Dairy Farm Revenue Insurance: Is the Application Viable?

Risk and Uncertainty,

Incorporating Environmentally Compliant Manure Nutrient Disposal Costs into Least-Cost Livestock Ration Formulation

Livestock rations are formulated to minimize feed cost subject to nutritional requirements for a target performance level, which ignores the potentially substantial cost of disposing of nutrients fed in excess of nutritional requirements. We incorporate nutrient disposal costs into a modified least-cost ration formulation model to arrive at a joint least-cost decision that minimizes the sum of feed and net nutrient disposal costs. The method is demonstrated with phosphorus disposal costs on a representative dairy farm. Herd size, land availability and proximity, crop rotation, and initial soil phosphorus content are shown to be important in determining phosphorus disposal costs.environmental compliance, linear programming, livestock rations, manure disposal, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries, C61, Q12, Q52,

Valuing the absence of feral swine in the United States: A partial equilibrium approach

Feral swine (also called wild pigs; Sus scrofa Linnaeus) are known to cause damage to crops among other types of property damage. This research addresses the lack of economic welfare estimates of wild pig imposed crop damages in the literature by estimating the value of wild pig removal with respect to five crops in nine southern U.S. states. An equilibrium displacement model was used to assess the changes in price and quantity that would result from eliminating damage to corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and peanuts in these nine states. Changes in price and quantity were used to calculate the changes in producer and consumer welfare in both the short- and longrun. The total producer and consumer surplus gains were found to be $142 million in the short-run and$89 million in the long-run

Valuing the absence of feral swine in the United States: A partial equilibrium approach

Feral swine (also called wild pigs; Sus scrofa Linnaeus) are known to cause damage to crops among other types of property damage. This research addresses the lack of economic welfare estimates of wild pig imposed crop damages in the literature by estimating the value of wild pig removal with respect to five crops in nine southern U.S. states. An equilibrium displacement model was used to assess the changes in price and quantity that would result from eliminating damage to corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and peanuts in these nine states. Changes in price and quantity were used to calculate the changes in producer and consumer welfare in both the short- and longrun. The total producer and consumer surplus gains were found to be $142 million in the short-run and$89 million in the long-run

Splitting Arabic Texts into Elementary Discourse Units

International audienceIn this article, we propose the first work that investigates the feasibility of Arabic discourse segmentation into elementary discourse units within the segmented discourse representation theory framework. We first describe our annotation scheme that defines a set of principles to guide the segmentation process. Two corpora have been annotated according to this scheme: elementary school textbooks and newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank. Then, we propose a multiclass supervised learning approach that predicts nested units. Our approach uses a combination of punctuation, morphological, lexical, and shallow syntactic features. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We show that an extensive morphological analysis is crucial to achieve good results in both corpora. In addition, we show that adding chunks does not boost the performance of our system

High Resolution Genotyping of Clinical Aspergillus flavus Isolates from India Using Microsatellites

Contains fulltext : 124312.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)BACKGROUND: Worldwide, Aspergillus flavus is the second leading cause of allergic, invasive and colonizing fungal diseases in humans. However, it is the most common species causing fungal rhinosinusitis and eye infections in tropical countries. Despite the growing challenges due to A. flavus, the molecular epidemiology of this fungus has not been well studied. We evaluated the use of microsatellites for high resolution genotyping of A. flavus from India and a possible connection between clinical presentation and genotype of the involved isolate. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: A panel of nine microsatellite markers were selected from the genome of A. flavus NRRL 3357. These markers were used to type 162 clinical isolates of A. flavus. All nine markers proved to be polymorphic displaying up to 33 alleles per marker. Thirteen isolates proved to be a mixture of different genotypes. Among the 149 pure isolates, 124 different genotypes could be recognized. The discriminatory power (D) for the individual markers ranged from 0.657 to 0.954. The D value of the panel of nine markers combined was 0.997. The multiplex multicolor approach was instrumental in rapid typing of a large number of isolates. There was no correlation between genotype and the clinical presentation of the infection. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: There is a large genotypic diversity in clinical A. flavus isolates from India. The presence of more than one genotype in clinical samples illustrates the possibility that persons may be colonized by multiple genotypes and that any isolate from a clinical specimen is not necessarily the one actually causing infection. Microsatellites are excellent typing targets for discriminating between A. flavus isolates from various origins

A computational model of invasive aspergillosis in the lung and the role of iron

BACKGROUND: Invasive aspergillosis is a severe infection of immunocompromised hosts, caused by the inhalation of the spores of the ubiquitous environmental molds of the Aspergillus genus. The innate immune response in this infection entails a series of complex and inter-related interactions between multiple recruited and resident cell populations with each other and with the fungal cell; in particular, iron is critical for fungal growth. RESULTS: A computational model of invasive aspergillosis is presented here; the model can be used as a rational hypothesis-generating tool to investigate host responses to this infection. Using a combination of laboratory data and published literature, an in silico model of a section of lung tissue was generated that includes an alveolar duct, adjacent capillaries, and surrounding lung parenchyma. The three-dimensional agent-based model integrates temporal events in fungal cells, epithelial cells, monocytes, and neutrophils after inhalation of spores with cellular dynamics at the tissue level, comprising part of the innate immune response. Iron levels in the blood and tissue play a key role in the fungus’ ability to grow, and the model includes iron recruitment and consumption by the different types of cells included. Parameter sensitivity analysis suggests the model is robust with respect to unvalidated parameters, and thus is a viable tool for an in silico investigation of invasive aspergillosis. CONCLUSIONS: Using laboratory data from a mouse model of invasive aspergillosis in the context of transient neutropenia as validation, the model predicted qualitatively similar time course changes in fungal burden, monocyte and neutrophil populations, and tissue iron levels. This model lays the groundwork for a multi-scale dynamic mathematical model of the immune response to Aspergillus species. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12918-016-0275-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Valuing the absence of feral swine in the United States: A partial equilibrium approach

Feral swine (also called wild pigs; Sus scrofa Linnaeus) are known to cause damage to crops among other types of property damage. This research addresses the lack of economic welfare estimates of wild pig imposed crop damages in the literature by estimating the value of wild pig removal with respect to five crops in nine southern U.S. states. An equilibrium displacement model was used to assess the changes in price and quantity that would result from eliminating damage to corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and peanuts in these nine states. Changes in price and quantity were used to calculate the changes in producer and consumer welfare in both the short- and longrun. The total producer and consumer surplus gains were found to be $142 million in the short-run and$89 million in the long-run