Medial-lateral loading and wear in TKA

Pre-clinical wear testing of Total Knee Arthroplasty has traditionally been carried out in a physical experiment [Fisher, 2002]. Recent computational models have been shown to have sufficient accuracy to be considered alongside these experiments [Knight, 2007]. These computational models use a relationship of wear volume proportional to the product of contact pressure, sliding distance and cross shear [Maxian, 1996]. Instrumented knees have recently shown that medial-lateral (ML) loads may be of similar magnitudes to that of the anterior-posterior (AP) load. The AP load is known to have a significant effect on the kinematics of the total knee replacement and so it is reasonable to assume that application of an ML load may have a similar degree of influence on kinematics. The effect of the ML load is hypothesised to increase the cross shear and hence the wear rate. At present, the ISO standard for testing TKA contains no provision for a ML load

Emotional Labor, Gender, and Social Interaction in Animal Care

Animal caretakers fill an important role in society - performing both hard and dirty work as they look after animals, and the overwhelming majority of nonfarm animal caretakers are women. This ethnographic study was conducted over the course of 11 weeks at an animal boarding facility. It finds that caring for animals is emotionally taxing labor, and that employees feel this type of work is particularly suited for women - though the exact reasons why vary. The animals themselves often serve as social facilitators between both staff and customers as employees navigate the stressful environment

Stocks or Stakeholders: Nonhuman Animals in Natural Resource Sociology

Human values and meanings for nonhuman animals are socially constructed. Nonhuman animals provide value through tangible means, such as food or economic value, but they also are valued for providing experiences, symbols, and ecosystem services like diversity. Nonhuman animals are afforded certain rights and considerations in modern society, but these have proved insufficient in ensuring positive outcomes for both social and ecological systems. Considering nonhuman animals as stakeholders could improve natural resource outcomes by more fully addressing transboundary and uncertainty issues

Alienation, Modernization, and Animal Welfare: Human-Animal Relationships at the Farm, State, and Country Levels

Our relationships with animals are important for us as humans, for the environment, and for the animals themselves. In this dissertation I look at the relationships between humans and animals at three scales: farm, U.S. state, and country. Specifically, I address how factors like economic growth, technological innovation, and globalization affect human relationships with animals. Understanding how these factors influence human-animal relationships is important for improving these relationships and deciding which directions will most contribute to sustainable outcomes. I address the social factors that influence human-animal relationships in three studies. In the first study I surveyed and interviewed dairy farmers in Washington. I asked them how farm size and the technologies and practices they used on their farm influenced their relationship with their work and with their cows. I then analyzed how these relationships influenced their overall life satisfaction. Farmers reported that farm size made it difficult to stay connected with their cows but that new technologies helped farmers connect in new ways with their cows while avoiding conventional negative interactions. Both relationships with work and cows were related to life satisfaction, which is important for farmers, who as a population face high levels of stress. In the second study I used data from government sources and the Humane Society of the United States to assess how economic growth influenced farm animal protection in the United States. The results of my analyses suggest that economic growth may have a positive effect on farm animal protection. This is encouraging news for policymakers hoping for win-win scenarios to improve animal welfare – though more research on direct animal welfare is needed. Lastly, in the third study I used data from Voiceless: The Animal Protection Institute and the World Bank to see how economic growth influenced farm animal cruelty on a global scale. The results suggest that economic growth reduces some types of farm animal cruelty but increases others. Trade with high-income countries may have a spillover effect with lower-income countries that reduces farm animal cruelty in those countries

The relatinship between refractive error and physical fatigue

The purpose of this study was to determine what type of refractive shift, if any, would occur as the result of enduring extreme physical fatigue. One hundred twenty-four marathon runners, and ten control subjects were measured with autorefractors before and immediately after the 26.2 mile Seattle marathon on November 27, 1993. The authors hypothesized that a significant shift in equivalent sphere toward hyperopia would occur due to the effects of dehydration, sympathetic activation, and possible loss of ciliary muscle tonus. The results indicate that there is no significant shift in refraction when compared to the controls, but individual subjects exhibited clinically relevant hyperopic or myopic shifts. Contact lens wearing subjects showed a statistically significant shift in refractive error towards myopia when compared to non-contact lens wearing subjects

Physics Opportunities with Meson Beams

Over the past two decades, meson photo- and electro-production data of unprecedented quality and quantity have been measured at electromagnetic facilities worldwide. By contrast, the meson-beam data for the same hadronic final states are mostly outdated and largely of poor quality, or even nonexistent, and thus provide inadequate input to help interpret, analyze, and exploit the full potential of the new electromagnetic data. To reap the full benefit of the high-precision electromagnetic data, new high-statistics data from measurements with meson beams, with good angle and energy coverage for a wide range of reactions, are critically needed to advance our knowledge in baryon and meson spectroscopy and other related areas of hadron physics. To address this situation, a state of-the-art meson-beam facility needs to be constructed. The present paper summarizes unresolved issues in hadron physics and outlines the vast opportunities and advances that only become possible with such a facility.Comment: 46 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

The potential of the co-operative form for farmers' markets in Ireland: Some lessons from the USA and UK

One of the most important developments in small-scale agriculture and in local food retailing in the last decade has been the emergence of a new generation of farmers’ markets in countries such as Ireland, the USA, the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Farmers’ markets are now a significant alternative source of sales, distribution and marketing for many small scale producers and a valuable source of fresh, local and specialist produce for growing numbers of consumers. This paper presents findings from the initial stages of a large-scale study which seeks to establish how farmers’ markets in Ireland can best be structured and organised to increase the competitiveness and sustainability of small farmers and to strengthen farmer influence and control in the marketplace. The research is particularly concerned with examining the potential of formal co-operative structures, which though relatively common in farmers’ markets in the US and the UK, remain largely unexplored in an Irish context. While ongoing extensive quantitative and qualitative research on all Irish farmers’ markets is the primary focus of the research, field visits to markets and key informants in the US and UK have also been conducted and completed. The findings from the latter research – and more specifically, their potential relevance to Irish farmers’ markets at their current stage of development – are the subject of this paper

Laying the foundations of international careers research

As an editorial to the special issue ‘new avenues in international careers research’ this paper discusses the roots of the international careers research stream, which sits at the intersection between career studies, HRM and international management. In order to support future studies in this emerging area of enquiry, we then attempt to lay down the foundations of a research agenda based around what we see as the three core areas of interest: contextualised careers research, comparative careers research, and careers research in internationally operating organisations. After providing some suggestions for the kinds of theoretical, methodological and research collaboration tools that will be required to build on these foundations, we introduce the five empirical papers that comprise this special issue

Wide-coverage deep statistical parsing using automatic dependency structure annotation

A number of researchers (Lin 1995; Carroll, Briscoe, and Sanfilippo 1998; Carroll et al. 2002; Clark and Hockenmaier 2002; King et al. 2003; Preiss 2003; Kaplan et al. 2004;Miyao and Tsujii 2004) have convincingly argued for the use of dependency (rather than CFG-tree) representations for parser evaluation. Preiss (2003) and Kaplan et al. (2004) conducted a number of experiments comparing “deep” hand-crafted wide-coverage with “shallow” treebank- and machine-learning based parsers at the level of dependencies, using simple and automatic methods to convert tree output generated by the shallow parsers into dependencies. In this article, we revisit the experiments in Preiss (2003) and Kaplan et al. (2004), this time using the sophisticated automatic LFG f-structure annotation methodologies of Cahill et al. (2002b, 2004) and Burke (2006), with surprising results. We compare various PCFG and history-based parsers (based on Collins, 1999; Charniak, 2000; Bikel, 2002) to find a baseline parsing system that fits best into our automatic dependency structure annotation technique. This combined system of syntactic parser and dependency structure annotation is compared to two hand-crafted, deep constraint-based parsers (Carroll and Briscoe 2002; Riezler et al. 2002). We evaluate using dependency-based gold standards (DCU 105, PARC 700, CBS 500 and dependencies for WSJ Section 22) and use the Approximate Randomization Test (Noreen 1989) to test the statistical significance of the results. Our experiments show that machine-learning-based shallow grammars augmented with sophisticated automatic dependency annotation technology outperform hand-crafted, deep, widecoverage constraint grammars. Currently our best system achieves an f-score of 82.73% against the PARC 700 Dependency Bank (King et al. 2003), a statistically significant improvement of 2.18%over the most recent results of 80.55%for the hand-crafted LFG grammar and XLE parsing system of Riezler et al. (2002), and an f-score of 80.23% against the CBS 500 Dependency Bank (Carroll, Briscoe, and Sanfilippo 1998), a statistically significant 3.66% improvement over the 76.57% achieved by the hand-crafted RASP grammar and parsing system of Carroll and Briscoe (2002)

Successfully Inter-seeding Legumes into Existing Cool-Season Pastures

This fact sheet provides research based guidance on the most effective way to inter-seed legumes into existing pasture which will create a more sustainable grazing system