2004 Michigan Dairy Farm Business Analysis Summary

This report summarizes the financial and production records of 144 dairy farms from throughout Michigan. To be included, the farms must have produced at least 50 percent of gross cash farm income from milk and dairy animal sales. The farms in this report were located throughout Michigan. The records came from Michigan State University's Telfarm project, the Farm Credit Service system, or by AgriSolutions in Michigan. The values were pooled into averages for reporting purposes. The farms are larger than would be the average of all dairy farms in Michigan. While considerable variation in the data exist, average values are reported in the summary tables and discussion that follows.Livestock Production/Industries,

PROFITABILITY AND PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY OF THE CROP AND LIVESTOCK ENTERPRISES OF MICHIGAN DAIRY OPERATIONS: 1998 SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

This paper summarizes the 1998 results of the Dairy Profitability and Production Efficiency project. Among the major findings are that the average cost of production was almost exactly equal to the average milk herd revenue on a per hundredweight basis. All eight farms covered variable costs of producing milk. Five of the eight farms showed a profit when all costs of production were included. All six farms that raised their own replacement heifers lost money on the enterprise. With respect to crop production, corn and corn silage were not profitable enterprises. The hay enterprise was profitable for five of the farms.Productivity Analysis,

Lactose maldigestion - age-specific prevalence black and Indian children

A study was performed to determine the prevalence and age of onset of primary lactose maldigestion in healthy black and Indian children, and to determine whether this was of clinical significance. More black (22 of 44 - 50%) than Indian children (10 of 45 - 22,2%) had lactose maldigestion (P < 0,02), the development of which was age-related and occurred earlier in blacks than in Indians; 6 of 19 black children less than 5 years old (31,6%) were lactose maldigesters, compared with 8 of 10 (80%) over 10 years old, while only 1 of 16 Indian children aged under 8 years (6,3%) were maldigesters, compared with 5 of 13 (38,5%) aged over 10 years. Most children had a very low intake of milk and lactose maldigestion was of no clinical significance to them

The practical significance of lactose maldigestion in institutionalised black children

A study was carried out to determine the practical significance of a high prevalence of lactose maldigestion in institutionalised children whose diet included 500 ml milk daily. Thirty of 34 children at a child we"are home were found to be lactose maldigesters as judged by a 2-hour rise in breath hydrogen of 20 parts per million or more after an oral load of lactose. Breath hydrogen tests were also perf~rmed on the same group of children, before and up to 150 minutes after the routine mid-morning cup of milk. Sixteen of the 30 lactosemaldigesting children did not show Increased breath hydrogen up to 2,5 hours after milk. No children were clinically intolerant of either the lactose or the milk. In these children the degree of lactose digestion was much improved in the non-fasting' state when measured by the breath hydrogen response to milk lactose. Lactose maldigestion per se is not a contraindication to institutional feeding routines, including regular moderate milk intake

Accounting quality and debt concentration

Singapore Management Universit

Inferred changes in El Niño–Southern Oscillation variance over the past six centuries

It is vital to understand how the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has responded to past changes in natural and anthropogenic forcings, in order to better understand and predict its response to future greenhouse warming. To date, however, the instrumental record is too brief to fully characterize natural ENSO variability, while large discrepancies exist amongst paleo-proxy reconstructions of ENSO. These paleo-proxy reconstructions have typically attempted to reconstruct ENSO's temporal evolution, rather than the variance of these temporal changes. Here a new approach is developed that synthesizes the variance changes from various proxy data sets to provide a unified and updated estimate of past ENSO variance. The method is tested using surrogate data from two coupled general circulation model (CGCM) simulations. It is shown that in the presence of dating uncertainties, synthesizing variance information provides a more robust estimate of ENSO variance than synthesizing the raw data and then identifying its running variance. We also examine whether good temporal correspondence between proxy data and instrumental ENSO records implies a good representation of ENSO variance. In the climate modeling framework we show that a significant improvement in reconstructing ENSO variance changes is found when combining information from diverse ENSO-teleconnected source regions, rather than by relying on a single well-correlated location. This suggests that ENSO variance estimates derived from a single site should be viewed with caution. Finally, synthesizing existing ENSO reconstructions to arrive at a better estimate of past ENSO variance changes, we find robust evidence that the ENSO variance for any 30 yr period during the interval 1590–1880 was considerably lower than that observed during 1979–2009

ROC curve regression analysis: the use of ordinal regression models for diagnostic test assessment.

Diagnostic tests commonly are characterized by their true positive (sensitivity) and true negative (specificity) classification rates, which rely on a single decision threshold to classify a test result as positive. A more complete description of test accuracy is given by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, a graph of the false positive and true positive rates obtained as the decision threshold is varied. A generalized regression methodology, which uses a class of ordinal regression models to estimate smoothed ROC curves has been described. Data from a multi-institutional study comparing the accuracy of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging with computed tomography (CT) in detecting liver metastases, which are ideally suited for ROC regression analysis, are described. The general regression model is introduced and an estimate for the area under the ROC curve and its standard error using parameters of the ordinal regression model is given. An analysis of the liver data that highlights the utility of the methodology in parsimoniously adjusting comparisons for covariates is presented