Strategies for success – contrasting approaches to organic dairy farming

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Financial and some physical aspects of ten commercial dairy farms with different management approaches and at different stages of organic conversion were monitored, alongside two herds at a research farm. One herd at the research farm was managed to maximize profit, the other aimed for self-sufficiency to maximize sustainability. Dairy enterprise gross margins per forage hectare varied from £824 to £1,851/ha and overhead costs ranged from £606 to £1,022/ha on the commercial farms, illustrating the necessity for control of overhead costs as well as enterprise performance in achieving profitability on organic farms

THE CURRENT STATUS AND IMPACT OF FENCING IN THE COMMUNAL-TENURE AREAS OF NORTHERN NAMIBIA

Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Strategic HR: Outsource Yourself?

[Excerpt] Human Resources has undergone a major transformation over the past three decades. Instead of solely pursuing a functional approach of delivering services, HR professionals now seek to develop and support the critical firm capabilities that drive business strategy. This shift indicates an important change in the way HR contributes to the achievement of an organization’s objectives. And yet responsibility for the older, functional aspects of HR still resides within the field, intertwining two components with considerable differences

Bibliography of Sequential Sampling Plans in Insect Pest Management Based on Wald\u27s Sequential Probability Ratio Test

This paper contains 65 references dealing with the development of sequential sampling plans in insect pest management based on Wald\u27s Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT), 25 in forest entomology and 40 in agriculture entomology. The insect(s) sampled, whether the decision procedure was based on one or two SPRTs, and the mathematical distribution and probabilities of Type I and Type II errors used to develop the SPRTs are also given for each sequential sampling plan

On the nature of the torus in the complex Lorenz equations.

The complex Lorenz equations are a nonlinear fifth-order set of physically derived differential equations which exhibit an exact analytic limit cycle which subsequently bifurcates to a torus. In this paper we build upon previously derived results to examine a connection between this torus at high and low r1 bifurcation parameter) and between zero and nonzero r2(complexity parameter); in so doing, we are able to gain insight on the effect of the rotational invariance of the system, and on how extra weak dispersion (r2 ≠ 0) affects the chaotic behavior of the real Lorenz system (which describes a weakly dissipative, dispersive instability)

Relaxation oscillations in a class of delay-differential equations.

We study a class of delay differential equations which have been used to model hematological stem cell regulation and dynamics. Under certain circumstances the model exhibits self-sustained oscillations, with periods which can be significantly longer than the basic cell cycle time. We show that the long periods in the oscillations occur when the cell generation rate is small, and we provide an asymptotic analysis of the model in this case. This analysis bears a close resemblance to the analysis of relaxation oscillators (such as the Van der Pol oscillator), except that in our case the slow manifold is infinite dimensional. Despite this, a fairly complete analysis of the problem is possible

Learning theory and its application to female learner support in engineering

School of Engineering at Murdoch University is now in its fifth year: a new School sited on the new regional Campus. This environment enabled the staff to take an innovative approach to the School's development. One key issue addressed from the outset was that of women in a nontraditional area. Positive action was taken to attract high calibre female staff and as a consequence over 50% of the School's staff, academic and non-academic, are female. From the student perspective, issues confronting females studying in Engineering, which are reflected in international low recruitment and retention, continue to be addressed. Individuals are different and these differences affect how a student performs. In particular, gender differences in learning styles have been noted. This has directed us to administer, as part of a first year foundational unit, learning style inventories to all first year students, who then identify their self-reported learning styles. In this positive atmosphere many varied and successful initiatives, based on our learning style research, are being trialled to encourage female students into our programs and then support and retain them throughout their four years of study. This research discusses the initial learning style results and their application to our initiatives

A delay recruitment model of the cardiovascular control system.

Copyright will be owned by Springer. We develop a nonlinear delay-differential equation for the human cardiovascular control system, and use it to explore blood pressure and heart rate variability under short-term baroreflex control. The model incorporates an intrinsically stable heart rate in the absence of nervous control, and features baroreflex influence on both heart rate and peripheral resistance. Analytical simplifications of the model allow a general investigation of the rôles played by gain and delay, and the effects of ageing.