Technical note: Rapid mineral determination in forages by X-ray fluorescence

A large portion of the cow's ration is composed of forages that can vary greatly in mineral concentrations, which may affect animal performance and health. Current methods for mineral analysis require sample destruction either through wet or dry ashing and complex analytical techniques for individual minerals. Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) is a nondestructive, multi-mineral, spectroscopy technique, which makes mineral quantification simple, direct, and affordable. The study objective was to evaluate the prediction performance of EDXRF of Na, Mg, P, S, Cl, Ca, K, Mn, Fe, Cu, and Zn concentrations in forages. Twelve certified plant samples with a wide range in mineral concentrations were used to develop calibrations, and 35 forages (18 alfalfa hays, 10 grass hays, 7 corn silages) with measured mineral concentrations, which were collected over several years from 3 proficiency programs, were used as an independent validation set. All the samples were previously dried and finely ground and were prepared by compressing them into a round dense pellet, 40 mm in diameter, using a 40-ton pneumatic laboratory press. Samples were scanned using an EDXRF instrument enhanced for lighter minerals like Na and Mg. Samples were scanned at 20 keV and at 40 KeV associated with an Al filter, for a total analysis time of approximately 6 min. Calibrations were developed with Bruker SpectraEDX (Bruker, Hamburg, Germany) software and optimized to minimize the standard error of calibration. All of the minerals had acceptable calibration performance with coefficient of determination ranging from 0.93 (P) and 0.99 (Cl, Ca, and Mn) and coefficients of variation within 5 to 14%, which are similar to the coefficients of variation of the reference analysis. The coefficients of variation for Na was an exception, with a coefficients of variation of 29%. The validation set obtained similar statistical results as that observed in calibration. The root mean square error of prediction corrected for bias was similar to the standard error of calibration, indicating that it is possible to build a robust calibrations that performed well across different type of forages by using 12 reference samples with a sufficient range in mineral concentrations that were determined accurately. A bias correction was necessary to improve prediction accuracy only for K (−0.23% dry matter) and Ca (−0.16% dry matter). Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence demonstrated the ability to be an accurate, direct, and simple technique for forage mineral analysis

Post Author/Ship: Five or More IKEA Customers in Search of an Author

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. In this article, imposters’ (or fake authors) aim is to problematize fixed concepts such as author, authoring, and authorship both in qualitative research and in organization studies—especially in relation to organizational communications that ostensibly promote and value diversity of (sexual) identity. In seeking to do so, these imposters engage with an IKEA ad and, in a process of “prospective” writing, inductively explore the absence or void of an author through a series of writing events

Working precarious careers trajectories: tracing neoliberal discourses in younger workers’ narratives

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The aim of this article is to explore how, in the context of the post Global Financial Crisis (GFC), some Italian younger workers in a specific geographical region in Italy recount their work trajectories. Drawing on narrative interviews with ten participants (aged between 24 and 30) as part of a research project carried out in the Autonomous region of Aosta Valley in Italy, the article traces discourses closely associated with neoliberalism–the discourses of the entrepreneurial self, employability and self-responsibilisation–through which subjects’ work experiences take shape. Moreover, the analysis highlights how locality, one’s personal relation with the geographical territory, makes more complex the younger people’s negotiations in crafting themselves vis-à-vis precarious employment opportunities and wider socio-economic dynamics in respect of precarious employment opportunities

Coming Out, But Into What? Problematizing Discursive Variations of Revealing the Gay Self in the Workplace

There is a substantial mainstream literature on coming out in organizations, which investigates the positive effects for gay people of being out at work, but very few contributions that challenge the discourse of coming out. Taking as its starting point Butler's famous question ‘So we are out of the closet but into what?’, this paper problematizes coming out discourses in the workplace. We report on a study in which ten men were invited to talk about their coming out in the workplace. There were three main ways through which our participants constituted themselves as gay men when they talked about coming out: by defining themselves as, and admitting to, being gay; by introducing themselves as being in a gay relationship; and by adopting legitimate subject positions such as the Other, the different one, or the normal gay. Through our analysis, discussions and conclusions, we show how participants position themselves within different discursive variations, thus revealing the multiplicity of ‘the gay self’ and highlighting how coming out repeats and supports normative systems

Conferencing otherwise: a feminist new materialist writing experiment

This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of ‘the academic conference’ and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if (Haraway, 2016) and what else (Manning, 2016). This ‘what if’ and ‘what else’ thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this paper were made possible by the vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow (Taylor, 2016) within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing

Tags, tagging, tagged, # - undisciplining organ-ization of [academic] bodies

We write as a collaborative mode of embodied writing that moves, tags, and re-sites us elsewhere, that mis/dis/aligns self-other, and permeates various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We write as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions and writing become in the doing. Different relational collective practices shared here disturb, disperse, question, undo and undermine sole authorship and consider how tags work and what tags might produce when these objects/things shape our academic lives. While engaged in tagging we also considered how tags tug, how tags shape the ways we think, feel and experience our academic lives. How are we produced by tags? What do tags produce (in/on) us and in our embodied lives?

The Doing and Undoing of the “Autistic Child”: Cutting Together and Apart Interview-based Empirical Materials

This article discusses how posthuman and new materialist theories afford us opportunities to rethink the production of the “autistic child,” drawing on a qualitative research project on parenthood in the context of childhood disability in Italy. We will put some Baradian’s key concepts (intra-action, agential cut and cutting together-apart) to work in glancing at the complexities we keep encountering when a mother, Arianna, describes her relationship with her daughter Laura. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to methodologically re-turn the production of the “autistic child,” and second, to rethink and unsettle the dichotomies that constitute some children as “disabled human beings,” abnormal, and undesirable

Conferencing Otherwise : A Feminist New Materialist Writing Experiment

This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of "the academic conference" and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This "what if" and "what else" thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing.Peer reviewe

Conferencing Otherwise: A Feminist New Materialist Writing Experiment

This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of “the academic conference” and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This “what if” and “what else” thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing.</p

Inviting the Spectral in Photos: A Poststructuralist Engagement With Visual Data in Qualitative Inquiry

In this article, we share some poststructuralist ideas for interacting and intra-acting with photos as visual data in qualitative inquiry. The discussion of photos as visual data has mostly drawn from representational perspectives. Furthermore, poststructuralist theorizing has been mostly utilized to discuss discursive data. Drawing from poststructuralist ideas, like Derrida’s discussion of the absent-presence, we offer a poststructuralist glance at photos as spectral visual data. We view such approach as liberating of visual texts and as denotative of the unfinalizability of meaning. To illustrate our point, we engage into a dual mode of narrative, of both words and images, that is photos. Following a brief overview situating the use of photos as data within a representational framework in qualitative research, we illustrate our poststructuralist glance inspired by a Derridean framework. As an epilogue, we share reflections in the form of questions aiming to challenge our narrative in this article. © The Author(s) 2022