Ox Yokes: Culture, Comfort and Animal Welfare

Three yoking systems are used globally to capture the power of oxen. These are the head yoke, withers yoke, and neck yoke. Each system has its strengths and weaknesses, with culture and cattle playing a role in the adoption and use of each system. The neck yoke system offers important lessons in understanding animal comfort and yoke design. Despite its success, the neck yoke should not be universally adopted, nor should it be universally promoted. However ignoring the lessons learned in North America over the last 400 years would ignore animals and teamsters who perfected this system and learned to maximize animal comfort and performance. Using history, research in Africa, as well as farm and competition experience from the United States and Canada, this paper addresses improving animal comfort, performance and welfare by understanding and appreciating yoking systems for oxen

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way. After a three-year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high-resolution (R ~ 22,500), high signal-to-noise ratio (>100), infrared (1.51–1.70 μm) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars. This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design—hardware, field placement, target selection, operations—and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis, and products. An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail. Finally, we discuss the achieved survey performance and illustrate the variety of potential uses of the data products by way of a number of science demonstrations, which span from time series analysis of stellar spectral variations and radial velocity variations from stellar companions, to spatial maps of kinematics, metallicity, and abundance patterns across the Galaxy and as a function of age, to new views of the interstellar medium, the chemistry of star clusters, and the discovery of rare stellar species. As part of SDSS-III Data Release 12 and later releases, all of the APOGEE data products are publicly available

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico em interação com professores na educação inclusiva: descrição de habilidades pragmáticas Students with autistic spectrum disorders in the interaction with teachers in inclusive education: description of pragmatic skills

OBJETIVO: Investigar as habilidades pragmáticas de alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico durante a interação com suas professoras em salas comuns de escolas públicas. MÉTODOS: Participaram 14 alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico, de ambos os gêneros, com idade entre três e oito anos (média=5,9; DP=1,8). Como parte do procedimento, foram realizadas filmagens em situações de sala de aula e para análise dos aspectos pragmáticos da comunicação dos participantes, foi utilizado o Protocolo de Pragmática. Os resultados foram tratados estatisticamente (p<0,05 e em alguns casos p<0,01; foram utilizados os testes de Wilcoxon, Friedman, Kruskal-Wallis, Spearman). RESULTADOS: Em média, o número de atos comunicativos expressos por minuto pelas professoras (3,4 atos/min) foi superior (p<0,05) ao apresentado pelos alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico (2,7 atos/min). Os alunos demonstraram predomínio de utilização do meio gestual, com média de 36,2 ocorrências, e de funções comunicativas menos interativas, com média de 24,1 ocorrências. Além disso, ocorreu correlação positiva entre os atos/min de alunos e professoras (p=0,01). Observou-se, também, que a idade e a escolaridade dos alunos não apresentaram correlações com o estabelecimento da comunicação nas díades. CONCLUSÃO: Foi possível identificar os déficits e as habilidades dos alunos com distúrbios do espectro autístico em sala de aula comum e confirmar a influência exercida pelo professor no desempenho comunicativo de tais alunos. Estes dados podem contribuir para esclarecimentos de lacunas existentes na literatura e para subsidiar intervenções terapêuticas e educacionais nos distúrbios do espectro autístico.<br>PURPOSE: To investigate the pragmatic skills of students with autistic spectrum disorders during interaction with their teachers, in regular classrooms of public schools. METHODS: Fourteen students with autistic spectrum disorders, both male and female, with ages between three and eight years (mean=5.9; SD=1.8), participated in the study. As part of the procedure, classroom situations were filmed for the analysis of the children's pragmatic aspects of communication, using the Pragmatic Protocol. Data were statistically analyzed using Wilcoxon, Friedman, Kruskal-Wallis, and Spearman tests, with a significance level of p<0.05 and, in some cases, p<0.01. RESULTS: In average, the number of communicative acts expressed per minute by the teachers (3.4 acts/minute) was superior (p<0.05) to the number presented by the students with autistic spectrum disorders (2.7 acts/minute). The students demonstrated prevalence in the use of the gestural communication mean, with an average of 36.2 occurrences, and of less interactive communicative functions, with an average of 24.1 occurrences. Moreover, there was positive correlation between students' and teachers' acts/minute (p=0.01). It was also observed that age and level of education did not present correlations with communication establishment in the dyads. CONCLUSION: It was possible to identify deficits and abilities of students with autistic spectrum disorders in regular classroom, and to confirm the teacher's influence on the communicative performance of these students. These data may contribute to further explain existing gaps in the literature, and to base therapeutic and educational interventions in the autistic spectrum disorders