘smart city’. It examines in which ways smart cities research can enrich smart villages research. It sheds light on the smart village research agenda as it unfolds in European and global contexts.

Crab and cockle shells as heterogeneous catalysts in the production of biodiesel

In the present study, the waste crab and cockle shells were utilized as source of calcium oxide to transesterify palm olein into methyl esters (biodiesel). Characterization results revealed that the main component of the shells are calcium carbonate which transformed into calcium oxide upon activated above 700 °C for 2 h. Parametric studies have been investigated and optimal conditions were found to be catalyst amount, 5 wt.% and methanol/oil mass ratio, 0.5:1. The waste catalysts perform equally well as laboratory CaO, thus creating another low-cost catalyst source for producing biodiesel. Reusability results confirmed that the prepared catalyst is able to be reemployed up to five times. Statistical analysis has been performed using a Central Composite Design to evaluate the contribution and performance of the parameters on biodiesel purity

Molecular phylogeny of horseshoe crab using mitochondrial Cox1 gene as a benchmark sequence

An effort to assess the utility of 650 bp Cytochrome C oxidase subunit I (DNA barcode) gene in delineating the members horseshoe crabs (Family: xiphosura) with closely related sister taxa was made. A total of 33 sequences were extracted from National Center for Biotechnological Information (NCBI) which include horseshoe crabs, beetles, common crabs and scorpion sequences. Constructed phylogram showed beetles are closely related with horseshoe crabs than common crabs. Scorpion spp were distantly related to xiphosurans. Phylogram and observed genetic distance (GD) date were also revealed that Limulus polyphemus was closely related with Tachypleus tridentatus than with T.gigas. Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda was distantly related with L.polyphemus. The observed mean Genetic Distance (GD) value was higher in 3rd codon position in all the selected group of organisms. Among the horseshoe crabs high GC content was observed in L.polyphemus (38.32%) and lowest was observed in T.tridentatus (32.35%). We conclude that COI sequencing (barcoding) could be used in identifying and delineating evolutionary relatedness with closely related specie

Entanglements with empathy: a critical exploration of more-than-human empathy in a school of veterinary medicine

This thesis critically investigates the profession of veterinary medicine by utilising a more- than human conceptual and methodological framework. Understandings of veterinary medicine – as a science and as an art – have traditionally remained under the remit of the medical sciences and have been popularised by a unrealistic imaginary. This research offers alternative ethical narratives to this framing which trouble the profession’s enduring dualisms of science and emotion, and human and animal. It is these dualisms which work to limit the role of the animal in veterinary medicine whilst encouraging a culture of emotional resilience in the profession. Taking a school of veterinary medicine within the UK as its empirical focus, this thesis specifically explores how veterinary students learn to become ‘sensuous scientists’ as they move through the multiple sites of the vet school: the lecture theatre, the anatomy lab, the farm and the small animal hospital. The affectively-attuned, ethnographic methodology allows for ethical tensions between humans, animals and materials to be raised in the research. ‘More-than-human empathy’ emerges as a key analytic within the thesis. As a result, this research fully acknowledges the animal as an actor in their care, demonstrates how affect and emotion are formative of veterinary medicine and critically discusses the overlooked more-than-human politics inherent in veterinary practice and empathy beyond the species divide