Efficacy of three anticoagulant rodenticides for the control of poison-shy Rattus rattus

House rats (Rattus rattus) which do not consume a lethal dose of zinc phosphide develop poison-shyness after a single exposure. The surviving poison-shy rats cannot be baited again with zinc phosphide for about three months. Poison-shy rats were separately given anticoagulant baits (brodifacoum 0.005%, coumatetralyl and warfarin 0.025%) in no-choice tests. The first two anticoagulants were found to be the most efficient ones. It was observed that those R. rattus which had consumed 56.7 mg/kg or more zinc phosphide died sooner (P < 0.05 to 0.1) after anticoagulant poisoning when compared with normal rats. It is conjectured that prothrombin inhibition is accelerated in the liver of poison-shy R. rattus due to the action of phosphine present in the earlier ingested sublethal dose of zinc phosphide

Trust me, I'm an entrepreneur! Can trust help SMEs to gain the credit they need?

Research on relationship lending focuses attention on economic factors which influence the relationships between SMEs' owners/managers and banks but no previous work has focused on the role of trust. Trust is expected to reduce transaction costs and agency costs, reduce the perceived credit risk and, thus, influence credit availability. Trustwor-thiness is associated with three attributes of SME owner managers' namely; ability, be-nevolence and integrity. It is hypothesised that lending managers' assessment of the trustworthiness of SME owner managers affects the ability of SMES to gain the credit. Trustworthiness is hypothesised as positively associated with credit access in contrast to lower trustworthiness which is associated with credit constraint. Use of overdraft is con-sidered here as indicator of credit constraint. The data were obtained from a survey of lending managers from banks in North East Italy. Control variables and a vector of trustworthiness factors were collected on a random sample of borrowers, resulting in a sample of 535 firms. Results from regression analysis found evidence that firms enjoy-ing high level of trust are able to access the credit they need and therefore are less credit constrained. Some implications of these results for banks, owner managers and future research are discussed

Methods in Mathematica for Solving Ordinary Differential Equations

An overview of the solution methods for ordinary differential equations in the Mathematica function DSolve is presented.Comment: 13 page