Residual Feed Intake as a Selection Tool

This publication explains how residual feed intake can be used as a helpful tool when deciding which sires and dams to utilize to obtain superior genetics

Promising Practices for Boating Safety Initiatives that Target Indigenous Peoples in New Zealand, Australia, the United States of America, and Canada

Boating-related incidents are responsible for a significant number of the drowning fatalities that occur within Indigenous communities in New Zealand, Australia, the USA, and Canada. The aim of this paper was to identify promising practices for boating safety initiatives that target Indigenous peoples within these countries and evaluate past and ongoing boating safety initiatives delivered to/with Indigenous peoples within these countries to suggest the ways in which they – or programs that follow them - may be more effective. Based upon evidence from previous research, boating safety initiatives that target Indigenous peoples in New Zealand, Australia, the USA, and Canada should employ cultural adaptation strategies, strategies to increase boating safety knowledge and awareness, strategies to increase the accessibility of boating safety equipment, and capacity building strategies. Improvements can be made to past, ongoing, and future boating safety initiatives delivered to/with Indigenous peoples in the four countries studied. These strategies all show promise in improving boating safety initiatives and decreasing boating-related drowning

The interaction of value and subjective probability in decision making under risk

In a class of decision making situations known as risky situations subjects are presented with information concerning payoffs which are dependent on the occurrence of some events and the likelihood of achieving these payoffs, and are asked to make decisions or judgments in terms of these payoffs and probabilities. The question of whether subjects' judgments of the likelihood of achieving these payoffs are independent of the value of the payoffs is an important one for the understanding of decision making behaviour and has attracted some attention, but these investigations have not resulted in any unequivocal answers. The difficulty of answering this question was seen as bound up with the difficulty of making inferences about subjective probability or about changes in subjective probability from responses which are not probability estimates but are decisions which reflect both the Probabilities and the payoffs in the situation. This study was concerned with asking what kind of experiment could overcome these inference problems to provide unambiguous evidence about such change in subjective probability. Two kinds of experimental design were considered. In the first, a distinction which had been made in the literature between outcomes dependent on response (D.O.) and outcomes dependent only on the occurrence of an event (I.O.) was maintained. Changes in subjective probability were to be inferred from changes in the value of D.O. selected by subjects. Three experiments showed no evidence of change in these responses while one did show evidence of change in choice of D.O. Closer examination of individual protocols suggested that it was difficult to separate change in subjective probability from changes in decision strategy following the introduction of I.O. In the second kind of experiment the dependent variable was the evaluation of the worth of a gamble composed of payoffs and probabilities of achieving them. In one experiment a prediction about the independence of payoffs and probabilities in such evaluations was derived from expectation models and tested; in another two dependent variables were included and probabilities inferred from evaluations were compared with those probabilities directly estimated by subjects. In general there was little evidence of change in subjective probability, but different response measures gave different results and it seemed that what was lacked was any clear idea of how subjective probability entered into these evaluations, and that expectation models might not be adequate as models from which subjective probability could be inferred. From these experiments it was concluded that the kind of experiment required to investigate the interaction of value and subjective probability would be one which would include two dependent variables - inferred probabilities and direct estimates, in an examination of the role that subjective probability played in any one kind of decision situation

Comparison of tumour-based (Petersen Index) and inflammation-based (Glasgow Prognostic Score) scoring systems in patients undergoing curative resection for colon cancer

After resection, it is important to identify colon cancer patients, who are at a high risk of recurrence and who may benefit from adjuvant treatment. The Petersen Index (PI), a prognostic model based on pathological criteria is validated in Dukes' B and C disease. Similarly, the modified Glasgow Prognostic Score (mGPS) based on biochemical criteria has also been validated. This study compares both the scores in patients undergoing curative resection of colon cancer. A total of 244 patients underwent elective resection between 1997 and 2005. The PI was constructed from pathological reports; the mGPS was measured pre-operatively. The median follow-up was 67 months (minimum 36 months) during which 109 patients died; 68 of them from cancer. On multivariate analysis of age, Dukes' stage, PI and mGPS, age (hazard ratio, HR, 1.74, P=0.001), Dukes' stage (HR, 3.63, P<0.001), PI (HR, 2.05, P=0.010) and mGPS (HR, 2.34, P<0.001) were associated independently with cancer-specific survival. Three-year cancer-specific survival rates for Dukes' B patients with the low-risk PI were 98, 92 and 82% for the mGPS of 0, 1 and 2, respectively (P<0.05). The high-risk PI population is small, in particular for Dukes' B disease (9%). The mGPS further stratifies those patients classified as low risk by the PI. Combining both the scoring systems could identify patients who have undergone curative surgery but are at high-risk of cancer-related death, therefore guiding management and trial stratification

Probabilistic Volcanic Ash Hazard Analysis (PVAHA) II: assessment of the Asia-Pacific region using VAPAH

Monthly mean wind direction and wind speed aggregated for a 64-year period from NCEP reanalysis data for 60 NCEP grid points used for the Asia-Pacific case study. (CSV 1 kb