Impact of Shade in Beef Feedyards on Performance, Body Temperature, and Heat Stress Measures

A study using crossbred steers was conducted at a commercial feedyard to determine the effects of pen shades on cattle performance, body temperature, and cattle activity. Two heat events (Event 1 and Event 2) and one cool event were defined for the feeding period. No significant differences were observed for average daily gain, dry matter intake, feed to gain, or carcass characteristics at the end of the trial. During Event 1, cattle in pens with shade had lower panting scores than cattle in open pens. During Event 2, cattle in shade pens had greater dry matter intake, lower panting scores, and lower ear temperature. Throughout the entire feeding period, cattle in open pens had greater ear temperature and panting scores than cattle in shaded pens while movement was not different between treatments. Using shades for feedyard cattle did not impact performance, but did improve some measures of heat stress

Educating law students for rural and regional legal practice: embedding place consciousness in law curricula

As with other professions, the declining rates of recruitment and retention of lawyers in rural and regional Australia is of significant concern. Whilst the causes of this vary between communities, common depictions of the rural and regional lawyer’s role indicate that employment as a lawyer in such areas is characterised by unique personal and professional challenges. Nonetheless, employment as a rural and regional lawyer also offers practitioners rewarding opportunities and lifestyle benefits. Research from other disciplines indicates that the challenges inherent in rural and regional professional practice may be alleviated, and benefits more easily harnessed, via place conscious discipline-specific curriculum that sensitises tertiary students to, and prepares them for, the rural and regional career context.Largely oriented towards substantive content to satisfy external accrediting bodies, undergraduate legal education does not typically acknowledge the ‘places’in which graduates will practice as professionals. This article argues however that there is scope to incorporate place within legal education, and documents an innovative curriculum development project which embeds place consciousness to better prepare law students for employment in rural and regional legal practice.Drawing upon methods from other disciplines, the project team designed a curriculum package which aims to sensitise students to the rural and regional legal practice context, and equip them with the skills to overcome challenges and take advantage of the opportunities available in a rural or regional professional career

Soft-tissue coverage for wound complications following total elbow arthroplasty

Background In patients with total elbow arthroplasty (TEA), the soft-tissue around the elbow can be vulnerable to soft-tissue complications. This study aims to assess the outcomes after soft-tissue reconstruction following TEA. Methods We retrospectively included nine adult patients who underwent soft-tissue reconstruction following TEA. Demographic data and disease characteristics were collected through medical chart reviews. Additionally, we contacted all four patients that were alive at the time of the study by phone to assess any current elbow complications. Local tissue rearrangement was used for soft-tissue reconstruction in six patients, and a pedicle flap was used in three patients. The median follow-up period was 1.3 years (range, 6 months–14.7 years). Results Seven patients (78%) underwent reoperation. Four patients (44%) had a reoperation for soft-tissue complications, including dehiscence or nonhealing of infected wounds. Five patients (56%) had a reoperation for implant-related complications, including three infections and two peri-prosthetic fractures. At the final follow-ups, six patients (67%) achieved successful wound healing and two patients had continued wound healing issues, while two patients had an antibiotic spacer in situ and one patient underwent an above-the-elbow amputation. Conclusions This study reports a complication rate of 78% for soft-tissue reconstructions after TEA. Successful soft-tissue healing was achieved in 67% of patients, but at the cost of multiple surgeries. Early definitive soft-tissue reconstruction could prove to be preferable to minor interventions such as irrigation, debridement, and local tissue advancement, or smaller soft-tissue reconstructions using local tissue rearrangement or a pedicled flap at a later stage

Design Considerations for a PEBB-Based Marx-Topology ILC Klystron Modulator

The concept of Power Electronic Building Blocks (PEBBs) has its origin in the U.S. Navy during the last decade of the past century. As compared to a more conventional or classical design approach, a PEBB-oriented design approach combines various potential advantages such as increased modularity, high availability and simplified serviceability. This relatively new design paradigm for power conversion has progressively matured since then and its underlying philosophy has been clearly and successfully demonstrated in a number of real-world applications. Therefore, this approach has been adopted here to design a Marx-topology modulator for an International Linear Collider (ILC) environment where easy serviceability and high availability are crucial. This paper describes various aspects relating to the design of a 32-cell Marx-topology ILC klystron modulator. The concept of nested droop correction is introduced and illustrated. Several design considerations including cosmic ray withstand, power cycling capability, fault tolerance, etc., are discussed. Details of the design of a Marx cell PEBB are included

Guidelines on the management of ascites in cirrhosis.

The British Society of Gastroenterology in collaboration with British Association for the Study of the Liver has prepared this document. The aim of this guideline is to review and summarise the evidence that guides clinical diagnosis and management of ascites in patients with cirrhosis. Substantial advances have been made in this area since the publication of the last guideline in 2007. These guidelines are based on a comprehensive literature search and comprise systematic reviews in the key areas, including the diagnostic tests, diuretic use, therapeutic paracentesis, use of albumin, transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic stent shunt, spontaneous bacterial peritonitis and beta-blockers in patients with ascites. Where recent systematic reviews and meta-analysis are available, these have been updated with additional studies. In addition, the results of prospective and retrospective studies, evidence obtained from expert committee reports and, in some instances, reports from case series have been included. Where possible, judgement has been made on the quality of information used to generate the guidelines and the specific recommendations have been made according to the 'Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE)' system. These guidelines are intended to inform practising clinicians, and it is expected that these guidelines will be revised in 3 years' time

Long-term associative learning predicts verbal short-term memory performance

Studies using tests such as digit span and nonword repetition have implicated short-term memory across a range of developmental domains. Such tests ostensibly assess specialized processes for the short-term manipulation and maintenance of information that are often argued to enable long-term learning. However, there is considerable evidence for an influence of long-term linguistic learning on performance in short-term memory tasks that brings into question the role of a specialized short-term memory system separate from long-term knowledge. Using natural language corpora, we show experimentally and computationally that performance on three widely used measures of short-term memory (digit span, nonword repetition, and sentence recall) can be predicted from simple associative learning operating on the linguistic environment to which a typical child may have been exposed. The findings support the broad view that short-term verbal memory performance reflects the application of long-term language knowledge to the experimental setting

Pre-service teachers linking their metalinguistic knowledge to their practice: A functional approach

Existing work in Anglophone countries has raised concerns regarding teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL); this may well be an issue in other countries also, with notable exceptions such as Finland. In Australia, with the introduction of the new Australian Curriculum, the question of teacher KAL has become crucial. Teachers, both practising and pre-service, generally have some knowledge about language as an object, usually including the text structures of particular school genres and information about sentence structure and word classes. This knowledge may be based on traditional grammar and may not be well applied above the sentence level. Teachers may also have an intuitive knowledge of discourse structures and are beginning to reflect on their own discourse using understandings of dialogic teaching. This paper provides an example of how first-year pre-service teachers (PSTs) were introduced to KAL at both the grammatical and the discourse levels, as part of an introductory unit on spoken language. A range of approaches was used, including a functional view of discourse. The PSTs then applied their KAL by putting it into a context that was meaningful for them: discussing their own practice. The paper gives an illustration of some of the work they produced that demonstrates their emerging understandings

Boundaries of Semantic Distraction: Dominance and Lexicality Act at Retrieval

Three experiments investigated memory for semantic information with the goal of determining boundary conditions for the manifestation of semantic auditory distraction. Irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars to an equal degree regardless of whether the speech coincided with presentation or test phases of the task (Experiment 1) and occurred regardless of whether it comprised random words or coherent sentences (Experiment 2). The effects of background speech were greater when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material, but only when the irrelevant words were high in output dominance (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings in relation to the processing of task material and the processing of background speech is discussed