Effect on Yield and Grade of Holding Lambs in Packer\u27s Yards

The income from livestock and livestock products is of considerable importance to American agriculture. Gross farm income from the scale of livestock from the sale of livestock and livestock products constitutes over one-half of the total gross farm income. Regardless of the general economic level, livestock and livestock products are the major source of farm income in the United States and South Dakota. Because of the importance of the livestock industry to farm income in the United States and South Dakota, any research or industrial progress to improve buying methods and grading standards will be of benefit to producers and also to the general welfare of all in the agricultural area

Intergenerational redistribution in the Great Recession

In this paper we construct a stochastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households are subject to aggregate shocks that affect both wages and asset prices. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify how the welfare costs of severe recessions are distributed across different household age groups. The model predicts that younger cohorts fare better than older cohorts when the equilibrium decline in asset prices is large relative to the decline in wages, as observed in the data. Asset price declines hurt the old, who rely on asset sales to finance consumption, but benefit the young, who purchase assets at depressed prices. In our preferred calibration, asset prices decline more than twice as much as wages, consistent with the experience of the US economy in the Great Recession. A model recession is approximately welfare-neutral for households in the 20–29 age group, but translates into a large welfare loss of around 10% of lifetime consumption for households aged 70 and over.

The Lost Dignity: The Reading of Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night

This paper unravels the dark side of apartheid system through the analysis of Alex La Guma’s novella; A Walk in the Night. The analysis brings out how La Guma uses his literary texts under study to reveal to his readership the lost dignity of the oppressed. This novella reveals to readers the atrocities that were perpetrated against the non-whites in South Africa. This study highlights the restrictions placed on African workers under the oppressive Apartheid system and its effects on the psyche of the non-whites in South Africa have been given credible space in the novella. There is seen in this novella a fictionalization of the different forms of maltreatments that non-whites suffered during the Apartheid regime. There is also seen in the novella a relentless effort by La Guma to protest against the Apartheid era. The life-styles of the non-whites clearly indicate that the Apartheid system really took away the dignity of the non-whites in South Africa. Keywords: Alex La Guma, Apartheid, South Africa, Oppression, Dignit

Young men’s talk about menstruation and hegemonic masculinity in the South African context: a discursive analysis

Current research in the sub-Saharan and other resource poor contexts indicates the largely negative social constructions of menstruation and menstruating women. Young men have been shown to reproduce these negative constructions and reinforce the stigmatized status of menstruation in these contexts. To my knowledge no studies have examined the ways in which young men talk about menstruation and menstruating women in South Africa. In this research, I aimed to explore the ways in which young men (in a resource poor area in the Eastern Cape) talk about menstruation in with their male peers in a focus group context and how this talk serves to enable specific subject positions (both masculine and feminine) that may reproduce, comply with and resist constructions of hegemonic masculinity (as outlined in previous South African research). By drawing on Raewyn Connell’s influential framework of masculinities and augmenting this with Margaret Wetherell and Nigel Edley’s contributions, this research adds to the growing body of research on masculinities in the South African context. I utilized a discursive framework in which to understand the interpretative repertoires drawn on in everyday talk about menstruation and the specific subject positions made available by these. Purposive sampling was used to recruit a total of 37 participants from two former Department of Education and Training schools in the Eastern Cape. Participants were young ‘black’ men with a mean age of 18.3 In analyzing and interpreting the data two overarching patterns emerged. In the first, the participants discursively distanced themselves from menstruation (and femininity in general) in order to avoid possible marginalisation and subordination in relation to local hegemonic masculine ideals. In doing this, the participants drew on a number of interpretative repertoires including: a dualistic repertoire, a bad (versus ideal) femininity repertoire and an abject femininity repertoire, which assisted in creating numerous subject positions. These subject positions allowed the young men to align themselves closer to hegemonic masculine ideals, and create distance by positioning menstruating women as the ‘other’. In the second overarching pattern, menstruation was constructed as a threat to masculine identity; within this construction, the young men discursively negotiated the ideological dilemmas surrounding this ‘highly feminine’ topic in ways that bolstered their positions within the gender hierarchy. Overall, hegemonic masculinities in this context were discursively reproduced and complied with in the participants’ accounts

A Simplified Model for Distortional Buckling of Channels and Zees in Flexure

Certain cold-formed sections like channels and zees, when subjected to bending in the plane of the web, often fail in laboratory tests at a load less than that predicted by standard specification equations. The mode of failure is an upward movement of the compression flange and lip relative to the web, which may remain fairly plane. When bends which were right angles change dramatically under load, the section changes shape, or distorts, resulting in a reduction of the section stiffness followed by buckling of the flange. Such a failure is referred to as distortional buckling . An analytical solution to the distortional buckling problem has been proposed by Hancock of the University of Sydney. This method was used to calculate distortional buckling capacities of around 200 shapes and a curve was fit to the results. Finally, a simplified expression was developed to check this limit state with minimal effort. Several full-scale tests were performed on channels and zees of various thicknesses and bracing conditions to verify the Hancock method

Bridging the phenotypic gap: Real-time assessment of mitochondrial function and metabolism of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The mechanics of nectar offloading in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris and implications for optimal concentrations during nectar foraging.

Nectar is a common reward provided by plants for pollinators. More concentrated nectar is more rewarding, but also more viscous, and hence more time-consuming to drink. Consequently, theory predicts an optimum concentration for maximizing energy uptake rate, dependent on the mechanics of feeding. For social pollinators such as bumblebees, another important but little-studied aspect of foraging is nectar offloading upon return to the nest. Studying the bumblebee Bombus terrestris, we found that the relationship between viscosity (µ) and volumetric transfer rates (Q) of sucrose solutions differed between drinking and offloading. For drinking, Q ∝ µ-0.180, in good agreement with previous work. Although offloading was quicker than drinking, offloading rate decreased faster with viscosity, with Q ∝ µ-0.502, consistent with constraints imposed by fluid flow through a tube. The difference in mechanics between drinking and offloading nectar leads to a conflict in the optimum concentration for maximizing energy transfer rates. Building a model of foraging energetics, we show that including offloading lowers the maximum rate of energy return to the nest and reduces the concentration which maximizes this rate by around 3%. Using our model, we show that published values of preferred nectar sugar concentrations suggest that bumblebees maximize the overall energy return rather than the instantaneous energy uptake during drinking.This work was supported by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council PhD Studentship under grant BB/J014540/1 to J.G.P

Intergenerational Redistribution in the Great Recession

In this paper we construct a stochastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households are subject to aggregate shocks that affect both wages and asset prices. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify how the welfare costs of severe recessions are distributed across different household age groups. The model predicts that younger cohorts fare better than older cohorts when the equilibrium decline in asset prices is large relative to the decline in wages, as observed in the data. Asset price declines hurt the old, who rely on asset sales to finance consumption, but benefit the young, who purchase assets at depressed prices. In our preferred calibration, asset prices decline more than twice as much as wages, consistent with the experience of the US economy in the Great Recession. A model recession is approximately welfare-neutral for households in the 20-29 age group, but translates into a large welfare loss of around 10% of lifetime consumption for households aged 70 and over.