Forage Management for Extending the Grazing Season

Studies were conducted to determine ways to extend grazing season with forages adequate to meet the needs of grazing animals and to reduce the cost of livestock production. Perennial grasses were swathed, windrowed and left in the field until they were winter-grazed with bred heifers. Corn (Zea mays L.) was stockpiled for winter grazing with lambs and ewes. Windrowed grasses increased in acid detergent fiber (ADF) and neutral detergent fiber (NDF) compared with stored hay, but crude protein content, heifer weight gain and body condition change was similar for both forages. An economic value of $218 ha-1 from initial grazing of corn with lambs, followed by grazing with bred ewes, without supplementation, provided a net income over expenses of$75 ha-1. Leaving windrows of perennial grasses in the field and stockpiling corn for winter grazing have potential for reducing reliance on stored forages

Identifying network communities with a high resolution

Community structure is an important property of complex networks. An automatic discovery of such structure is a fundamental task in many disciplines, including sociology, biology, engineering, and computer science. Recently, several community discovery algorithms have been proposed based on the optimization of a quantity called modularity (Q). However, the problem of modularity optimization is NP-hard, and the existing approaches often suffer from prohibitively long running time or poor quality. Furthermore, it has been recently pointed out that algorithms based on optimizing Q will have a resolution limit, i.e., communities below a certain scale may not be detected. In this research, we first propose an efficient heuristic algorithm, Qcut, which combines spectral graph partitioning and local search to optimize Q. Using both synthetic and real networks, we show that Qcut can find higher modularities and is more scalable than the existing algorithms. Furthermore, using Qcut as an essential component, we propose a recursive algorithm, HQcut, to solve the resolution limit problem. We show that HQcut can successfully detect communities at a much finer scale and with a higher accuracy than the existing algorithms. Finally, we apply Qcut and HQcut to study a protein-protein interaction network, and show that the combination of the two algorithms can reveal interesting biological results that may be otherwise undetectable.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures. 1 supplemental file at http://cic.cs.wustl.edu/qcut/supplemental.pd

An evolving network model with community structure

Many social and biological networks consist of communities—groups of nodes within which connections are dense, but between which connections are sparser. Recently, there has been considerable interest in designing algorithms for detecting community structures in real-world complex networks. In this paper, we propose an evolving network model which exhibits community structure. The network model is based on the inner-community preferential attachment and inter-community preferential attachment mechanisms. The degree distributions of this network model are analysed based on a mean-field method. Theoretical results and numerical simulations indicate that this network model has community structure and scale-free properties

Coexistence of opposite opinions in a network with communities

The Majority Rule is applied to a topology that consists of two coupled random networks, thereby mimicking the modular structure observed in social networks. We calculate analytically the asymptotic behaviour of the model and derive a phase diagram that depends on the frequency of random opinion flips and on the inter-connectivity between the two communities. It is shown that three regimes may take place: a disordered regime, where no collective phenomena takes place; a symmetric regime, where the nodes in both communities reach the same average opinion; an asymmetric regime, where the nodes in each community reach an opposite average opinion. The transition from the asymmetric regime to the symmetric regime is shown to be discontinuous.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Finding community structure in networks using the eigenvectors of matrices

We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of edges connecting them. Previous work indicates that a robust approach to this problem is the maximization of the benefit function known as "modularity" over possible divisions of a network. Here we show that this maximization process can be written in terms of the eigenspectrum of a matrix we call the modularity matrix, which plays a role in community detection similar to that played by the graph Laplacian in graph partitioning calculations. This result leads us to a number of possible algorithms for detecting community structure, as well as several other results, including a spectral measure of bipartite structure in networks and a new centrality measure that identifies those vertices that occupy central positions within the communities to which they belong. The algorithms and measures proposed are illustrated with applications to a variety of real-world complex networks.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, minor corrections in this versio

Local Causal States and Discrete Coherent Structures

Coherent structures form spontaneously in nonlinear spatiotemporal systems and are found at all spatial scales in natural phenomena from laboratory hydrodynamic flows and chemical reactions to ocean, atmosphere, and planetary climate dynamics. Phenomenologically, they appear as key components that organize the macroscopic behaviors in such systems. Despite a century of effort, they have eluded rigorous analysis and empirical prediction, with progress being made only recently. As a step in this, we present a formal theory of coherent structures in fully-discrete dynamical field theories. It builds on the notion of structure introduced by computational mechanics, generalizing it to a local spatiotemporal setting. The analysis' main tool employs the \localstates, which are used to uncover a system's hidden spatiotemporal symmetries and which identify coherent structures as spatially-localized deviations from those symmetries. The approach is behavior-driven in the sense that it does not rely on directly analyzing spatiotemporal equations of motion, rather it considers only the spatiotemporal fields a system generates. As such, it offers an unsupervised approach to discover and describe coherent structures. We illustrate the approach by analyzing coherent structures generated by elementary cellular automata, comparing the results with an earlier, dynamic-invariant-set approach that decomposes fields into domains, particles, and particle interactions.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/dcs.ht

Finding and evaluating community structure in networks

We propose and study a set of algorithms for discovering community structure in networks -- natural divisions of network nodes into densely connected subgroups. Our algorithms all share two definitive features: first, they involve iterative removal of edges from the network to split it into communities, the edges removed being identified using one of a number of possible "betweenness" measures, and second, these measures are, crucially, recalculated after each removal. We also propose a measure for the strength of the community structure found by our algorithms, which gives us an objective metric for choosing the number of communities into which a network should be divided. We demonstrate that our algorithms are highly effective at discovering community structure in both computer-generated and real-world network data, and show how they can be used to shed light on the sometimes dauntingly complex structure of networked systems.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure

Maximal planar networks with large clustering coefficient and power-law degree distribution

In this article, we propose a simple rule that generates scale-free networks with very large clustering coefficient and very small average distance. These networks are called {\bf Random Apollonian Networks}(RAN) as they can be considered as a variation of Apollonian networks. We obtain the analytic results of power-law exponent $\gamma =3$ and clustering coefficient $C={46/3}-36\texttt{ln}{3/2}\approx 0.74$, which agree very well with the simulation results. We prove that the increasing tendency of average distance of RAN is a little slower than the logarithm of the number of nodes in RAN. Since most real-life networks are both scale-free and small-world networks, RAN may perform well in mimicking the reality. The RAN possess hierarchical structure as $C(k)\sim k^{-1}$ that in accord with the observations of many real-life networks. In addition, we prove that RAN are maximal planar networks, which are of particular practicability for layout of printed circuits and so on. The percolation and epidemic spreading process are also studies and the comparison between RAN and Barab\'{a}si-Albert(BA) as well as Newman-Watts(NW) networks are shown. We find that, when the network order $N$(the total number of nodes) is relatively small(as $N\sim 10^4$), the performance of RAN under intentional attack is not sensitive to $N$, while that of BA networks is much affected by $N$. And the diseases spread slower in RAN than BA networks during the outbreaks, indicating that the large clustering coefficient may slower the spreading velocity especially in the outbreaks.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Employing with conviction: The experiences of employers who actively recruit criminalised people

Atherton, P., & Buck, G. Employing with conviction: The experiences of employers who actively recruit criminalised people. Probation Journal, 68(2), pp. 186-205. Copyright © [2021] (Copyright Holder). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.In England and Wales, criminal reoffending costs £18 billion annually. Securing employment can support desistance from crime, but only 17% of ex-prisoners are employed a year after release. Understanding the motivations of employers who do recruit criminalised people therefore represents an important area of inquiry. This article draws upon qualitative interviews with twelve business leaders in England who proactively employ criminalised people. Findings reveal that inclusive recruitment can be (indirectly) encouraged by planning policies aimed to improve social and environmental well-being and that employers often work creatively to meet employees’ additional needs, resulting in commercial benefits and (re)settlement opportunities